TODO BUENO?

by Andrés Castro

from Macmillan

New York City continues to grow and grate on me.
     Being born at Coney Island Hospital the summer of ’58, 

     after my family arrived from Puerto Rico—Borikén 

to the Indigenous—should make me a Boricua, but no.

Mi familia on the island often says I am from Por Allá, 

     especially those claiming bloodlines to native villages—

     chiefs rabid in their gatekeeping—when calling 
the post-Columbian colonizing label, Taino, inauthentic. 

My genté, speaking from por alla/my over here—

     just call me Nuyorican. My ancestral archipelago remains

a natural wonder; but why erase my mainland city tribe. 
     My adolescence was blessed with a South Bronx block 

of modest homes owned by Black, brown, and white 

families that mixed—no matter the surrounding chaos 

of the sixties. My transplanted island roots took root 
above and below concrete. So what I was born too late 

to be an OG Nuyorican—say The Young Lords or outlaw

poets Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarín, and Miguel Piñero, who

founded the Nuyorican Poets’ Café to welcome everyone. You
can’t grow up where I did and not be Nuyorican—this one, 

given my nature, still needs activism and revolutionary poetry.  

     The stakes are too high now: the world is being set ablaze 

with the U.S. the head arsonist—aren’t the U.S. bombs that made 

Gaza a wasteland and suddenly dropped on Iran enough proof? 

     I only wish my roots were not drying out so quickly. My mother

would say, “Cuídate, de los buenos quedan pocos,” if still alive.

I have gone from little boy to brittle—taking care and being good 

in 2025 is old as analog. The robotic other side is evil and reckless—

signing the Doomsday Clock will strike midnight in my lifetime—
whether I practice Yucayeque rituals in Borikén’s central mountains 

or rattle downtown on the Lexington Ave express. What I really

need to talk about is the genocide of Palestinians given the chance.  

Andrés Castro, a PEN member, is listed in Poets & Writers Directory and keeps a personal blog,
The Practicing Poet. Andrés is currently working on Militant Humanist, a project for poets, 
writers, artists, and others.

GARBAGE

by William Aarnes

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

             persona sin valor

I like to imagine

a Puerto Rican mother

who, despite herself, caught

one of those rolls

of paper towel

tossed into the crowd

with utter contempt.

She’s kept it, the plastic

wrapper still intact,

atop her refrigerator,

a trophy to remind her

what the word useless—

inútil—means.

Some day, she hopes—

ella espera!—

she’ll feel free

to ball it up,

hoja tras hoja sucia,

and light a fire

to celebrate—

por fin! por fin!—

the tosser’s loss.

William Aarnes lives in Manhattan.

STATE OF EMERGENCY

by Donna Katzin

The House on Tuesday passed a resolution to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border, as majority Democrats painted an apocalyptic portrait of a lawless chief executive out to gut the Constitution. —The Washington Post, February 26, 2019

An emergency                                                              
sleeping in our subways, Sal
knows no other home.                                                              

Her belly a beast,
Alma picks through the trash when
no one is looking.

Pedro camps between
boards that used to be his house
in Puerto Rico.

Santa Rosa Ruth
sifts through rubble where wildfires
devoured her mother.
                             
With bare feet we map
our way through the wilderness,
build bridges—not walls.

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. 

STEVEN SPIELBERG VISITS AN ISLAND STILL WITHOUT ELECTRICITY IN THE MOUNTAINS TO PITCH HIS REVIVAL OF WEST SIDE STORY

by Mariana Mcdonald

"Steven Spielberg Met With Puerto Ricans About 'West Side Story' Concerns. At a town hall with University of Puerto Rico students and faculty, the director, flanked by screenwriter Tony Kushner, said his remake of the musical will strive for authenticity. Critics say the problems go deeper than that." —Hollywood Reporter, January 15, 2019

Steven, do not bring it back.

Once was enough. Too much,
in fact. Those melodies
for Natalie and Rita—

their perfect brilliance stuck,
made slurs standard,
made us Aunt Jemima.

Staccato steps
Little-Black-Sambo’d
our dignity and dreams.

Don’t bring it back. Instead,
make new sounds.
Tell new stories.

Let the dancers
razzle dazzle
to a voice

you don’t yet know.

Mariana Mcdonald is a bicultural poet, fiction writer, journalist, and editor. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Lunch Ticket, and Poesía en Vuelo, fiction in So to Speak and Cobalt, creative nonfiction in Longridge Review, and nonfiction in In Motion. She edited the 2017 International Latino Book Award-winning bilingual memoir Cartas a Karina by Oscar López Rivera. She is active in social justice movements and the writing community.

FLORIDA MAN DOES DATA ANALYTICS

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Three days after most of the federal workforce was furloughed on Dec. 21, a 14-year-old girl fell 700 feet to her death at the Horseshoe Bend Overlook, part of the Glen Canyon Recreation Area in Arizona. The following day, Christmas, a man died at Yosemite National Park in California after suffering a head injury from a fall. On Dec. 27, a woman was killed by a falling tree at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the borders of North Carolina and Tennessee. The deaths follow a decision by Trump administration officials to leave the scenic—but sometimes deadly—parks open even as the Interior Department has halted most of its operations. During previous extended shutdowns, the National Park Service barred access to many of its sites across the nation. National Park Service spokesman Jeremy Barnum said in an email that an average of six people die each week in the park system, a figure that includes “accidents like drownings, falls, and motor vehicle crashes and medical related incidents such as heart attacks.” Photo: Lights shine at a shuttered entrance station at Joshua Tree National Park in California on Jan. 3, 2019. The gate is normally staffed during the day but is now unstaffed 24 hours per day, allowing free entrance for all visitors. Campgrounds have been closed at the park and other services suspended during the partial government shutdown. (Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images) —The Washington Post, January 4, 2019

Let him start by counting
the number of refugees
that can fit in a pup tent
or a large tiger cage.

Let him make a pie chart
for the styles of rakes
needed for preventing
forest fires
in the state of California.

He will weigh the odds
for laundering Russians
in Florida or New York.

He will compare the rainfall
in inches
in Paris
in November
with flood levels in Houston
in their last hurricane.

Puerto Rico
he ignores.

Let him indicate the size of
small hands
used to measure
the big wall.

He will evaluate the climate data
removed from public view
divided by the number of bodies
that can't fit
in a city morgue

then chart the data
for his fans:
give them
what they want

the results:
always
inconclusive.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan lives in South Florida and writes noir with a dark humor. Books have been released by publishers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Poetry chapbooks include The Art of Bars (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and Days' End (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2017). Project XX, a novel about a school shooting, was published in 2017 by Salt Publishing in the UK. 

WHEN THE GAVEL SOUNDS, MADAM SPEAKER . . .

by Marsha Owens

. . . impeach or not impeach may be the question.
The answer is Yes! Impeach his sorry ass
not because it will rid us of him
but because it will ridicule him
and become our only retributive act.

Begin slowly, pick off the scab
one layer at a time—
for every caged child
and homeless veteran
for the dark-skinned boy
and the Muslim parents
for Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford
and for each uncounted voter
for the Puerto Ricans
and for our pitiful planet

for all of us who feel trapped in the fetal position
anti-depressants scattered on bedside tables
fear streaming down our cheeks
desperation roped tight in the darkest places
tossed like shrouds around our collective shoulders.

Marsha Owens is a retired educator who lives and writes in Richmond VA. Her poems and essays have appeared at TheNewVerse.News, Huffington Post, TheWildWord, Rat’s Ass Review, and Streetlight Magazine. She is a co-editor of the anthology Lingering in the Margins to be released in the Spring.

TRIOLET: AN AFTERMATH

by Robert West

Image source: —“The Frightening Lesson Hurricane Maria Taught the World About the Politics of Climate Change,” TIME, September 19, 2018.

More than 130 members of the House and Senate sent President Trump a letter demanding he apologize to the people of Puerto Rico for refusing to accept the official death toll for Hurricane Maria. Trump brazenly asserted 3,000 people didn’t die and said Democrats were inflating the official death count to make him look bad. “These comments were grossly inaccurate, callous, embarrassing and beneath the dignity of the Office of the President of the United States,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “We call on you to immediately apologize and set the record straight by publicly acknowledging the official death toll.” —The New York Post, September 19, 2018


They died because you didn’t really care,
    and now a lot of blood is on your hands.
Three thousand souls! . . . But you of course declare
the count a hoax designed to hurt you, car-
ing only for yourself—a billionaire
    who heard their desperate pleas as rude demands.
They died because you really didn’t care,
    however much you try to wash your hands.

Robert West's poems have recently appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Asheville Poetry Review, The Paddock Review, Still: The Journal, and Red Dirt Forum. He lives in Starkville, Mississippi.

DOTS OF TOWNS MONTHS AFTER HURRICANES HARVEY AND IRMA

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

Storm-damaged Rockport, Texas homes are seen in this Sunday, Aug. 25, 2017 aerial photo. Mortgage delinquency rates soared in September and October in many of the coastal and other cities flooded by Harvey, including Houston, Beaumont and Corpus Christi, according to new data from real estate analytics company CoreLogic. —San Antonio Express-News, January 15, 2018

of course, there will be long, massive work
for big names like
houston and miami    however rubble
is also rubble in the dots of towns
with their downed trees and power lines
roofs sheared off   walls that caved
these are the invisible ones living between and around bigness
dots of towns in a litany of counties
               that lost schools, citrus groves, hole in the wall cafes
               that didn’t make the news
               the question now
               will the police officers, librarians, butchers, teachers and bakers  go elsewhere
               or will they like some of the volunteer firemen decide to stay
               after all, this is where we grew up
               our children were born
               and where we go to church
               the dots of town must dig deep
               among the rubble for their just reason for staying

Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a poet, writer, and spiritual director. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News. Her first book of poetry was entitled she: robed and wordless. Sister Lou Ella lives 45 minutes from Rockport, Texas, one of the small towns devastated by Hurricane Harvey that may never recover.

FACES OF MARIA

by Andrés Castro

“We found many children in Utuado living in these conditions. No roofs, water, power, and little food.” Tweeted by Antonio Paris‏ @AntonioParis 


Who in their right mind would name a hurricane Maria?

Only the diabolical would wrap death in Mother Maria.



As Boricuas die, our Commander and Chief Drone tweets,

plays golf, calls the begging Mayor of San Juan, no Maria. 



My grandfather, Don Manolo, an Independista until the end,

cut cane as a young man, hoping to marry sweet sixteen Maria.

Titi Carmen, the Santera in the family, would take her old
grandmother and introduce her to the spirit Orichas as Maria.

In Don Pablo’s basement church, sacred African-Cuban drums
conjured my favorite Changó by the statues of Virgin Maria.

Don’t substitute your prayers for baby food, water, electricity,
give your money to crooked Priests and Pastors, Ave Maria.

We know this is a man’s world, a white man’s world, a rich
white man’s world, I am a poor Nuyorican, loving Maria.

The trees, birds, little green coquis will come back in time,
fathers and mothers with faith will name their babies Maria.

Andrés Castro is a PEN member/volunteer and is also listed in the Directory of Poets and Writers. His work has appeared in the anthologies Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About the Police and Close to Quitting Time, as well as in print and online journals including Left Curve, Counterpunch, The Potomac, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Long Shot, Acentos, Pilgrimage, Montreal Serai, and ImageOutWrite. He also regularly posts work on his blog The Practicing Poet: Dialogue to Creativity, Poetry, and Liberation.   

I AM PUERTO RICO

by Kathleen A. Lawrence

Click to donate!

I am not an island

surrounded by big water

but shimmering shores

lapped by the tears of my people

I am not a dirty barrio
but a street strung

with a clothesline filled
with aprons and smocks

I am not mud caked

but the color of rich clay

and sparkling amber gemstones

I am not a gray swirl of storm
but a lovely ocean breeze

I am a centipede with countless legs
moving together to make repairs

I am the evening breeze
whistling come home

I am the chartreuse fern
bowing to our emerald palms

I am the indigo sky

fluttering like a dancing petticoat

I am the contented sigh

in our silver-edged moonrise

I am the sweetness

of our plump, clementine sun

I am joyful as I play
hide and seek behind
our rolling, laughing hills

I am strong like the backs of our beetles
I am flying with rainbow wings

I am as quick as our waterfalls
I am as spirited as the acid green coqui

I am Puerto Rico



Kathleen A. Lawrence has had poems published in Rattle (Poets Respond), Eye to the Telescope, Scryptic, Silver Birch Press, haikuniverse, Silver Blade Magazine, The Wild Word Magazine (Germany), Altered Reality Magazine, Undertow Tanka Review, Silver Blade Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, among others. Recently two of her poems were nominated for 2017 Best of the Net awards, and another was nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). In 2016 she won third place for “Even Happy Ghosts are Scary Ghosts When You’re Seven” in the SFPA poetry contest. She was a Poet of the Week at Poetry Super Highway in January 2017.

SHIP-WRECKED MEXICANS

by Gil Hoy

All those
American citizens

With no food,
No water

On an island
Surrounded by
Big water

Ocean water,

Are getting
rowdy and unruly.


Let the wild winds howl,

Let the flooding rains run.


Editor's note: The title is an epithet defined here.

Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer and poet. He received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an MA in Government from Georgetown University, and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. Hoy served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His work has appeared, most recently, in Third Wednesday, The Write Room, Clark Street Review and TheNew Verse.News.