A FINGER FOR THE WORKERS

by Donna Katzin

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

In his big-boss suit, the President 

tours the Ford factory, as if he owns the place,

until a heckler calls him a predator

without even slowing down the line

that devours his labor until the bell rings

to keep the country’s machinery running.

 

The boss’s fingers have never known a callous,       

labored long hours to meet production quotas

until they ached and his back complained.

They flick disdain and disrespect to workers 

like cigarette butts or young women used up

until the men on top tire of them,

spit them out, like last night’s nicotine—traumas and all.

 

But the gesture masquerading as power

sends a message to the shop floor crew—

the truth-teller has gotten under 

boss-man’s sagging skin,

and this group knows how to organize… 

They can do it again.

 
A former union organizer, Donna Katzin has worked for more than four decades with South Africa in its struggle to defeat apartheid and advance the new nation's  democratic development.  She also continues  through Tipitapa Partners to work with vulnerable Nicaraguan communities struggling to feed their children.  She is the author of With These Hands, a book of poetry and photos of South Africans struggling to give birth to a new nation, and a published poet honored to have been included in The New Verse News.

THE TIPPING POINT

by Jill Rachel Jacobs

(Ode to an Unseen Migrant During Perilous Times)

 

When evil comes a knocking, 

it may arrive with a vengeance, or 

incognito, like some 

Bible-thumping

good ol’ Joe, 

humping a flag.

 

("What we've got here is a failure to communicate")

When rage is sadness and 

sadness is rage, and it becomes

impossible to distinguish the two,

it’s not surprising we may recoil,

hidden in the shadows of the 

reality of what has become 

the new normal. 

 

("But I don’t want to go among mad people")

Like a cancer gone undetected, 

metastasized, 

cell by cell, 

dividing 

conquering,

licking wounds,

stealing secrets, 

tempted by madness,

trying to make sense of 

how we have now become 

that which we once loathed.

 

("Thank you, Sir, May I have another?")

 

When horror is contained, 

darkness has lifted, 

emerging from the underbelly,

dreams intact, 

still blinded by the 

innocence of children’s eyes, 

resting comfortably;

We wait.

 

("We have learned to see the world in gasps")

Unencumbered by reason,

justice now a luxury, 

in a world unrecognizable,

where compassion no longer prevails.

 

(How long? An hour, a year, a lifetime or two?)

 

When will we say when?

When prey becomes the predator,

When captors are held captive,

When cage doors are flung wide open.

Jill Rachel Jacobs is a New York based writer, poet whose poetry has been featured in numerous journals. Her features, commentaries, interviews have been published in The New York Times, Reuters, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, NPR’s Marketplace and Morning Edition.

MOMENT

by Jennifer M Phillips

"I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!" —Trump on TruthSocial via Newsweek, September 21, 2024

You could surrender everything
hearing the mesmeric voice of the predator
saying, I will make you safe, will save you
from your body, from decisions between the imperfect,
from nebulous fear, from the unknown future, from your tired heart;
fluttering at the excitement of the sycophant carrying a big idea
of someone else's like a hydrogen balloon,
his tongue a blurted  flame, and suddenly
you long for detonations. Life's long patience
and quiet hands you shake off like your mother's
holding you back from the thrill of traffic,
the allure of the other side.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock)

HAIL, MARY

by Maria Lisella

Buon giorno, buen dia Maria

Full of grace and wisdom and power

The Lord may be with thee, and you

May be Blessed among women but

 

What about the children? Not the one

In the womb that has been consecrated

As the son of God, but God, your god,

My god has many sons, daughters all

 

Around the world. They are not all blessed

Some are cursed and lost and under a pile

Of rubble in Ukraine, Yemen, Israel, Palestine, Gaza;

Others live in the darkness of the blind, are

 

Plagued by hallucinations, cursed with spasms

Of a mind that plays tricks on them all day, all

Night. Imagine a predator behind you, in your

Shadow, silent, stealthy, looking over your shoulder

 

Or under your bed. You cannot see but you know

They are there and they mean you harm for no

Other reason than you are where you find yourself

Not for an act you perpetrated on someone else,

 

Just for being who you are. The luck of the draw?

And Holy Mary, Mother of God, do you pray for

The innocent as well as the sinners? The pilots,

The soldiers firing artillery rockets, are they too

 

Prayed for? Rockets with ranges of 30-50 miles, fired

In barrages for the most effect, the most damage.

Are they too in your prayers to god and which god

Might that be? What does that God look like, what

 

Does that god think, plan, why does that god never

intervene? Humans shooting hate and rockets blindly

into Ashkelon, Beersheba, under the eyes of Israeli 

drones … range is crucial for rockets, for prayers too.

 

Pray for us sinners and for the innocent, for my own son

Living in a world plagued with demons he cannot see

or touch or hear but knows they are there, so music

and words come to him as if a shaft of light in day

 

Or night, raises his voice above the din in his brain, to

Feel the lift above the iron dome of paranoia, the upsurge

Of spirits that haunt, and fly, and invade his small cot in an

Institution with cinder block walls, netted windows he can’t

 

See but knows they are there: the limitations, the lack

Of liberty, the outside in; the other sons and daughters

in Gaza, or Yemen or Ukraine are bombarded with a panoply

of air power used in a steadily escalating series of attacks.

 

What I wish for my own son is comfort, warmth, knowing

There is a meal, a roof over his head, a dog at his feet, a

Sun he can feel but not see… Mother of God, what do you

Wish for your sons, your daughters now and at the hour

 

Of their deaths? When will your god hear your pleas or

Have the mothers and daughters been silenced to the

Tunnels, the basements, the streets, have they lost their

Voices, their powers to heal, now and at the hour of now?

Maria Lisella is the sixth Queens Poet Laureate and an American Academy Fellow; her work includes Thieves in the Family (NYQ Books), Amore on Hope Street (Finishing Line Press) and Two Naked Feet (Poets Wear Prada). She is a member of the Thursday Morning Poets, Brevitas and co-curates the Italian American Writers Assoc. literary readings.

TWO DEGREES

by Ralph James Savarese

Murder hornet photo tweeted by @Elvis_Trump

                                                                                           
Let us now praise the Japanese honey bee, Apis cerana,
which alone cannot defeat the much larger

and more vicious “murder hornet,” Vespa mandarinia.
Just one or two of the latter can destroy an entire hive,

moving in like winged, up-armored Cossacks.
After decapitating the honey-makers, they stuff

their yellowish-orange mouths with larvae and pupa.
Yet a miracle, not so much on ice as in the oven,

sometimes occurs. The honey-makers practice a technique
called “bee-balling,” which involves swarming

their attacker and collectively cooking it alive.
The bees move their flight muscles to generate heat;

they can withstand temperatures two degrees higher
than the hornet…. How about we try this with that predator

in the White House? Surround him with human warmth;
kindle him, you might say, with kindness? Of course,

the American honey bee hasn’t yet developed such a defense,
perhaps because it’s insufficiently eusocial and maybe

even indifferent to the fate of the hive. (“I’m not gonna
wear a mask, and there’s nothing you can do to make me!”)

As the seas rise and infection marauds the planet,
can you not hear the soft buzzing of wings, the earth balling

to save itself?

Ralph James Savarese is the author of two books of prose, Reasonable People and See It Feelingly, and one collection of poetry, Republican Fathers, due out in October.

FAREWELL, NAMESAKE I NEVER KNEW

by George Salamon

"For roughly a decade, the land snail species Achatinella apexfulva, which used to be plentiful on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, was believed to be down to a single survivor. His name was George, and he lived his last days alone in a terrarium in Kailua. Hawaii . . . but on Jan. 1, George died. . . . His death was symbolic of a steep decline in the population of land snails." —The New York Times, January 10, 2019  Photo Credit: Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources

I wish I had met you, on a
Stroll on a beach in Oahu,
One George and another.
Two anachronisms in
The age of speed.
Your species and mine
Face extinction, mine
By its own hand, yours
By predators that hunt you.
I read that you looked like a
"Swirled scoop of mocha fudge."
Ours would have been a sweet
Friendship, and I would have
Watched you as a buddy does,
And wondered if you knew we
Were both of a dying kind.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.

GAME OF DRONES

by George Salamon (with a bow to Tom Lehrer)

GNAT

The USA has the most,
And that is good
Because we're for freedom and motherhood.

Our allies have them too,
And that's all right
Because they'll join us in a fight.

They're called UAVs, unmanned
Aerial vehicles, and you
Must get to know them:

Hunter and Reaper,
Predator and Gnat,
For our security they'll go to bat.

Eleven countries have them today,
But that's not the way
It's going to stay.

"Every country will have armed drones
Within ten years," oh my.
But that's no cause to worry.

They'll only be used for "targeted
Killings, terrorism and government
Suppression of civil unrest."

So good night, baby,
Sleep tight and don't fret,
Drones will be watching over you.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, MO and contributes to Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DRONE PILOT

by Ann Bracken



     Based “Dreams in Infrared” by Nicola Abé 
     posted at Spiegel Online International, December 14, 2012.

He works in a windowless, air-conditioned container somewhere in New Mexico.
The pilot and his co-workers sit in front of fourteen computer monitors
and four keyboards.
Drone pilots at work.

The container is the cockpit where no one flies. They sit at controls
watching the Predator drone circle in figure eights
high above Afghanistan,
6,250 miles away.

The pilot sees a house made of mud
and a shed used to house goats comes into focus in the crosshairs.
He receives an order to fire and presses the button with his left hand.
Then he marks the roof with a laser.

The pilot next to him
pulls the trigger.
Releases a hellfire missile.
Sixteen seconds to impact.

The moments freeze, ticking by in slow motion.
The pilot can still divert the missile.
No one is on the ground. Three seconds to impact.

A child walks around the corner of the goat shed.

Second zero. The pilot’s digital world collides with the village
between Baghan and Mazar-e-Sharif.
The pilot sees a flash on the screen.
The explosion
the building collapses
the child disappears.

The pilot’s stomach plunges.
Did we just kill a kid? he asks the pilot next to him.
Yes, I guess it was a kid.
“Was it a kid?” they write in a computer chat window.

Someone they don’t know answers.
Someone sitting in a military command center.
Someone far away who observed the attack.
“No, that was a dog.”


Ann Bracken is a writer, poet, educator, and expressive arts consultant whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Little Patuxent Review, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire:Love Poems, Praxilla, The Museletter, The Gunpowder Review and Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century. Her company, The Possibility Project, offers expressive arts programs for women of all ages. Ann is a lecturer in the Professional Writing Program at the University of Maryland.