MY KENNEDY CENTER (1982-2026)

by Robin Stevens Payes

Alvin Ailey Dancers * American Ballet Theatre * Beautiful * Book of Mormon * Cabaret * Cyrano de Bergerac * Dear Evan Hansen * Placido Domingo * Suzanne Farrell * Anthony Fauci * Renee Fleming * Ben Folds * Hair * Hamilton * Les Misérables * Long Day’s Journey Into Night * Millennium Stage * Moulin Rouge * National Symphony Orchestra * Noises Off * On Your Toes * Ragtime * REACH * Shear Madness * Side Show * You Can’t Take It with You 

I DREAMED A DREAM

the dance

the plays

the musicals

the orchestras

the opera

our brains on music

 

the costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props, the audience  that lifts you when you’re down

the rising talent, since 1997, free at 5 p.m. on the Millennium Stage

Not a REACH: Revelations

Come to the Cabaret, 

old chum, in The 

Room Where It Happens

Hello, you’re gonna die someday!

You Can’t Take It with You, they say. The KENNEDY CENTER canceled before our eyes. 

Shear Madness!

OPENING SOON: the madcap whodunnit you will definitely want to miss: 

DEMOLITION ON THE POTOMAC 

Author’s note: Having lived in the DMV since 1982, the survival of this treasured cultural institution feels personal to me and my family. I hope we can keep alive—in person and in print—the tragedy of what is happening there. Noted in the poem are KenCen highlights our family has experienced over the years.

Robin Stevens Payes is a Pushcart Prize–nominated poet, storyteller, and cultural steward whose work braids ancestral memory, science, myth, and moral imagination. She is the author of the YA time-travel adventure series Edge of Yesterday and creator of [re]member the world, a multi-genre project retrieving and reweaving the silenced history of her grandmother’s flight from Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. As the ancestor telling a new story so her grandchildren and theirs may thrive, she writes about memory—what is lost, what survives, and what we must carry forward—on her Substack, Releasing Memory.

EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH TURNS TO RUBBLE

by Raymond Nat Turner

Tiny backpacks, bloody body parts litter pulverized apartment and charred-

car-streets. Stolen lives litter flattened hospitals and schools. Litter crimson

coffee shop floors. Litter blackened fields of vaporized crops.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Over and over Earth’s saddest symphony plays. Harrowing screams, wails, moans.

Same timbre, same tones. Same saline Palestine tears in Sudan. Same in Ukraine, 

Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran. The same 1% is at war with workers of the world—and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They bomb, they strut. They prance and ‘dance,’ and bomb and bomb again.

They bomb abroad shouting, “stay sheltered!” Lucrative explosions silence

music of whining saw, pounding hammer raising roofs, housing the unhoused.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Hubris high off homeland invasion, hostile takeovers weeks before, they dream

of easy money. Quick work of weekend war. But weekend morphs into weeks. 

And weeks into months. And months into long and lean years.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They send holy warriors striking Saturdays, Sundays, holidays ‘round Epstein news

cycles like pyrite wrecking balls revolving around orange planet, Pedophilia. ‘Round

its death smell. ‘Round sulphur scent and white phosphorus fragrance anointing them.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They strike when Essential Workers catch fleeting winks on speeding trains roaring

beneath snoring cities. When countrymen and women dreaming of better worlds are

not yet woke. Over and over again Cruel Reich Cult strikes under cover of darkness and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Cruel Reich Cult strikes when working ones are doubled over panting, catching

blitzkrieg breaths. Or, when they meditate, chant, or pray protecting souls, spirits,

minds from repeated trauma of sadistic Psy-Ops on our damn dime.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

One Big Beautiful Bank Job body count equals wreckage in the wake of DOGE:

Department Of Grifter Enrichment. And drowned, frozen, burned bodies pile up 

at feet of climate deniers battling Mengele Medicine Men for roadkill recognition.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Ugly omen, J6 white supremacists storming Capitalist Hill, ransacking offices, shitting in

halls, foreshadowed shredded social safety net. Scuttled science and education. Heralded 

War House-Offal Office golden grift; Kennedy Center shuttered; redacted Bill Of Rights.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

ART

by Cheryl Waitkevich

 

 

On Monday, February 16, Presidents’ Day, 22 professional dancers from the First Amendment Troop performed a 90-second contemporary dance, titled The ResistDance. 

Yesterday, high fog, a marine layer, so gray even the air itself
casts a pallor. This morning, though the sun shines, the weather report
forecasts snow flurries. Before sunrise I watched a video made by dancers

in front of what was once The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
dancers dressed in maroon, the color of blood after it has met air.
The choreography starts with an unassuming woman in a knit cap,

jacket, old jeans like I might have worn when dropping my kid off
at school when I thought I’d just hurry home for a second cup of coffee.
She stands as some of the dancers surround her, make the shape

of a SUV while two other dancers as masked gunman approach,
and without guns shoot her chest and head until she falls
limp against the bodies that could never protect her.

The dancers dissolve and they're dancers again, surround
a thin tall, bearded man, slight bulge in his waistband. (Is it a gun?)
Pandemonium, confusion, paper and people swirling.

He helps someone falling after being pretend beaten
for which he is also pretend beaten, then shot multiple times

his body pummeled and shuddering as bullets hit

until finally, he lies still as dancers transform into angels
dancing with a couple of souls, these new-made spirits standing
hand-in-hand to look at the Washington Monument,

their reflection in the vast pond
in front of them present
for even God to see.

 

 

Cheryl Waitkevich (she, hers) spent forty years working in healthcare. Now retired, she is enrolled in the Rainier’s Writers Workshop, the MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. She has been published in West Trestle Review, Galway Review, River Heron Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, as well as other journals and anthologies. She lives on Squaxin land, known now as Olympia, Washington with her husband Robert Jorgensen and their wildly delightful dog Ollie.  

NEW CHAIRMAN OF THE KENNEDY CENTER IMPOSED

by Leslie Kenna

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Mr. Trump posted on social media: “It is a Great Honor to be Chairman of The Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing Board of Trustees. We will make The Kennedy Center a very special and exciting place!” —The New York Times, February 12, 2025

Dismiss the bass.
Silence the wind.
Send the oboes home.
 
Fling the flutes.
Torch the triangle.
Sever strings on the harp.
 
Stop the metronome.
Punch through drums.
Shred all sheet music.
 
Fire the conductor.
Topple the chairs.
Slam the curtain down.
 

No more music!
Except for the Trumpet,
the solitary Trumpet,

metallic and flatulent

one off note repeats
incendiary words.

We are revolting.

We are so revolting.

Leslie Kenna is a writer and scientist living in Maryland. Credits include New York Times Tiny Love, NPR-affiliate station KUNC, TedEd, @NYPL, and Bacopa Literary Review.