THIS IS NOT NORMAL

by Jeremy Nathan Marks 

I will not forget what happened earlier today/last night/yesterday/

last week/last month/last year/this past decade 

I will not un-hear “I can’t breathe” I will not un-see “I can’t breathe”

Now I can hardly mouth “take a knee” 

I will not overlook the seizing of children from the arms 

of their mothers and their fathers at the border

met with a jacket that said, I really don’t care do u?

I will not pretend there was no Merrick Garland 

Birtherism, “Lock Her Up,” “Commie,” “Monster” 

and “Nasty Woman” 

I won’t overlook Access Hollywood and Charlottesville 

Muslim Bans and “Stand Back/Stand By”

I do recall Russia, Ukraine, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn

William Barr, the emoluments clause, impeachment and tax returns

I won’t forget “Send Her Back” or ignore all those phoney words of outrage 

by Senators and Representatives who now walk in complete lockstep 

playing the country for fools with Judge Barrett and how “he’s learned his lesson” 

I will not un-see the Second Lady of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

accosted buying groceries, called the n-word because she’s of color 

I cannot reconcile how Covid became a “blessing from God” 

because the right man contracted it at a hugging party for a judicial coup d’état 

This is not normal

none of this is normal 

there is more to democracy

than just the news cycle

There is the world 

and our place in it 

there is a country, burning

This is not normal 

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. New work appears this fall in So It Goes, Boog City, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Expressive Writing, The Last Leaves, Chiron Review, Dissident Voice, Ginosko, and Bewildering Stories. 

I CAN'T VOTE

by Marsha Owens

“Sorted” by Pia Guerra at The Nib, August 17, 2020.

Blue mailboxes thrown onto truck beds
helter-skelter like toy soldiers tossed
onto a playroom floor, except I see
pictures—this is not make-believe—
but a real-time story much like the one
Anne told in her diary except by this point
in Germany trucks and trains carried people,
her father, other fathers, mothers, gone
to god knows where, and still Anne
believed her father would come back
someday, just stroll through the door
like coming home from work. . .but
we all know that’s not how her story ended.
So where is the mailbox graveyard?
Is someone burying
these mailboxes
next to Democracy
and the 2020 election—
they were such a fine
couple in new jersey just
a few days ago—but now
they lie close to my friend
who died from COVID-19,
just across from
Sweet Liberty
and Blind Justice
in a spot near
an eerie gravesite
that echoes
a lament into each
dark night,
i can’t breathe.


For her bio, Marsha Owens samples Nikki Giovanni: "I've been considered a writer who writes from rage and it confuses me. What else do writers write from?"

MOURNING GEORGE FLOYD

by Marilyn Peretti

A boxy white truck with the blue eagle
pulls up to the curb, the postal vehicle
I observe most days.

Today I’m absorbed in tv, at the same time
view the driver through my window—
her pale blue clerk’s shirt, a billed cap,
and the blue-gray summer shorts
showing her shiny brown legs
through the open door.

Fleetingly I wonder what mail she’ll
bring me. But back to the Houston
funeral of George Floyd, victim
of city police brutality.

The choir, distancing themselves
due to the pandemic, the speakers,
the pastors lowering their safety masks.
The organ, the hymns, the brothers.

Then Rev. Al Sharpton, “‘I can’t breathe’
he said, and was choked for 8 minutes,
46 seconds — Breath is how God gives
you life, it is sanctified, it is sacred.”

She’s still sitting in the truck
looking down intently at her device
it seems. I watch the congregants,
hear sad and glorious words, lifting
George up, praising his honesty,
his leadership, his faith.

After 15 minutes she climbs out
of the truck, opens the rear door,
lifts the mail tub out for our building,
interrupting her concentration—
she our civil servant, an essential worker,
experiencing this near-personal funeral
on the job.

More songs, more lifting up of George.
She returns to the truck, empty tub
over her head, protection from the
sudden June downpour.

In her seat again, she stares at the device,
mourning in the postal truck. After
some time, I see the red brake light
come on, and she pulls away.

Marilyn Peretti of Glen Ellyn, IL, does too much thinking. And probably feeling. She has been published many times before at TheNewVerse.News.

SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON

by David Southward

"St. George" by Salvador Dalí (1971)

Four nights in a row, the motorcade
of believers rolls past my house,
ignoring the mayor’s curfew. Bullhorns
blaring, they ride on the roofs
of moving sedans, brandishing signs
to remind a republic of the dying words
of George Floyd: I can’t breathe!

I think about history’s martyrs—
those saints of the early church
swallowed by Rome’s imperial machine,
who couldn’t possibly have known
how they would be transformed
by common love and fury
into heroes and miracle-workers.

Take Saint George. Once
a nobody—a lowly foot soldier
in Rome’s legions—he died clinging
to his faith in a better world. Today
he gleams from Europe’s stained-glass
windows, resplendent in his armor
as he stands on a dragon’s hide.

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Apocrypha (Wipf & Stock 2018) and Bachelor’s Buttons (Kelsay Books 2020).

THE FLAMINGO CUP

by Jenny Doughty

The last time I cried was when I heard my daughter try and explain events on the TV to her three year old. There were protest marches, she started to say but Katie interrupted, What’s a protest march? My daughter hesitated. Katie flourished a cup picturing a pink flamingo. She’d liberated it from her baby sister earlier. Was it over a flamingo cup? The strain hit me of a week spent watching a black man die under a white cop’s knee, hearing I can’t breathe, seeing blood flow from baton blows, people gasp and choke from tear gas or bruised by rubber bullets. Baby girl, yes, it was all about a flamingo cup. It was about some people wanting all the flamingo cups and others having to use their cupped hands. It was about some people whose flamingo cups overflowed with the juiciest juice while others drank lead-tainted water from faucets. It was about cops stopping black people who had flamingo cups because they might have stolen them from white people. It was about people with the biggest and best flamingo cups taking them from others who were left, like your baby sister, crying on the floor. Sometimes it was about stopping somebody else from taking your flamingo cup when they already had their own but wanted more. It was about caring about that flamingo cup so much that you no longer cared about the person holding it, even if that person was left with only cupped hands to drink from or crying on the floor or crushed under a knee, not breathing.

Jenny Doughty is a former English teacher and Education Adviser to Penguin UK.  Originally British, she has lived in Maine since 2002. Her poems have appeared in The Aurorean, Pulse online review, Naugatuck River Review, Four Way Review, and several anthologies. She is currently President of the Maine Poets Society. Her first book of poems Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber was published by Moon Pie Press in 2017.

RIOT!

by Scott C. Kaestner

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Set fire to the streets
where George Floyd
was lynched.

Blow up the notion that
being Black is punishable
by death.

Tear this motherfucker down
the blue shield enabling
these acts of terror.

Dump gas on the fire fueling
people’s fury with the futility
of having this happen again.

Another Black man slain
in the name of justice.

Another oppressor sticking his knee
into the neck of progress.

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop pretending this will get better
and won’t happen again.

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop blaming victims
and talk about systemic racism instead.

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop the insanity
and scream “no justice, no peace!”

“I can’t breathe... please stop!”

Stop playing by biased rules
fight fire with fire.

And burn
baby
burn!

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, writer, dad, husband, and former coworker to many. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings.

FOR GEORGE FLOYD

by Donna Katzin

In the streets of Minneapolis                                                            
fires, flashbangs rip night from slumber
as marchers breach barriers,
swell down 27th Avenue
to the Third Precinct.

From its roof, gas wrings tears
from eyes that thought
they’d cried themselves dry,
chokes lungs that burn for breath
in memory of George Floyd—
unarmed, pinned like a sacrificial lamb
by four white men in uniform                                            
for seven never-ending minutes            
while a knee to his neck slowly squeezed
the last air from lips pleading for his life,
gasping Eric Garner’s last words—
I can’t breathe.

While he worked, the cold killer stared into the camera      
of a seventeen-year old brown-skinned girl
who may never graduate from nightmares.

For black mothers, fathers, sons, daughters
terror hangs like a hungry noose.                                                                  
Never takes a vacation.
Refuses to sleep.

It’s not that every officer is a murderer.
It’s just—you never know.


Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa. A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing. Published in journals and sites including TheNewVerse.News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

BENIGHTED

by Shalala Leny

Diana Ejaita’s “Portrait of History”

Black bodies dance under white, bright streetlights
The same way they do under white police
Black guns pierce black souls covered by white sheets
Black skin knows the sun taste better at night
We feed predator, we know this outright
We mourn Garner, the others, we cry, we grieve
We struggle, we bleed, and no, I can’t breathe
They kill us in many, different ways despite
Our protests for rights and liberty
While they rewrite our wide history
So we will ebonize strange, white, bright lies
We are not strange fruit, striped scarred stitchery
One day, revolution will come through benighted skies
One day, you’ll see that still like air, we’ll rise


Shalala Leny is a student and freelance writer in Miami, FL. Her poetry tends to explore the topics of race and identity, especially in a black person in America.

BREATHE FREE AND DIE

by George Salamon

"I can't breathe." Eric Garner, who died on July 17, 2014 after a NYPD officer put him in a chokehold. NY Times, July 18, 2014 

"I can't breathe." Barbara Dawson, who died on December 8, 2015 after a Blountstown FL police officer removed her from a hospital where she had gone to complain of abdomenal pain. NY Times, Jan. 7, 2016

We have got to teach these folks
That there ain't no such thing as the right to breathe.
If you haven't learned to do it the American way
And gobbled up all the air you can swallow,
The cops will not care
And hospitals will tell you to hit the road.
This ain't no socialist state, but one
Built by self-reliance and know-how,
Making us a nation of self-made men who
Won't tolerate weakness or pay for the wages of poverty.

So, get with the program and make enough dough
To pay for the air you pretend God gave us to share.
Let go of such un-American drivel and cant,
And maybe you will never again have to say "I can't."


After teaching German at several East Coast colleges George Salamon breathes the air and writes in St. Louis, MO, primarily for the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and TheNewVerse.News.

WHO CAN BREATHE

by George Held

            “I can’t breathe.”
                        Repeated last words of Eric Garner, police victim


Like Fate’s arbiters,
Cops crush the breath
of those they oppress,
let the rich breathe easy;

Hawaiians couldn’t
smell the breath
of standoffish whites,
ha‘oles

(men without breath),
distrusting those whose
withheld breath might stink of
treachery.

If you are rich
or white and can breathe
easy these days,
you should shun

city streets, TV news,
and poems that can
take your breath
away.


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

THE DAYS AFTER

by Catherine McGuire

Our streets are filled with the dying –

not like Freetown or Dakar, where flies feast,

but boys in blue hoodies, dark-haired girls

with taped mouths, lowering themselves to asphalt,

lying on wet roads and looking up

at the thousand-eyed headstones our cities erect

to cover the dead. I Can't Breathe.

Above them, the window eyes glow with money,

with silk-suit rituals to appease a Quad of Horsemen

who are already too near. The children below

give themselves lovingly to the pavement;

no real fear of death can penetrate the young.

But they've offered their hearts

to those who have been pierced – they've seen mothers

crushed and groping, tear-drenched or too numb for tears.

They've seen the impotent rage – that they can feel –

and they lend their bodies, their voices

hoping to be the horns that sounded so pure

that Jericho itself came down.

Catherine McGuire is a writer/artist with a deep interest in philosophy. Using nature as a mirror, she explores the way humans perceive themselves and their world. She has poems published in the US and abroad and has four chapbooks: Palimpsests, (Uttered Chaos, 2011) Glimpses of a Garden, Poetry and Chickens, and Joy Holding Stillness.