WATCHING ALYSA LIU SKATE

by Tammy Smith

It’s impossible not to yell
“That’s what I’m f**king talking about!”
knowing she nailed it.

High above the ice,
even the Quad God
can’t hide his grin.

Nothing compares
to the joy of watching
her land a triple flip.

The globe spins with that power.
Bliss like this is contagious. 
I should return to the rink. 

Dig out my old skates, 
wipe down the blades,
sharpen them. 

Leave doubt in the arena.
Lace rage tight inside leather.
Release. Rise. Glide. 

Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker living in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, ONE ART, Grand Little Things, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.

“PENISGATE” AT THE OLYMPICS

by Diane Kendig

 

Illustration from Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology: Premium source for made up science

The Guardian begins with the obvious question:
“Why inject acid into your penis, and what are the health risks?”

If ever there were a serious misuse of the second person,
here you go. I won’t inject anything into myself, or,

as my sister said, when doctors ordered her to give herself
her own shots, “This is why I went into Speech, and you into Medicine.”

And actually, the athletes aren’t injecting their own, uh, organ,
because they are into Skiing and their doctors into Medicine.

Even for the men among us, though, says my husband, it's unimaginable.
Still ski jumpers go to great lengths and with hyaluronic acid, even further.

That is, they want their crotch at greater lengths for suit measurement—
which happens nine months before the games, so they get like a little

maternity ski suit, a tad larger, getting a slight lift, just 5% more surface,
but this is the Milano Cortino 2026. Competition amounts to centimeters.

The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating. One urologist says,
the rarest case would be gangrene and loss of the penis.

No athlete has been willing to comment on that.

Diane Kendig  is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has appeared in Cider Press Review, Comstock Review, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write. 

LACROSSE: AN APOLOGY FOR FORGETTING

by Dick Altman

"Ball players," a hand-colored lithograph by George Catlin (1796-1872)

How Indigenous Athletes Are Reclaiming Lacrosse: The Haudenosaunee Nationals lacrosse teams have a big ambition: competing in the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. —The New York Times, July 30, 2022

Thud!

 

Thud!

 

Thud!

 

The sound

of a solid rubber

lacrosse ball

slamming

into my chest

at 90 mph.

 

I’m a goalie.

By game’s end

the ball tattoos

red impact circles

all over ribs

and thighs

Everyone

a “save”.

     *

Cayuga

 

Mohawk

 

Oneida

 

Onondaga

 

Seneca

 

Tuscarora

 

Syllables poetic

of the Iroquois.

Now known as

Haudenosaunee.

Hoe-dee-no-SHOW-

nee, to my ear,

almost a poem

unto itself.

 

Haudenosaunee.

Star-strewn lacrosse

team that hopes—

and I share them—not

merely to win six years

from now Olympic gold.

 

But to trumpet

in the game’s balletic

clash and flow—

of stick on stick,

stick on flesh—

Native America’s

presence—resilient,

enduring—as I want

to imagine it

in the wider world.

                *

I write this poem for you,

you of First Nations,

to acknowledge

what a privilege

it was to dance

in your ancestors’

footsteps.

 

To play one of your

magical stringed

instruments, whose

music lets me subdue

strikes in mid-flight.

Bladed ball of poetry

that writes across

my body its wounds.

                 *

I stand fifty years later

in front of the mirror.

If I look closely, I can

see fine broken blood

vessels, not of age,

but joy of deflecting

one more shot on goal.

One more Thud! of joyful

pain, to rhapsodize over

a lifetime.

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, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.

2022 WINTER OLYMPICS

by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei

Read: "What Uyghur Americans Want You to Know about the Olympic Games" from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

As the wIntér oLympics cLOSE for 2022,

the Covid Bubble popped, and Xi Jinping’s Beijing fling’s through,

the teams returned, some to their lands where real snow oft occurs,

remembering the food and quarantines with heartfelt stirs.

Though typical concerns and controversies happened still,

false starts, missed calls, falls, dope disquals, and jumpsuits on the hills,

the WINter Games participants were “free” and far from strife,

Tibet, HongKong and Xinjiang. There was no loss of life.

Bing Dwen Dwen, frozen in his space clothes, with his constant smile,

embodying ice purity, has waved good-bye in style.

 

Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is poet of China, an anagrammatic heteronym of Bruce Dale Wise. “Reed ABCs” is his art name (hào).

THE WINTER GAMES GO ON

by Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”

Although detainees must sleep in cramped cells on cement floors,

and though they must wear shackles with their numbered uniforms,

and though repression crosses Xinjiang’s pale locked-down sky,

the corporate industrial complex won’t bat an eye.

 

Although Hong Kong was once a base of civil liberties,

and though the communists crush those who want democracy,

and though the people now are jailed, practicing free speech,

the corporate industrial complex won’t say a thing.

 

So now in Beijing, the Olympic Winter Games go on,

supported by Proctor & Gamble, Visa and Bridgestone,

Intel, Allianz, Coca Cola, and Airbnb…

The IOC states it will be still aired by NBC.

Rudi E. Welec, “Abs,” is an irregular pseudonym for a NewVerse News regular.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

An athlete, who cleared hurdles with great ease,

Got ready for the most important race

Of his career by streaming melodies

On board a bus to take him to the place

Decided on. But he relaxed too good!

Soon he was miles from where he should alight

And, if he took official guidance, would

Miss any chance of setting matters right.

And then a Good Samaritan appeared,

Re-routing him and stepping in to pay ...

In life, for certain hurdles to be cleared,

The stranger's kindness proves the only way,

As this man, with Olympic gold to own,

Now tells. He did not win his gold alone!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly.

UNSENT LETTER TO HIDILYN DIAZ, OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST

by Jonel Abellanosa

How much more weight

should you lift off our poverty

of belief, how much more heavy lifting

before we know ours is the golden

heart we lost before birth?

 

We pine, nostalgic for the home

we never knew, strangers to our own

archipelago. The beauty we see hidden

in plain sight, stolen long before

we’re old enough to question.

 

Long our memory of plunder,

recall homeless when the monsoon

season rages. We’re too preoccupied

to remember. How much the dearest

question we learn to ask, dear

 

as restless days at a high cost, heaven-high

anxiety we can’t wrap to give our children.

How much, how much more? Enslaved

to more, we open our chests, shocked

our hearts have been stolen.

 

Nor do we have the chest to live by

during months when rain drains all warmth.

How many of us don’t know you emerged

victorious against the heavy burden?

How many of us are still searching

 

for the heart that elsewhere beats

the way living in comfort beats and makes us

hear music, the pursuit of happiness

a birthright equal not just for the few?

For the shortlasting you found our hearts.

 

For a moment

wear it

like a medal

for us

all.

Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, The Philippines. His poetry and fiction are forthcoming in The Cape Rock and Poetry Salzburg Review and have appeared in hundreds of magazines including The New Verse News, Thin Air, Chiron Review, The Lyric, Poetry Kanto, and The Anglican Theological Review and have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars prizes. His poetry collections include Songs from My Mind’s Tree and Multiverse (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, New York), 50 Acrostic Poems (Cyberwit, India), In the Donald’s Time (Poetic Justice Books and Art, Florida), and Pan’s Saxophone (Weasel Press, Texas). He is a nature lover, with three companion dogs, and three other beloved dogs who have passed on beyond the rainbow bridge. He loves all animals. 

THE PASADENA POOL ON WEDNESDAYS

by Jenna Le

“Dr. [Sammy] Lee went on to earn three Olympic medals, beginning at the 1948 Games in London, where he took home a bronze medal in the 3-meter springboard and a gold medal in 10-meter platform diving. He earned his second consecutive gold medal — a first for any diver — in platform diving at the 1952 Games in Helsinki. . . . At the Brookside Plunge pool in Pasadena, Dr. Lee, as well as other Asian, Latino and black men and boys, were allowed to swim only on Wednesdays, in a special session that the pool called ‘International Day.’” —Washington Post, December 5, 2016. AP photo of Dr. Lee in the 1948 London Olympics via the Washington Post.

          for Dr. Sammy Lee, 8/1/20-12/2/16

The diver Sammy Lee took home
two medals, two consecutive
Olympic golds. Our polychrome
America, our putative
post-racial land laves Lee with love;
it splashes pics of Sammy’s splashes
on TV, turning man to dove,
to symbol, as he turns to ashes.

But when the press says “Lee took home
two golds,” what does that word, home, mean?
Lee, born unto the styrofoam
and steel of California, seemed
American as one could get:
a scholar, athlete, doctor, spouse,
parent, and U.S. Army vet.
Yet, when Lee tried to buy a house
in Garden Grove in ’55,
he was told, “You’re not white enough.”

Can home be home if, where you live,
you’re banned from living, barred from love?
Had platform diving—Sammy’s sport—
not given him a platform, might
he still be roaming far from port,
a homeless wanderer in the night?

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Anchor & Plume Press, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations appear or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, The Best of the Raintown Review, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, The Village Voice, and elsewhere.

THE BLOODIED BOY AND THE GAMES

by Jay Sizemore





Can you hit the water like a knife,
so sharp and so quiet
it remains oblivious to the stabbing?
          No somersaults by choice.
          Every building a potential grave,
          a rubble of tombstones disarrayed.

Can you run faster than death,
with a nation of gasps
riding your shoulders and spine?
           Here, a gold medal for a sunrise.
           We wipe the blood from our eyes.
           We dig our children free of debris
           and carry them like bombs.

Are you sure you picked the right God?
Has the arrow loosed itself
from behind your ear
and found the center of the universe?
Doesn’t the ocean sound like applause?
           There are so many that are lost.
           Their names vanish like landscape details
           pulled further and further away.
           This fog makes blind strangers of us all
           bruised bodies hurting to be touched.

Is the world watching?
I’ve balanced my entire life
upon a beam no wider
than the average human foot.
I’ve turned myself into a compass,
a needle floating inside a leaf.
I’ve conditioned my frame,
hardened my senses
through repetition,
becoming an instrument
of precision
lifting fighter jets
up over my head.
Will you fold my indiscretions into a flag,
while a black man bites the curb,
and forgive me for being great?
             Stare into his eyes.
             Dark as polished stone,
             the blank gaze
             of a shell-shocked child,
             his blood dried to his cheek
             like an unwanted birthmark
             not given at birth.
             It’s no mistake that the human heart
             is larger than a grenade.
             Are you sure you picked the right God?


Jay Sizemore writes poetry and fiction. He has been  published in places such as Rattle, McNeese Review, Jabberwock, and Crab Orchard Review. He lives in Nashville, TN.

WALT WHITMAN AT THE 2016 OLYMPICS

by Bob Katrin

O for any and each the body correlative and attracting.
Singing the muscular urge and the blending…
the welcome nearness… the sight of the perfect body.

The splendor of the opening ceremony and around the
corner the reeking-of-life favelas monitored by
Praetorian Guards with automatic weapons. Keep out
the riff raff, the plenty persons near but not
the hot, the right ones.

The corruption of city-states, the poor, the beggared,
and the rich, the corporate and the incorporate; the
dopers, tokers, and politicians.

The athletes, lithe, lean, and lovely, and the “bulge.”
Ah! The fit-witless and the bulge of youth, the beauty
anyway and incorruptible discipline and dedication
irrelevanced by “commercials.”

And on Copacabana Beach, “We don’t need a stadium
to play volleyball.”

Oh Latin America, Oh Columbus, Columbanumbus!
The New World screwed screwing itself.

The hungry gnaw that eats me night and day…
I need another glass of cachaca and a plate of feijoada.

Tonight I dance with the dancers and drink with the
drinkers. Everyone is my friend even the crooks
on the Olympic Committee.


Bob Katrin is a writer and poet living in Southern Pines, NC.

RIBBED FROM THE HEADLINES

by Jill Crainshaw

When they strolled in the garden alone while

the dew was still on the apple blossoms, the
man gave the woman all the credit. “She
gave me fruit. I ate.” But as limelight
illuminates Olympic garlands “There’s the guy

responsible for it all!” Her husband. Take a rib
from a Bear’s side; “Wife Wins Medal!” Suture

buttons on free-flowing fabrics to dress up
mannequins on mega-fashion magazine covers;

thirteen cents an hour in undisclosed
back rooms. No one will ever know. Sew up a

presidential nomination; plunge a whetted needle
through “abrasion resistant” waxed canvas ceiling. The
morning headlines? “Clinton claims nomination” stitched
on the front page of the Tribune, history pocketed

in a photo of him, not her. Her clothes asked for it after all,
buried on page twelve bottom left

next to an ad for half price laundry detergent.

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a Presbyterian minister. Her work has appeared in Star 82 Review, Mused: Bella Online Literary Review, and Panoplyzine. She is a frequent contributor to the Unfundamentalist Christians blog.

QUEER MUSIC

by Tom Lennox

In the ice dancing competition in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Russia’s bronze medalists Nikita Katsalapov and Elena Ilinykh “brought down the house with their performance to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.”

They chose the queer for their music
to dance upon the ice
queer ice
deep and Russian
dense with dreams
with the thrill of passion’s thaw
a triumphant heart
beating beneath the ice
Russian heart
queer heart
within the swan
black swan beset by
the magician
black heart
his veins too
Russian passion
queer passion
that slices
through the ice
lifting the heart like a waltz
queer waltz


Tom Lennox’s poems have appeared in Miriam’s Well and The New Verse News. He has published two chapbooks, Aerial Acts and Once Twice. He lives by a creek in a wildlife region in southwest Florida.

THE REUNION OF THE PUSSY RIOT SINGERS

by Tricia Knoll 

One of the two recently released members of Russian punk protest band Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, said on Friday that their release was aimed solely at improving Russia's image before it hosts the Winter Olympic Games rather than a humanitarian gesture. --Mail & Guardian, December 29, 2013

May the games begin
the announcer calls
and may the best man,
oops and best women
carry the gold

for a nation waiting
for its glory count,
so speaks the media.
An embarrassment
of riches -- each nation

locks away those who speak
with the timber voice
of righteousness and pussies.
Amnesty is the tool
not of enlightenment
but of international spotlight.

Were the games to witness
to the strong
to commit peace
with unlike others,
with the soil we walk,
air we breathe,
and the creatures
who out-run us, out-sing us,
out-fly us, and out-think
us under the waters.
Were these the games,
a turning revolution,
victors might repair
the spoils.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet who for decades has imagined winning the women's Olympic marathon while slowly jogging through an urban landscape. Her chapbook Urban Wild will be published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press.

THE SUPPORT OF SPORTS

by Tricia Knoll

The raffle of an AR-15 assault rifle to raise money for the Saint Helens Girls Softball League will get a public airing at a community meeting Thursday. --Stuart Tomlinson, The Oregonian,  March 20, 2013

I pulled a red Radio Flyer wagon
full of Girl Scout cookies from door to door --
when doors opened with smiles
we assumed were safe.

Despite my wicked field hockey stick,
in high school my only role I could play in sports
was timing the breast stroke in boy’s swimming meets.
Then I bought bras with a label saying Title IX --

and yes, I bought a Barbie Doll or two
for my daughter -- and watched without dismay
when the cattle dog chewed off an arm and then a leg.
I’ve sold dozens of dozens of tulips to raise

money for a high school trip to Paraguay
and delivered those bouquets in a mail cart
to workers’ desks in an office tower
for a month. Flimsy wrapping paper --

we sold that too. Silk-screened t-shirts
for soccer. Chocolate bars for track.
Magazine subscriptions for volleyball. Florida
oranges by the crate, delivered to front doors.

Joannie Benoit won gold in the first
women’s Olympic marathon -- a big moment
for this plowhorse-style distance runner.
Young girls, find your road to fitness,
sweat, movement, teamwork,
combat if you want it.

But please don’t raffle rifles.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet with a long, long love of sport and movement.