SURVIVOR’S GUILT

by Sarah Fitzpatrick

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

8:47 a.m., the world is a siren. The train folds down its newspapers in unison. A thousand dominos clack to impossible silence. Playbills flutter into ash. Billboards tie themselves into prayer flags screaming past a capsule sealed against the miasma of falling towers. A new infant surfaces to gasp blue light. Mother’s breasts engorge with the fair-weather clouds beyond the cesarean drape. Someone is screaming down the hall. The willows of Central Park shudder the sign language of calamity. The molten core of Earth constricts. The trees understand it as music. 

Saved by a teacher conference, your feet give way. You’ve stayed an enormous golden pendulum, its wire dusted with powdered glass. Enraged muscles conspire to squeeze until your tender hand is empty of blood. It runs to colorize the sidewalks of a ghastly silent movie screened only in Manhattan. The city as monolith, a scientist’s constant. The pendulum is a false prophet. You become the fixed point. Transfuse time back into the veins of every paramedic, every finance worker, every new mother, every suicide bomber. Steal back all that is magnetized by the core. Give back the seasons to the trees.

Sara Fitzpatrick works in animal welfare in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her poetry and fiction have been published in places like Merion West, Jet Fuel Review, X-R-A-Y, and Tampa Review. A collection, Bury me in the Sky, was published in 2020 by Nixes Mate Books.

SHADBLOW

by Arlene Weiner

We’d go down to the end of Dyckman Street
to watch the trains, Mom and Teddy and I.
We’d wave at the locomotives, and the engineers
would wave back. A little family.
 
In spring we saw shad nets in the Hudson River.
There’s a tree called “shadblow” because 
it bloomed when the shad were running,
early spring.
 
We lived in Manhattan, in an apartment.
Trees in the park, fish displayed on ice 
in the window of the fish store. 
 
Near my grandmother’s apartment house,
one magnificent magnolia covered itself
with bloom, white blushed pink, every spring.

Arlene Weiner grew up in New York City and has lived in Pittsburgh for decades. She has been a Shakespeare scholar, a den mother, a cardiology technician, and an editor. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New Verse News. Ragged Sky Press published three collections of her poetry. The most recent is More (2022).

CHRISTMAS EVE: NEARING MIDNIGHT IN NEW YORK

by Langston Hughes 

The Christmas trees are almost all sold
And the ones that are left go cheap
The children almost all over town
Have almost gone to sleep.
The skyscraper lights on Christmas Eve
Have almost all gone out
There’s very little traffic
Almost no one about.
Our town’s almost as quiet
As Bethlehem must have been
Before a sudden angel chorus
Sang PEACE ON EARTH
GOOD WILL TO MEN!
Our old Statue of Liberty
Looks down almost with a smile
As the Island of Manhattan
Awaits the morning of the Child.

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes wrote “Christmas Eve: Nearing Midnight in New York” in 1914.

MOUNTAINS OF AMBIGUITY

by Dick Altman

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP, August 16, 2024) — Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A Northern Arizona University professor emeritus who analyzed soil, water and vegetation samples taken along a popular hiking and biking trail in Acid Canyon said Thursday that there were more extreme concentrations of plutonium found there than at other publicly accessible sites he has researched in his decades-long career.

Northern New Mexico

How many daybreaks

have I risen

to the drum/chant/flute spirit

of high desert’s Jemez,

sacred Indigenous mountains,

dancing my western skyline?

 

I wanted to escape Manhattan’s

work encampments, 

false pinnacles of glass

and steel,

to find here, 

at seven thousand feet,

gifts of earth/air/water,

untrammeled 

by humanity’s heel. 

 

The breathtaking cleft

that serves as the gateway

into the Jemez—

like a canyon pathway 

into the clouds—

lofts me,

calls me 

into another world.

 

Nature’s handiwork in the Jemez

expresses itself 

in a thousand volcanos,

asleep for now,

fanning out from Valles Caldera,

planet’s largest,

grandeur that, 

across Rio Grande’s valley,

seems all mine.

My hiking ardor leaves

its imprint 

in that elk-abounding

encirclement, 

a trail of joy,

marking every season.

 

Yet not without sadness.

I have first to pass 

Oppenheimer Alley,

where the brain of man

explodes an idea,

whose remnants scatter

the countryside,

forces unseen

that torment the Jemez

without known end.

 

Los Alamos’ lights

at night snake downslope,

pointing at me,

atomic city’s

unrepentant reminder

that my escape

was less promise,

than dream.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Wingless Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.

WHEN PROTESTS COME TO THE UPPER EAST SIDE

by George Salamon





“In a reflection of how American cities have changed since the 1960s, demonstrations have included many wealthy areas.” —The New York Times, June 2, 2020


High-towered days in Manhattan
Crumble into ruins, while the silk
Curtains in the million-dollar condos
Whisper of murder and the owners
Wander restlessly through the rooms,
Hearing whispers of the tired old black
Men who served drinks in the rooftop
Bar, their eyes speaking of hardscrabble
Lives and the parents retreated to their
Children's bedrooms and read to them
From brightly-colored picture books of
America's fairy tales that once upon
A time bewitched them.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and has most recently contributed to The Asses of Parnassus, Dissident Voice, and TheNewVerse.News.

THE SKYSCRAPER MUSEUM

by Kate Bernadette Benedict

Even after the crisis eases, companies may let workers stay home. That would affect an entire ecosystem, from transit to restaurants to shops. —The New York Times, May 12, 2020

Indeed. This lobby is marble-graced.
Heels would echo as workers raced
for pinging elevators, though some stopped
at newsstands first, where they’d opt
for breath mints and a morning paper.
Here’s a New York Times, with vintage
headline. Centennial of Brooklyn Bridge.

Let’s go up, let’s press floor 43.
Bad art, glass walls, a ficus tree.
Outside : virtual sky and steeple.
Inside: holograms of busy people
dressed like Peggy and Joan and Draper.
Here’s a typewriter. Hear it clacking?
Pages on the side for stacking.

What a time it was! It ended.
Congregating got suspended.
The energy of streaming streets.
Uptown, Mad Men; downtown, Beats.
Coffee smells and carbon paper.
Towers went up and towers fell,
a simple virus fouled the well.

So let us praise Manhattan
as it used to be
and marvel that we worked that way
in harmony
in soaring buildings
that caught the sun
and let in moonlight too.
Eras end. History gives them due.

Kate Bernadette Benedict, of New York City, is the author of Earthly Use: New and Selected Poems.

LOCKDOWN

by Rick Mullin

“Hokusai Meets Fibonacci with Numerical Sequence” by Ars Brevis

We did this to ourselves, we say. The sirens
rise and fall disparaging the soul.
Alarms are nothing new in these environs,
but the silence in between them takes its toll.
We did this to ourselves, we tell ourselves
in voices silent as the thoroughfares,
not understanding how, but understanding.
We sense a culmination. Our affairs
are not in order. We aren’t cleared for landing
in our soundless silver aircraft as it shelves
in clouds above the towers of Manhattan.
The numbers coming down are a distraction
as the news rolls in a Fibonacci pattern.
The mounting body count is an abstraction.
The sunlight in the courtyard overwhelms.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

STATE OF THE UNION

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck
via The Progressive Populist

While T***p looks presidential
reading words slowly on the networks,
on the classic movie channel
King Kong the giant ape runs amok,
first on Skull Island,
then in Manhattan.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya can't. She just can't. The Book of Knots and Their Untying is published by Kelsay Press.

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. 

THE SECAUCUS FIRE

by Rick Mullin

April 19, 2016

It burned for hours on the Internet,
the skyline of Manhattan lost behind
a meadow ghost of plodding smoke, regret,
despair, ennui and memory combined.

I watched it at my desk. I shared the link,
anticipating mayhem on the Path
to Hoboken, a donnybrook outside
the Railhead Bar, a cavalcade of wrath
and rank confusion. Madness. Suicide.
The Erie Lackawanna on the brink

of nothing, I would learn at 5 o’clock.
An unremarkable commute. The crowd
was not in crisis mode. The normal shock
and shuffle led upstairs to where no cloud
of earthly origin drove Jerseyans to drink.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

DECEMBER 8

by John Azrak

On this day in history
Raymond Carver came to town
a hulking man with sapphire blue eyes
drinker's nose and a tipsy finger-
tip handshake with time to kill
before his reading at Columbia University;
He shared cocaine at the apartment
of a young writer, Jay, who idolized Ray's
piercing minimalist fiction, his own life
a bent out of shape Carver character,
having recently lost his mother,
wife to divorce, any notion of self-discipline,
his fact-checking job at The New Yorker.
Ray, of course, knew from dissipation
and suggested that the young writer
might want to flee the dangers and distractions
of the big city to work on his craft far upstate.
On the train uptown Jay worried the idea
as if he had a writer's stake in the heart
of the publishing world, worried it more so
in the room where the soon to be huge
Ray Carver read “Put Yourself in My Shoes”
to a small but ecstatic audience
while not fifty blocks away Mark Chapman
hid in an alcove at the stately Dakota.


John Azrak has published widely in literary magazines and anthologies; his most recent poems, in Nimrod and Stoneboat, deal with the war in Syria. He is an admirer of the work of Raymond Carver and John Lennon.