MISS CISSY TEACHES A MATH LESSON

by Sandra Anfang

George Floyd as a boy with his mother Larcenia, known as Miss Cissy, who died on May 30, 2018

.

My son George is dead. We lie 

under the earth in a quiet Houston

cemetery where we grieve together. 

All of Minneapolis is grieving.

Twenty-seven months from now

we will still be grieving.

I heard him call out for me

as he struggled for eight minutes

under the knee of the white cop

My name is tattooed on his belly.

We are connected at the core.

In twenty-seven years we will still be grieving.

I used to love the number twenty-seven:

three times three times three.

The number of black men police kill

each year has not changed since I died.

Twelve hundred sixty-five of my babies have

been felled, and they are all my babies.

Here they said. Take this money in exchange

for George’s life, but that won’t bring him back.

I cannot balance this equation. 

Three point three: the number

of millions our family was paid

for every minute that white cop 

pressed his hate into George’s neck.

Just forty-six, he was a dad and grandad.

The city has wiped the crime scene clean

but our pain is an indelible stain.

Money is a powerful mop. We will use it

to help the cause of black folks everywhere.

That white cop must be locked away

if that’s what it takes to end 

this circle of slaughter.

Sandra Anfang is an award-winning poet, poetry teacher, and editor. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including San Francisco Peace and Hope, Spillway, The New Verse News, and Rattle. Her two chapbooks Looking Glass Heart and Road Worrier were published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and 2018, respectively. Xylem Highway, a full-length collection, was published by Main Street Rag in 2019. Sandra teaches with California Poets in the Schools and hosts Rivertown Poets, a monthly reading series, in Petaluma, California. This poem was born of the twenty-seven-million-dollar settlement for George’s life by the city of Minneapolis this week.

DOTS OF TOWNS MONTHS AFTER HURRICANES HARVEY AND IRMA

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

Storm-damaged Rockport, Texas homes are seen in this Sunday, Aug. 25, 2017 aerial photo. Mortgage delinquency rates soared in September and October in many of the coastal and other cities flooded by Harvey, including Houston, Beaumont and Corpus Christi, according to new data from real estate analytics company CoreLogic. —San Antonio Express-News, January 15, 2018

of course, there will be long, massive work
for big names like
houston and miami    however rubble
is also rubble in the dots of towns
with their downed trees and power lines
roofs sheared off   walls that caved
these are the invisible ones living between and around bigness
dots of towns in a litany of counties
               that lost schools, citrus groves, hole in the wall cafes
               that didn’t make the news
               the question now
               will the police officers, librarians, butchers, teachers and bakers  go elsewhere
               or will they like some of the volunteer firemen decide to stay
               after all, this is where we grew up
               our children were born
               and where we go to church
               the dots of town must dig deep
               among the rubble for their just reason for staying

Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a poet, writer, and spiritual director. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News. Her first book of poetry was entitled she: robed and wordless. Sister Lou Ella lives 45 minutes from Rockport, Texas, one of the small towns devastated by Hurricane Harvey that may never recover.

RAPTURE: A SORT OF SONNET

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Oregon wildfire, September 6, 2017. Photo source: NBC4i

I often think of immolation when the wind
gets up to no good as is does here
in the mountains and reminds me how wildfires
take California, the gulf rains take Houston,

how puffery takes over Washington with
no particular purpose. I have a gracious
plenty of canned goods set by in case
Al Gore is right when he shows me pictures

of what can only be the End of Days—
fires and drought enough to raise a hallelujah.
I’m glad for the heads up and good on Al.
It’s eschatology no matter what you suppose.

The end will come, if you pick science or religion—
either the Rapture or the god dammed secular flame.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle live in the Ozarks where she #Resists Arkansas politics and politicians. She is the author of two books and five chapbooks.

T***P ADDRESSES THE SURVIVORS

by Earl J Wilcox

Thank you all for coming.
It’s so good to see such a great crowd,
especially those of you in pajamas,
without food, but carrying your pets,
and those who came wading or boating
in hip-deep waters, such a sacrifice, and
I am so pleased to see you old folks carrying
your meds, particularly one old grandma,
what a trooper you are granny,
to come all this way to see me here.
This morning, Melania and I are so thrilled
with this great turnout, your happy, smiling
faces, cheering us on. Truly we all—men and
women and children and dogs and cats, the
lame, the sick and frightened, such beautiful
faces—all are making America great again!
Thank you all for coming to see me.


Earl J. Wilcox, once a graduate student in Texas, lives now in SC, sends his best thoughts to his Texas friends enduring the heavy Harvey rains.

THINGS TO DO WHEN YOU'RE IN CHARGE DURING A FLOOD

by Diane Elayne Dees

Eat birthday cake in the Arizona desert.
If, however, you’re not invited to the party
like the other guy was, don’t despair:
Arizona still needs you, though it’s as dry
as a page torn from the Constitution.
There is work to be done in the West,
though relentless rain assaults Houston,
and parts of Texas look like a war zone.

You could briefly fly over and have an aide
explain to you what’s going on; it took only
moments to fly clueless over Louisiana.
After that, you’re free to leave what looks
like the end of the world in the hands
of the callous and incompetent.
Heck of a job.

But you like to do things your own way,
to break the rules because you can.

You could ride out the storm at Mar-a-Lago
while Texans sleep on the floors of shelters,
avoid the bunker while they wade through
flooded highways. Or you could gather
the press to remind them that Texas
gave you its electoral votes, and the streets
were mobbed for your inauguration.
And you could assure Texans, as they search
for gas, water, food, their furniture, their pets,
their sanity—that everything will be fine
because there soon will be a wall.

Diane Elayne Dees's poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita. Diane, who lives in Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women's professional tennis throughout the world.

400 BIRDS

by Preston Martin

Photos of birds that died Wednesday, May 3, after crashing into a high-rise building in Galveston. Animal Control Officer Josh Henderson said a total of 398 birds crashed into the building, and three —Houston Chronicle, May 5, 2017

In Auden’s low dishonest decade
History displayed a taste for tyrants.
Recent voters share that taste.
Some pray this retreat a wrinkle,
global sense will, with a start, awake.

New reality weighs our days,
our troubled nights; we grow stooped.
We appeal to our turning minds
see the long view, humanity is wise,
yearns for truth, fraternity. As if
wishing could make true.

Yesterday four hundred birds
lost their birdy instincts, reason—
blinded in reflection of a Galveston high rise—
flew full and headlong to greet their deaths.

Speculation by bird authorities:
glare mistaken for the sun, or moon light,
something, that seemed right at the time—
led them, without reason, to their demise.

Warblers, redstarts, ovenbirds,
bluebirds, cuckoos, sparrows, kestrels,
blackbirds, redwings, robins, cardinals,
orioles.

Preston Martin has published poems in literary journals including New Ohio Review, Iodine, Chaffin Journal, Kakalak, won awards or recognition by the North and South Carolina Poetry Societies and the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival. He has also published in anthologies including Every River on Earth: Writings from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press), and  Heron Clan III. He reads, writes, and teaches in Chapel Hill and Durham, NC, and chairs the Brockman-Campbell book competition for the North Carolina Poetry Society.

DECONSTRUCTING TEXAS

by James Penha

Jim Love’s homage to Texas, “Area Code” (1962) steel, cast iron and lead,
presently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX.

“The Texas takeover is like Obamacare death panels, or Sharia law coming to a court near you, or fluoride in the water supply. It doesn’t matter if the particular charge is proven to be completely false. Just getting the larger idea (don’t trust Obama’s feds, they want to un-cling you from your guns and religion) into the mainstream media is a victory. It validates the paranoia.” —Leslie Savan, The Nation, May 8, 2015

"Nearly every Republican in the Texas House is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit state and local officials from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples." —AP, May 13, 2015 

The every-which-wayness of tomahawking
oil drills, like Fred Astaire twerking against gravity
on walls and ceiling, does not surprise: Pan pipes after all
and the broad ten-gallon of a new Hermes
wings just above a bookend pedestal. Nor does a
chain-saw tumbleweed, nest of baby crankcases, wild
pig, arrowhead, milk bottle, longhorns and loblolly.
And at center stage a lone Rainmaker curries favor from his Lizzie;
it’s 110 in the shade on a stage a Broadway baby understands.

But that dour visage next to the lug wrench monstrance?
(Paul Frank’s simian Julius would worship a monkey wrench,
and snow monkeys swayed only briefly on Texas branches;
Iron Eyes Cody cried crocodiles for this land much later.)

No, within that overseeing mien
a Vitruvian wannabe struggles to set
his face and place the star on which
the whole of this sorry state depends.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.