ON THE EVE OF A NEW ERA

by Lis Anna-Langston

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

I am waiting for the sun to dip

low over the hilltops in an act of defiance.

I am waiting for our government
to rise up again and say,
Give me liberty or give me death.

I am waiting for the free flow moments
to carry me to the seas that bump against
the belly of Savannah

and I am waiting for the tenderness to return to the night.

I am waiting for the spies to reveal their secrets
and cast aside the masks they’ve
considered identity

waiting for the bells to toll,
announcing the coming of relevance

I am waiting for elementary particles
to create their own game show
challenging anti-matter to a bet.

I am waiting for the Aztecs to conquer the Spaniards
with wit, beguiling them with the crooked smile of Montezuma’s revenge.

I am waiting for the hot neutron glow
of the sun to illuminate our place in the Universe

and I am waiting for the Warlords
to cast off their weapons and disappear into the mist.

I am waiting for the ghost of Elvis
to return to the white house
in Tupelo, Mississippi where his Mama
is standing on the front porch calling for the shadow of him
to return
from the long lines of fans
waiting
at the gates of his grace land.

I am waiting for Thomas Jefferson to bow to the
kindred spirits in the streets of Philadelphia and
walk back to Carpenters Hall to call a meeting
regarding the state of delinquent bets with the Republic
and its people.

I am waiting for the catcher in the rye
to take the hand of John Lennon and pull him back to earth.

I am waiting for my grandmother
to return to this life
so I can tell her I miss her
and I am waiting for the mailman
to bring my new book of poetry.

I am waiting for art to express form,
not just feeling
like the gut of Picasso driven and seeming.

I am waiting for the unmarked grave
of Che Guevarra
to sprout one thousand wild flowers.

I am waiting for God to find the box of crayons
I sent him
special delivery
with the sharpener on the side.

I am waiting for Dorothy to wake up in Oz,
get out of bed
and do something about that pedaling witch
once and for all.

I am waiting for the Disciples to stop serving redemption at the last 
supper.

I am waiting for Truman Capote to stop drinking
and finish another novel
and waiting for the raven
to return weary
back to the door of Edgar’s dreary.

I am waiting for the Romans to take back the Empire
on a Sunday morning
while all the good heathens are praying.

And I am waiting as patiently as a kidnapping plot
hashed out over coffee
for the scavenger angels
to walk out of the alleyways
cloaked in darkness
dragging the age of enlightenment
with their dirty hands
to rise up and startle us
with utter abandon
again.

Hailed as “an author with a genuine flair for originality” by Midwest Book Review and “a lovable, engaging, original voice…” by Publishers Weekly, Lis Anna-Langston is the author of Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond, Gobbledy, Tupelo Honey, Maya Loop, Wild Asses of the Mojave Desert, and the short story collection Tolstoy & the Checkout Girl. Raised along the winding current of the Mississippi River on a steady diet of dog-eared books she attended a Creative and Performing Arts School from middle school until graduation, went on to study Literature at Webster University, Creative Writing through the Great Smokies Writing Program through the University of North Carolina at Asheville and recently graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2023. Her novels have won the NYC Big Book Award, Independent Press Awards, and dozens of other book awards. As writer and producer her films screened and won at film festivals around the world. A three-time Pushcart award nominee, her work has been published in dozens of literary journals including The Literary Review, Emerson Review, Hobart, Barely South Review, and Emrys Journal.

CALIFORNIA SEPTEMBER 2020 WAITING FOR RAIN

by Phyllis Klein

Says the Climate Arsonist, “It will start getting cooler. You just watch,” as he participates in a briefing on wildfires with California Governor Gavin Newsom, left, at Sacramento McClellan Airport, Monday, 14 September 2020. Source: AAP via SBS News.

Any way you look at it, things are pretty grim.
Even an optimist (not me) has uplifted about as much
as they could, and still the rivers with their

muddy waters lope over the banks of hope,
stranding us in a flood of bad news. But no showers,
no torrents in sight. The lens of the future

becomes a Picasso painted kaleidoscope.
Rocks from an ominous silted riverbottom sink
even lower, lugging words, thoughts,

images down. Paperweighted laments underwater.
But the truth is so dry. See it coast past the window saying,
Get used to this. The sun must be angry,

or maybe it’s goldening another planet
with better behaved inhabitants. Or maybe
it’s the air, beyond rage, depressed, grieving, draped

in its gray facade. Eventually the situation blurs
into a barrier, a dam, a kink in the hose, pressure
on the rise. Combustion on its warpath.


Phyllis Klein writes, lives, and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Silver Birch Press, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Chiron Review, Portside, and Sweet, a Literary Confection. She also has poems forthcoming in I-70 and 3Elements. She believes in artistic dialogue as an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. And the healing power of anything as beautiful as poetry.

POLITICS AND PICASSO

by Ed Werstein

A Facebook friend posts: Any blue
will do! and I comment: What if
Picasso had had that attitude?
We may be entering another of our
periodic blue periods. I want to scream
across the internet, No! Not any blue will do!
According to the founders, we are
the architects, the artists, of our own
future. (If we have one).
We mustn’t just dip blindly at the blue
palette we’re offered to cover the orange
we’ve been putting up with lately.

Some blues bend toward green, while
others appear blue, but quickly turn
yellow when applied to the canvas.

Artists! Let’s amaze our many critics around the world.
Let’s choose a new revolutionary blue
(or at least a reformist one), a blue
we haven’t dabbled in in decades.

Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2018 he received the Lorine Niedecker Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His latesT chapbook is Benediction & Baseball.

THE RAVAGING

by Jonel Abellanosa

After "Guernica" (1937) by Pablo Picasso

Skulduggery of shades put me in.

Grays for taste buds, ground grainy

as doves. I smell blood.
Mouths 
expel hollow air, and I hear.

Palms like blue cornflowers,

luring to be pulled. Charcoal

bodiless arm and leg, but not

deep as indifference, the world

still a bullring. I can’t help but
see the orange president, his hair
spearing the horse, its painful
neigh my neigh, your neigh.

The sun is a slug, a bullet

lodged in the complacent spine.

Light lingers for lies, how we
still believe no one else dies.

A previous contributor to TheNewVerse.News, Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, the Philippines. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Rattle, Poetry Kanto, McNeese Review, Mojave River Review and Star*Line. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars award. His fourth poetry collection Songs from My Mind’s Tree was published in 2018 by Clare Songbirds Publishing House (New York), which will also publish his collection Multiverse. His poetry collection Sounds in Grasses Parting is forthcoming from Moran Press. His first speculative poetry collection Pan’s Saxophone is forthcoming from Weasel Press.

WISDOM TAKES A HOLIDAY

On T***p’s Withdrawal from the Climate Agreement

by Jon Wesick

Lincoln plants cotton on the White House lawn.
Rachel Carson sprays Agent Orange.
Martin Luther King hoists the confederate flag.
Gandhi stops at a steakhouse
on his way to the shooting range.

Crick and Watson blow their Nobel Prize money
on swizzle sticks and lotto tickets.
Jacques Cousteau moves to Arizona.
Einstein downs a six-pack of PBR
before getting behind the wheel of his GTO.
Jonas Salk shares dirty needles in Haitian crack houses.

Picasso enters his finger-painting period.
Mozart releases his 99 Bottles of Beer Symphony.
e.e. cummings WRITES IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
Julia Child dazzles guests with beef jerky à l’orange.
Dave Brubeck and McCoy Tyner embark
on their International Chopsticks Tour.

Stephen Hawking competes
in the Ultimate Fighting Challenge.
Bobby Fischer takes up checkers.
Elon Musk trades space flight and electric cars
for Pez dispensers. Warren Buffet
wires money to an exiled Nigerian prince.
Jean Paul Sartre guest stars
on Jackass.

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels.

THE ART OF PEACE

by Cally Conan-Davies

                     

Picasso, “Dove of Peace,” 1949. Source: “The Dove: Picasso and Matisse,” Lewis Art Café.

When Matisse

gave Picasso his last

fancy pigeon

he drew it

as though

it were a line in the wind

from which all things come

forgiven.


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.

ENLIGHTENMENT

by B.Z. Niditch

Image source: Poets for World Peace

This spring we plant
seedlings
on grounds that flower
covering the good earth,
and write in splendor
by our night lamps
as a new season rebirths
each poet's power,

Asking winter's icy justice
be gone this season
we reach  for deadlines
over a stalking press
to stamp out
in bold headlines
every reasoned grievance,

Yet the bureaucracy
drives us crazy
making us wait
in the cold for hours
and the plutocracy
ignores our pleas
for democracy,

We learn from Byron
Picasso or Shelley
with a artist's chance
for a dove's release
under the burning sun
when frightful furies
ask for war
we yearn
to walk for peace.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher.  His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Le Guepard (France);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

KEEPING INDEPENDENCE

by Archana Sankaran

Old Beggar With a Boy - Pablo Picasso, 1903

I will keep my
strong sense of independence,
my fierce will,
precious freedom
and hopefully,
creative lust.
Until the minute coffers
where I pinned my
existential insecurities,
stand near empty.
But empty, it does not
scare me anymore.
I have seen empty,
spread those bowls of begging
and received often pity
but sometimes crumbs
that were and are of
much value to me.
That some people can
be kind, never mind if grudgingly
to strangers.
There certainly is
a clarity, a looking at truth
a freedom at empty.
Oh, what a wonderful
place I am at, tonight.
Happy at going to full.
And happy to get to empty.


Archana Sankaran is a poet based in India. She is also an artist . She finds writing poetry often emotionally cathartic. And is grateful for the gift of writing.

HOW DECISIONS ARE MADE

by Martin Willitts Jr

Image source: The Craftinomicon

based on “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” Picasso, 1907, and Fox News

Gossip twists the truth, distorts the facts
into unrecognizable shapes
into five Picasso women in Avignon.

If a person says enough lies, exactly the same,
all the time, too many people
accept it as truth. But a lie is still a lie.

And like the distorted women, brutalized
beyond recognition, gossip is
an art form that changes what was.

Ruins are still ruins. The person destroyed
must shift through the rubble of their lives.
Somewhere, underneath, smolders the truth.


Martin Willitts Jr has been nominated for 6 Pushcart and 6 Best Of The Net awards. He has 5 full-length and 20 chapbooks of poetry, including the  2013 national contest winner, Searching For What Is Not There (Hiraeth Press). He has been in The New Verse News before.

AT SUMMER'S ENDING

by B.Z. Niditch

In this zig zag life
still breathless for a swim
over reddish waves
at summer's ending
a patient first light
stills the crystal waters
where a sun reflects
the cork bottles we throw
overboard into the sea
containing peace wishes,
hoping on some muddy shore
a soft glance will lead
these words like shadows
to speedily embark
with our small voices,
or on earth-wise hooks
to crisscrossed fates
telling with our tongues
to stop quicksands of war,
that with elated eyes
by states along the equator,
between continents
or by a footbridge
children on all fours
at another humid morning
such as this,
searching for fish or shells
outstretched to sail
or diving along a salty beach
will discover our note
and bring into play
what Picasso's dove
would convey.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; LeGuepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest); Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

THE WALLFLOWERS

by Ed Shacklee

A Picasso and a Gauguin Are Among 7 Works Stolen From a Dutch Museum--NY Times, November 17, 2012

The Monet, Picasso, Gauguin and Matisse
were worth tens of millions of dollars apiece,
thus sturm und drang followed when they went AWOL
from Rotterdam’s lovely museum, Kunsthal,
and every TV blared the news without cease:
“Monet, Picasso, Gauguin and Matisse!”

But the burglars burgled two other fine paintings
which barely got mentioned and didn’t cause faintings.
The Meyer de Haan was an afterthought,
for what kind of bidding would he have brought?
And “Woman with Eyes Closed” by Lucian Freud
was a little too modern and not even nude,

so these were ignored as the burglars ran
off with Picasso, Monet and Gauguin,
plus the "Reading Girl in White and Yellow”
by Henry Matisse, an ingenious fellow;
but spare a few moments regret for de Haan
and Freud, who were stuffed in the back of a van --

less famous, but worthy to hang on the wall
of Rotterdam’s lovely museum, Kunsthal.


Ed Shacklee is a public defender who represents young people in the District of Columbia.  His poems have appeared in The Flea, Light Quarterly, Shot Glass Journal and Tilt-a-Whirl, among other places.