PLEASE, AMERICA, DON'T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME

by Cecil Morris

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

I remember breaking up with my first real girlfriend, 
the one who surprised me with earthly delights 
and let me touch the promised land, again and again, 
the one who did not push my hands away as if 
they were impertinent puppies, maybe cute 
but mostly annoying. I loved everything about her, 
her hair on my skin, her mouth, her own wild eagerness, 
her eyes turned up to me, the way we enjoyed 
the American River on sun-burnished afternoons, 
even how she dropped the great, immovable river rock 
on my naked heart and made me beg and cry 
and empty myself in stupid, sprawling letters. 
I thought she loved me and then she didn’t love me. 
 
That was almost 50 years ago—1976— 
and this is it again exactly, another love 
rejecting me, lifting her marbled foot and stepping 
on me with all the gorgeous, colonnaded tons 
of her, repulsing my advances, saying keep 
your nasty science off of me and covering 
her liberal titty. Her voice, that smile and kiss 
of democracy, has turned to bray and bawls 
and claims that I misunderstood, that she 
doesn’t even know me. And, again, I am left 
in tears to beg my heart’s case in postcards 
and signs, my own voice now raw with the ache 
of what I thought I had and now have lost. 
Please, America, please. Please come back to me.

 
Author’s note: The epigraph comes from Chris Banks, a line in his long poem “Core Samples of the Late-Capitalist Dream” in Alternator, Nightwood Editions, 2023. I borrowed the “liberal titty” and the imagery and language of the line “Her voice, that smile and kiss / of democracy” from e. e. cumming’s “Thanksgiving (1956)”

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025.  He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

ARE WE THERE YET?

Ode to Passover

by Anita S Pulier

Painting by Frans Pourpos the Elder (c. 1565–1580) depicting God showing Moses the Promised Land. Source: Wikipedia.

Celebrate forty years of wandering.
Forty years of searching.

Read Haggadah to the children,
give thanks,

sing praises
for the tribe surviving.

Focus on the ancients,
not the news.

Ignore ICE, as it issues
this warning: if officers

view you as Other,
hear a foreign accent,

take notice of tatoos,
you will be wrangled

like cattle into pens
and, paperless or not, deported.

To where? Weep, explain
you have lived here

since you were two,
this is your home.

Your wife, your children,
your aged mother

may never see you again.
Glory be to what?

Listen! Angry screams nurtured
by hatred, drown out the cries

of kids in Florida, or Texas, or next door.
How many more will be force fed this poison

in the name of a merciless God
punishing the sin of survival?

and Gaza
and Gaza

Tonight, we Jews co-opt words;
suffering, pain, freedom.

I imagine the day that
anyone’s God

will deliver enlightenment,
angels will sing,

heavenly light will shine
on the cruel irony of the self-righteous,

the day each of us will be revealed
as the supplicant,

each of us the Other.
The day our ancient journey,

our Passover celebration,
will not fall so woefully short

of the promised land.

Anita S Pulier's newest  books are Paradise Reexamined and Leaving Brooklyn  (Kelsay Books). ). Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.

EDMUND PETTIS BRIDGE 2025

by Jim Burns

For John Lewis, 1940-2020

Bloody Sunday, Bloody Sunday,
we looked away this year,
and now its gone, but…

The spirits waft out of the fog
on nights moist and sultry
as sweet summer sex
and meet at the bridge 
they can’t forget.
See them now,
John Lewis, Hosea Williams,
alive again and young,
Moseses leading their people
across the Red Sea
to the Promised Land,
leading 1200 moving feet
across the Alabama River,
a moccasin 
cold and poisonous
glistening in the moonlight 
below those 1200 feet marching
to the other side,
the other side where
their tormentors,
cold and poisonous too,
wait in the mist,
spectral figures,
mean-faced troopers with billies
and rearing horses with bulging eyes,
waiting to make this Judgment Day.
Why do these phantoms gather 
to cry again
from the sting of gas
as if their tears hadn’t fallen
for centuries before,
to bleed again
as if they had never bled
from the crack of batons
across heads bowed in prayer?
They climb up from their graves
until someday they reach
that other side.

Jim Burns was born and raised in rural Indiana and spent most of his working life as a librarian. Now retired, he turned to a long held interest in writing, and has had poems published by Eucalyptus Review, Skipjack Review, Rainy Weather Days, and others. He lives with wife and dog in Jacksonville, Florida.

ARE WE THERE YET?

Passover 2022

by Anita S. Pulier

Marc Chagall's "Passover Haggadah"

Celebrate forty years of wandering.

40 years of searching.

Read Haggadah to the children,

give thanks,

sing praises

for the tribe surviving.

Focus on the ancients,

not the news.

Ignore ICE, as it issues

this warning: if officers

view you as Other,

hear a foreign accent,

take notice of shabby clothes,

you will be wrangled

like cattle into pens

and, paperless or not, deported.

To where? Weep, explain

you have lived here

since you were two,

this is your home.

Your wife, your children,

your aged mother

may never see you again.

Glory be to what?

Listen! Angry screams nurtured

by hatred, drown out the cries

of kids in Florida, or Texas, or next door.

How many more will be force fed this poison

in the name of a merciless God

punishing the sin of survival?

Tonight, we Jews co-opt words;

suffering, pain, freedom.

I imagine the day that

anyone’s God

will deliver enlightenment,

angels will sing,

heavenly light will shine

on the cruel irony of the self-righteous,

the day each of us will be revealed

as the supplicant,

each of us the Other.

The day our ancient journey,

our Passover celebration,

will not fall so woefully short

of the promised land.

Anita S. Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane, and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butcher's Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press. Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac.

REPEAT PERFORMANCE

by Indran Amirthanayagam

The captain of Afghanistan’s women's wheelchair basketball team Nilofar Bayat and her husband Ramish disembark from the second Spanish evacuation airplane, carrying Afghan collaborators and their families, that landed at the Torrejon de Ardoz air base, 30 kilometers away from Madrid, on August 20, 2021. (Mariscal / POOL / AFP via Getty Images) via The Nation.

We are Americans even after 9/11, or Afghanistan, Vietnam for

its generation, which makes me think that we tempt history too

much, are poor students, never learn. So here we go again,

in helicopters and planes with just a handbag, a couple of

documents, and lives of those we can evacuate before the deadline,

and the country shutters up, and we return to insidious inside

operations because we will never learn, war being diplomacy

by other means, revenge always percolating on the stove, politicians

gnashing teeth to spit out America will be great again, under

their blinkered tutelage, investing in heavy tanks, precision bombers

and strategic plans only to realize that none of these can defeat the rebel

with a cause, who knows the land's dips and rises, who can melt into

the crowd, before springing back in the finest and most colorful robes,

to say bye bye American pie, get back by midnight to your promised land.

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including Blue Window/ Ventana Azul translated by Jennifer Rathbun (Lavender Ink/Diálogos Books, 2021), The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020), and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). In music, Indran recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.

SONG OF THE SEA: MEXICO 2018

by Donna Katzin

"Mexico town devastated by earthquake welcomes thousands from migrant caravan. Migrants from Central America are fleeing poverty and violence and are still weeks away from reaching the US." —The Guardian, October 30, 2018. Photo: Central Americans fill their water bottles with juice while waiting in line to receive donated food in Niltepec, Oaxaca. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP via The Guardian.

In your unfailing love you will lead

    the people you have redeemed.

In your strength you will guide them

    to your holy dwelling.

—Exodus, 15.1

A human river,
they come in shirts and sandals,                           
children holding their hands, 
mochilas bearing their only belongings.                                           

They come in shirts and sandals,                           
hunger in their hearts,
mochilas bearing their only belongings,                                             
turn their backs on beatings, gunshots in the night.

Hunger in their hearts,
they trudge through wilderness,
turn their backs on beatings, gunshots in the night --
leave the land that gave them life.                     

They trudge through wilderness,         
envisioning a Promised Land,
leave the land that gave them life.
Together they cry out to their god.                                       

Envisioning a Promised Land
like passengers of the St. Louis,
together they cry out to their god
when the border slams shut.                                                 

Like passengers of the St. Louis,           
refusing to turn back                   
when the border slams shut,
they surge in search of a miracle.                                                                         

Refusing to turn back,
a human river,
they surge in search of a miracle,
children holding their hands.

                                                                                             

Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including TheNewVerse.News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.