INAUGURATION IN NEW ORLEANS

by Elizabeth Larose

They are taking our roofers

our window washers

our builders

our preschool teachers.

They are killing white women

our poets 

our mothers 

our neighbors.

In my intestines the knots

have knots.

But last night was the Inauguration

Mass for the new mayor of Nola

beautiful Latina

Helena

and the new City Council:

a white woman

a black woman and 

five black men.

In the Cathedral-Basilica of 

St. Louis, King of France,

the queen, Irma Thomas sang

How Great Thou Art—I felt it.

We still have street lights 

that don’t work, so many,

potholes the size of small lakes

and tremendous inequality

still the knots have let go a bit

and my chest feels a little bigger

to hold my heart.

I heard Kamala Harris and Steve Scalise

were at the inauguration. 

And the lion lay down with the lamb.

Peace be with us

and with our Spirit.

Inaugurate that!

Elizabeth Larose is a visual artist from New Orleans with shows worldwide, including in NYC, The San Francisco Bay Area, Istanbul and Cartagena. She has also worked in education, from teaching to administration at international schools in Columbia, India, Turkey, and the U.S. Her poetry has been published in Leas Lit, Resilience in Writing, A Poetry Anthology, and The Ekphrastic Review (as of Jan. 22)

THE MORNING AFTER

by Donna Katzin

The New Yorker cover by Malika Favre

 

We celebrate Hartz Mountain worker-women

in the pet food factory in Hackensack,

treated worse than the dogs they fed,

their every move, bathroom break

surveilled by bosses when they

dared to organize a union.

 

We give thanks for Irene Eaglin,

who came north on rails of Jim Crow,

scrubbed white women’s floors with calloused hands,

wore a pink uniform that marked her as a servant,

taught the pale child in her charge

about the Klan and apartheid.

 

We remember the children of Soweto,

commemorated by museum garden stones,

who marched by the hundreds in blizzards of bullets,

armed with chants and posters claiming

the right to learn in their own tongue

and to grow up.

 

In solidarity, we honor Victor Jara,

in the Santiago stadium, where he sang

against the dictator to horror-stricken fans

who looked on as torturers mangled his body,

and he played liberation songs on his guitar

with broken hands.

 

We bow our heads today

for 18 year-old Neveah Crain,

hours after her Texas baby shower,

when sepsis set in, lingered, and doctors

refusing to remove the “unviable fetus”

from her womb, let them both die.

 

We write epic poems to Kamala, a woman of color

who ran to run our fragile, fractured nation

 where men afraid to let a woman lead

chose instead to listen to propaganda

to hide the timorous family member

trembling between their own legs.

 

We welcome them all to stand with us now

in a parched land we scarcely recognize,

scarred by the lust for profit and power,

oil and blood, that has left us searching

for our voices and each other,

thirsting for the rain.

 

Donna Katzin is a published poet and contributor to The New Verse News. She served for 26 years as executive director of Shared Interest, which does community development and investment work in South Africa, having previously worked for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility as director of South Africa and International Justice Programs, after organizing for the UAW. She is a member of the Reforming Judaism's Tikkun Olam Commission, working on reparations in the U.S., and co-chairs Tipitapa Partners, empowering grassroots women in Nicaragua. Her book of poems and photographs With These Hands chronicles post-apartheid South Africa's process of giving birth to itself.

FINDING HOPE

by Ron Shapiro

Festive.

Never in my life have I been to a march where everyone is smiling, singing along to the music, waving flags illuminating the space between elbow-to-elbow people of all ages.

Look to my left, women dancing. Look to my right, people hugging.

 

Is this the country I hear about on the news? Divided? Tribal?

 

None of that here. No way. No how.

 

Three mega-screens with the word Freedom surrounded with three stars on each side.

 

Above, wispy clouds and warm sun grace the day eventually evolving into a spectacular sunset of pink and orange clouds.

 

But right now, it’s a party! A celebration!

 

Good to be around so many like-minded folks. The vibe invites me to hope. 

Is that so bad?

You can’t tell me it is. No talking heads here. Just ordinary citizens being what this country could be.

 

Idealism bubbles up from the pessimism, cynicism, half empty, brokenness, anger, hatred and anything else in the raw sewage of lies and fascism.

 

Sitting now on the grass, I can only feel the deep bass shaking the earth and observe moving feet, bouncing bodies grooving with the music. I can’t help but smile. O’Jays “Love Train” rolling down the tracks of hope and love.

 

And if I look over my right shoulder, I can imagine the Washington Monument swaying a little.

 

The most alive I’ve felt during this election season. No news here; just joy of life, of being here now. Unplugged but plugged into the moment. Nowhere else I’d want to be.

 

This  place feels like a shelter from the political storm. Nothing to turn off or turn down here.

 

Just acceptance of how the country’s future could be if sanity, truth and love prevails. Nothing perfect but a baby step in the direction of King's "moral arc" of justice.

 

And should Harris win and repubs undermine some of her policy ideas, at least she will have elevated the English language.

 

Her speeches regularly use words such as hope, idealism, promise, opportunity, joy, rights, freedom, helping, raising, community, love, heroes, happiness, citizenship, compromise, love, new, forward, caring, trust, others, light and truth.

 

As someone who loves words, hearing and, yes, feeling those words at the rally yesterday emerged as one of the highlights for me. Being with 50,000 or so people immersed together in such positive language was deeply inspirational.

 

I think even Orwell would have savored the spirit of this uplifting moment.

 

And perhaps I sipped a bit too much of the celebratory kool-aid at the event.

 

But let me say that it was a delightfully sweet and tasty brew.

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, currently mentors college essay writing as well as teaches Memoir Writing through George Mason University. He has published writings in Nova Bards 23 & 24, Gatherings, Poets of the Promise, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine and twochapbooks: Sacred Spaces and Wonderings. He lives with his wife and Shanti the Cat in Reston, Virginia.

LESSONS FROM THE PAST

by Sally Zakariya

The New York TImes, October 17, 2024

Unearthed in Peru 
signs of a female sovereign
thirteen centuries ago

In the tomb painting
she’s wearing a crown
and holding court from
a power throne

We’ve had so far a very
masculine view of this
old civilization, say
archaeologists, devoted 
diggers of the past 

Could be we’ve had 
a pretty masculine view
of this new world, too

Could be the time
has come for another 
woman leader here 
in these Americas

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed the poetry anthology Joys of the Table and blogs (occasionally) at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

READING, WRITING, ARITHMETIC

by Ron Drummond

Sign up at Vote Forward

“The library is open.”

– RuPaul Charles

 

 

“Turn the page,” my candidate says,

and we are even more delighted 

with this ambassador of sanity 

than five-year-olds at story time.

 

I turn the page of a roll of voters

registered to the same party as me

and continue personalizing notes and

envelopes to possible “for” votes,

 

my handwriting in each letter

paired with a QR code spelling 

how, where and when to cast

their vote. I band stacks of stuffed,

 

stamped envelopes – this batch

of over three hundred going to

a state where all zips begin with

two, the numeral that allows for 

 

my finest work: a slight, lovely curve 

that swoops to a taut, crisp horizontal.

At some point, I will put on some music,

but for now, I am flying solo.

 

I picture the recipient’s odd experience 

of holding a hand-addressed envelope to be

like Sondheim’s Joanne pausing her song

to ask, “Does anyone still wear a hat?”

 

I relive the tedium of my factory job

working with extruded plastic, and those

night-shift endings at Denny’s “marrying”

the ketchups” – wedding the contents

 

of the bottles so that none are partly full, 

leaving each with the sediment of ancient 

condiment at their bottoms – when all 

I want is dawn, and to go home to bed.

 

Within reach of where I stamp and seal

is a cigar box of campaign buttons, mostly 

from lost crusades. I’m not a snob about them.  

I don’t take pride in backing failed runs. 

 

Most of the buttons promote anti-war pols,

and half are red, white and blue discs 

with the much-later-to-be-assassinated 

Allard Lowenstein’s name on them. 

 

But when this current election is over 

and I add a shiny new navy-blue one 

to my collection, I envision this old 

El Cid Corona Minors box – it once held

 

25 seven-inch (54 ring-gauge) cigars 

with open feet & capped heads – being 

transformed. It will no longer be a flat, 

hinged urn. It will no longer be a grief box.

 

“Turn the page,” my candidate repeats,

using a gesture even the non-literate

can understand.

Ron Drummond is the author of Why I Kick At Night (Portlandia). A founding editor of Barrow Street, his poetry and translations have appeared in over forty journals, as well as in anthologies and textbooks. He has received fellowships from Ragdale, VCCA, Blue Mountain Center, and the Macondo Foundation. He lives in NYC with his husband Terry Cook.

PLEA TO A FORMER PRESIDENT

by Philip Kitcher

Deceit provoked our warfare with Iraq,

Leaving a million people dead or maimed.

How can you win your reputation back?

How is a leader’s legacy reclaimed?

 

A con-man threatens to destroy our nation,

Seduces voters into fatal choice.

Please make your country partial reparation.

You have been silent.  You could raise your voice.

 

Perhaps you still have power to shift our course.

Not speaking out will signal your consent.

Revive your party’s heritage, endorse

A woman fit to be our president.

Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.

PRACTICING FOR THE BIGLY DEBATE

by Wayne Scheer

No one ever saw a debate like this.

They tell me seven billion people

will watch me,

maybe more.

So I have to prepare bigly.

First, I’ll mispronounce her name.

Ka-MAL-a, 

Then I’ll call her 

Kamrade.

She’ll try to laugh 

And I’ll remind people how only low IQ people

laugh like that. 

I never laugh.

I smirk, sometimes I sneer.  Mostly, I grimace.

That’s manly.

She opens her mouth when she laughs.

That’s a girlie thing.  

My father once hit me in the mouth for laughing.

I hate people who are happy.

I have more money.  Money makes a person happy.

My father taught me that, too.  

Ka-MAL-a doesn’t have as much money as I have,

so her laugh is a lie.

It has to be.

My father said.

And stop feeding me all those facts and statistises.

No one wants to hear that.

My rating will drop with my followers if I spout facts.

They want red meat, not kale salad.

Do you know how much red meat has gone up

since Komrade Ka-MAL-a and Obama have been in power?

Neither do I.

But people tell me it tripled, quadrupled.

People have to feed their children sawdust 

because they can’t afford

prime rib for their babies.  I hear that all the time.

I teethed on filet mignon and lobster,

(this was pre McDonald’s) 

but children today suck on little plastic thingies.

It’s all Obama’s fault.  And Hillary’s.

Lock them up! Lock them up?

What’s that?  I’m going to debate Kamala Harris, not Obama or Hillary.

Since when?

Oh, that’s right, Ka-MAL-a.  

I get them mixed up.  Ka-MAL-a. O-BAM-a. Frederick Douglass.

Ka-Mal-a? Isn’t she the one who sat in the front of the bus

when she isn’t even black?

What? Why should keep that to myself?

You don’t know anything about ratings.  

It’s time to let me be me.

I’m President of the World and a black belt in Karate.

I trained as a Navy Seal, you know.

They say I was the best recruit they ever saw.

I would have gone to Vietnam and stopped that war in one day,

but my father had bone spurs... 

Wayne Scheer lives with his wife in Atlanta. After twenty-five years of teaching writing and literature in college, he is trying to follow his own advice and write. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his stories have appeared in such varied publications as The Christian Science Monitor, Sex and Laughter, The Pedestal, Flash Me Magazine, Cezanne’s Carrot, The Binnacle and The Better Drink.