RED TEAM VERSUS RED TEAM

by Shannon Anthony

Sounds like your party has a civil war

or self-implosion theme. Unfriendly fire:

Your taco bar comes with razor wire.

So now briefly, you are chiefly

claiming that your camp is

against the heartland champs

because the one point of Barbie, that doll,

is to be here to cheer, not cheered at all.

And because she once spoke

and you're proudly unwoke

you're rooting for the 49ers

to kiss the ring where the sun don't shine

forgetting every bad thing you ever said

about the city that gave you Nancy.

Cognitive dissonance and decline: Go red!

Knock yourself out with your bash (nothing fancy).

I think you'd agree I've got that right.

(I'm not male, but not pregnant, and I'm white.)

If you come to (such as they are) your senses

you'll see that concussions have consequences.

You're not immune, and this isn't a kingdom.

What happens in Vegas is just a symptom,

another test we'll hear he aced. Remember

the Big Game: That happens in November.

Shannon Anthony lives in Minneapolis.

SHOOTER

by Stan Pisle

@Walt_Handelsman

Shooter 

Reported in Florida…

Forget how many times. 

An involuntary pulse throbbing 

in the dark, in the light,

Our schools, our arenas, our malls, courts, playgrounds, homes. 

 

A shooter took the life four cops in Oakland, 

five in Dallas, 

two in New York, 

26 people at a Sutherland Springs Church 

Nine in Charleston

58 in Las Vegas

—with 851 shot. 

Eight hundred and fifty-one people shot by one man. 

The numbers grow too much for a poem.

Stop 

Telling us life stories of the dead.

Window dressing over crackles of bullets.

Building fences between shooters and the shot.

NPRing, obits of people murdered for mercantile. 

Attempting animal warmth on cold dead bodies piled up.

Dividing and parsing the pile, determining which shot member counts. 

 

Show

Bullet riddled heads.

Emmette Till open coffin the funerals.

Zoom in where the casing entered under the nose, ejecting the soul.

Fuck that, assault rifle hollow points facture on contact.

Nothing’s left, only pulverized.

Narrate the blood cone spurting across theaters, schools, country music festivals.

Interview the bump stocked woman baren from five shells raping her womb. 

Collect the pools of bone and hamburger from the 100,000 shot each year.

Let gravity channel it to the twits and fat bros of Fox.

To the manufacturer of the hollow points 

Let them wipe up the fragments flowing in a bath the rest of us are forced to take.  

Stan Pisle is a Berkeley California poet. His work as appeared in the Arroyo Magazine, on KQED San Francisco, The Ravens Perch, and The New Verse News. 

NINE DEAD IN DAYTON

by Martin H. Levinson

Map of the 2,162 mass shootings since Sandy Hook. —Vox

twenty-two in El Paso, twenty-one
in San Ysidro, forty-nine in Orlando,
fourteen in San Bernardino,
fifty-eight by a Las Vegas casino,
a crowd of concertgoers,
bodies lying bleeding, a
nation that is reeling, the
core of who we are, posting
hate, loading up, firing fast
and down they go in Walmarts,
at festivals, inside of schools,
inside of bars, one hundred
rounds a minute, death is a
democracy, knows no color,
knows no sex, equality for
all, bullets pierce pliant flesh,
splinter bones, don’t tread on
me the gun nuts say, Columbine
and Parkland, Sandy Hook,
Aurora, thoughts and prayers,
fictitious care, death and
dying everywhere.

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published ten books and numerous articles and poems. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . .

by George Held

by Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Gun control support fades three months after Florida massacre 

—Reuters/Ipsos poll May 23 2018

This time it was going to be different.
This time the losers were going to win.
This time the good guys were named Emma
and Cameron and David and the survivor
parents were hip, articulate, determined.

And then they ran into the NRA,
the intransigent bought legislators,
the Second Amendment zealots and the
nation’s sense of titanic inertia in
favor of the status quo, and nothing changed.

The wise guys were right: No massacre, like
Sandy Hook or Las Vegas, will change
the deep culture’s love of guns and aggression,
winners and losers…plus c’est la même chose.

George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017).

PORN AND POLITICS

by Alejandro Escudé

Judith Bernstein, “President” (2017), acrylic and oil on canvas, 90 x 89 1/2 inches at the Paul Kasmin Gallery via Hyperallergic.

You mustn’t mean what you say, in the sex biz.
If you say, “ooh,” then it isn’t really an “ooh.”
If you say, “We have to keep our schools safe.”
You don’t mean, “We have to keep our schools safe.”
There’s no safety in numbers; just one svelte set
Of impregnable laugh lines—and the strength
To sweat out the entire scene, bulbous and sharp.
So the masters meet the masters in Las Vegas,
And, secretly, who could possibly avoid to watch?
The search tallies her hits to a million a month.
The money rolls in for being sexy in a certain way.
Oh to be Evita Peron’s corpse, whom the general
Was hired to guard! One might hear the squelch
Of the dictator’s hands being sawn off, the splash
As Hart Crane’s body in the steely Caribbean.
She made it her own; she says her name is Stormy
For a reason. There are many reasons I suppose.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

THE THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS OF TRADER JOE SHOPPERS

by Kristin Berger

Image source: Kim's Cravings

That tonight will be the quiet, easy Sunday when all cars obey
the lights and the moon escorts clouds to the other side
of the overpass, under which homeless families are thankful
for no rain and church tips—
That tonight you reduce the odds and leave the children home,
the one fuming that you won't let him get the Nerf gun
that handles & loads like a semi-automatic;
Because you are the mother, and tonight will be the random night
you return with a trunk full of groceries, nothing
but a split nail and no sirens in the distance.

Kristin Berger is the author of the poetry collection How Light Reaches Us (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a poetry chapbook For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and co-edited VoiceCatcher 6: Portland/Vancouver Area Women Writers and Artists (2011). Her long prose-poem, Changing Woman & Changing Man: A High Desert Myth, was a finalist for the 2016 Newfound Prose Prize. Her most recent work has been published in Contrary Magazine, Half-Mystic Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Timberline Review and Wildness. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she hosts a summer poetry reading series at her neighborhood farmers market. 

IN THE FALLING DARK

by Devon Balwit 

Sheree Rumph of San Antonio prays over two of the 26 crosses erected in memory of the 26 people killed in a shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas on Monday, Nov. 6, 2017. The shooting took place during a Sunday service at the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP via The Times-Picayune, November 7, 2017)

Each day I take my little target and go out.
I cling to my petiole—call it life—
I hope for no storm, no rending gust,
no one with a gun, a grudge, a common truck.

I cling to my petiole—call it life—
I shield its flicker with my hand, invite in
no one with a gun, a grudge, a common truck.
I wring the last green from my short day.

I shield my flicker with my hand, inviting in
only beauty, only the heroism of the ordinary.
I wring the last green from my short day.
I close the door on threat. I turn inward.

Only beauty, only the heroism of the ordinary,
please, people—not invective, not hate—
Close the door on threat, turn inward.
Listen to the breath and find the vital.

Please, people—not invective, not hate—
the human world is so late. It’s dusk.
Listen to the breath and find the vital.
I try. Every day, I’m a beginner.

The human world is so late. It’s dusk.
Each day, I take my little target and go out,
I try. Every day, I’m a beginner.
I hope for no storm, no rending gust.

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more. The author thanks Bruce Cockburn for the title of this poem.

THINKING ABOUT MARILOU

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco



Of all
people I

should be more
sympathetic, should

be kinder to
The Woman Who Loved
Wrong—after

all, I have
been her,

sitting next
to a dark window

on the plane,
with the shadow

of the plane
lost in the ocean

with the person

I loved
lost

to all kindness. But
I can’t


get past her picture (not

her fault), how she

is smiling
and a fingertip of white hair

on her forehead (not
her fault)

shows she didn’t touch
the color up

and blue is all
around her like a
halo, and she’s

happy, and I

hate her
hate her
hate her

because, then,
she didn’t know

because
she wanted
to be loved

because it’s too hard
after all
to be so

sad.

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbook Various Lies is available from Finishing Line Press.

MY THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS GO OUT TO YOU

by Melissa Balmain

Well, of course your mom was precious and I'm sad she's not alive, 

but the answer's not to confiscate my HK MP5—

it's to hand all moms their own! You'd still be Mama's honeybun

if, instead of brunch on Mother's Day, you'd thought to give a gun,

give a gun, give a gun, give a love-your-mama gun.

As for spouses, yours was beautiful before her head blew off—

how I wish you'd bought yourselves a his-and-hers Kalashnikov,

and avoided parties, films and other useless couples' fun.

Friday night's for weapons training, it's a chance to date a gun,

date a gun, date a gun, date a hot-o-matic gun.

And your little boy? Adorable—a shame he couldn't bolt.

He's our proof that every teacher ought to have the latest Colt,

plus a practice range where tire swings and tetherballs once spun.

Skip those silly games at recess till each Teach can aim a gun,

aim a gun, aim a gun, aim a Core-required gun.

So come on, quit being haters, don't you give my rights a shove.

There's a way for me to keep my gun, and you the folks you love!

All it takes is recognition that your highest goal, bar none,

is to plan your daily lives around my need to own a gun

that is deadlier than any used from Vicksburg to Verdun,

while ensuring that this right belongs to nearly everyone,

even online-shopping crazies who buy rifles by the ton.

Love my gun, love my gun—you're the planets, it's the sun—

Love my gun, love my gun: if you don't, you'd better run.


Melissa Balmain's poems have appeared in such places as American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Poetry Daily, and The Washington Post's Style Invitational; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. She's the author of Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award).

BREAKING POINT

by David Chorlton

He was there to play, not to party. The night before the shooting, Mr. Paddock made two complaints to the hotel about noise coming from his downstairs neighbors: Albert Garzon, a restaurant owner visiting from San Diego, and his wife and friends. Mr. Garzon, who was staying in 31-135, directly beneath Mr. Paddock, said security guards knocked on his door around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday and asked him to turn down his music, country songs. When he asked where the complaint was coming from, pointing out that the nearest rooms on either side were far away, the security guard said, “It’s the guest above you.” —The New York Times, October 4, 2017

He was a quiet man, a man
who worked with numbers and amassed
more money than he had use for
so he spent some on guns
which made him feel bigger
than he was, but still quiet.
No known affiliations
to a cause or a religion
whose god ordered him to kill.
He liked to play against machines, to watch
the cards and count the winnings.
Otherwise, he kept
to himself.
He needed to sleep to concentrate next time
around.
      Suppose
it wasn’t the sense of a mission
that made him stack
his weapons in the room, suppose
he simply liked to carry them around
just in case
he ever needed them, you know,
for some spontaneous and banal reason
such as the noise
rising from the concert stage thirty-two floors down
and when it went on too, too
long, he smashed the window
and didn’t have to aim.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and late in 2017 The Bitter Oleander Press will publish Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.

STARING AT A SHELF OF BOURBON

by Megan Merchant 

Three days later my husband is on his way
home from Vegas. I stop to buy bourbon, the expensive kind,

as if this is just a movie and I can pour it into the wound
to keep it from spreading. I sketch words to avoid using—

blood, gun, bodies until there is at least a scab,
and the grip of nightmares have lost their choke-hold.

I ask the guy which kind packs the most punch, hearing again
my husband’s voice breaking into tears, worried he did not do enough.

Bulleit, his says, without wincing, the shelf stocked full enough to sterilize
any feeling, to stupor any change.


Megan Merchant lives in the tall pines of Prescott, AZ.  She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press, 2016 Best Book Award), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, 2017), four chapbooks, and a forthcoming children’s book with Philomel Books. She was awarded the 2016-2017 COG Literary Award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, the Poet Laureate of the United States.

EARLY MONDAY MORNING

by Peg Quinn



Every screen screams another mass shooting.
I lug a bucket of water saved from
warming my shower to a begonia,
its blossoms neither red, or magenta but
a bright blending of the two together.

Soft clouds dance a brisk parade cross the sky.


Peg Quinn is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, mural and theatrical set painter and award-winning quilter.

WHAT FEEDS US

by Amy Strauss Friedman

Each morning I reach into a bag of broken hearts
to feed my dog. Chicken biscuits in fragments
from freighting. He devours them whole
as if his survival hinges on love, on ancestry,
an ancient civilization that still remembers him.

He chews them rabidly as news of Las Vegas
bleeds through the television screen, another omen
of our dying planet. Our stars have left the scene
for the night, and in their wake the smoky scars
of the newly dead. We feast on broken hearts.
It’s all we have to feed us.


Amy Strauss Friedman is the author of the poetry collection The Eggshell Skull Rule forthcoming from Kelsay Books, and the chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). A two-time Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Escape Into Life, decomP, and elsewhere. Amy lives in Denver, Colorado where she teaches English at Columbia College.

AT THE VENETIAN RESORT CASINO ON THE STRIP

by Janet Leahy



LAS VEGAS (The Borowitz Report)—The casino billionaire and Republican kingmaker Sheldon Adelson met several 2016 G.O.P. candidates available for purchase over the weekend, but decided to buy none of them, Adelson confirmed today. --The New Yorker, March 31, 2014


An escape to Vegas, to bend
the ear

of a rich man, a foot
in the silver door

to dirty money, to hunger
that gnaws

for more, a psalm of himself
chips piled high to buy

someone plastic, the candidate
cannot wear a dark patina


Janet Leahy writes poetry in New Berlin, Wisconsin.  A member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, she has two collections of poetry, The Storm, Poems of War, Iraq and Not My Mother's Classroom.