SWAMP THING

by Mark Hendrickson

Kermit the Frog grew up in a swamp  
before he moved to Manhattan  
where all the rats still skate on butter. 
He tried to warn us that rainbows are only illusions,  
back before his voice changed,  
back when swamps seemed quirky and cute. 
 
Speaking of swamps, a story came out today  
about the 2010 discovery by Felisa Wolfe-Simon  
of a low form of life that lives in the muck  
and somehow thrives on toxic arsenic; 
she has now discovered other seemingly mindless creatures  
that appear to thrive on sheer magnetism alone. 
 
I live in the blue center dot  
of a tidal pool made of salt and Windex  
surrounded by organisms that live  
on all that is poisonous, microbes that live  
by breaking down all structure,  
that thrive on decomposition.  
 
People cheer as every potentate since Saint Reagan  
swears to finally drain the swamp; yet instead  
we see it is the swamp that drains us. 
We are mangroves surrounding ourselves with mangroves,  
all standing up to our knees in it, 
mired in marsh and methane. 
 
We all know swamps smell like corrupted flesh,  
yet our nostrils are so saturated we can’t tell anymore. 
Complacency is a swamp we think is stagnant 
even as it spreads to engulf us, and Canada, and Greenland. 
We have become swamp things: reluctant heroes twisted by the world, 
trying to save what we can; a show too implausible to endure for long. 

Mark Hendrickson (he/him/his) is a gay poet and writer in the Des Moines area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Variant Lit, Vestal Review, The New Verse News, Spellbinder, and others. Mark worked for many years as a Mental Health Technician in a locked psychiatric unit. He has advanced degrees in marriage & family therapy, health information management, and music. Follow him @MarkHPoetry.

LIZ THE TERRIBLE

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

Liz Truss is Brits' prime minister du jour.

Inquiry's overrated in her book.

Zetetic minds were offered Liz's cure—

The Trussonomic leap before you look.

How Kwasi's top-rate tax cut tanked the pound

Escaped her, since she didn't do the sums

That would have shown her growth plan was unsound—

Except for Liz The Terrible's rich chums.

Research on trickle-down had long debunked

R. Reagan's fantasy. Though not for Liz.

In Economics One-Oh-One, she flunked,

Believing if you just say growth, growth is...

Liz did not last: her hare-brained stratagem

Exemplified how not to be PM!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. 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.

THE FIRST RULE OF COMEDY

by Thomas J. Erickson

Monkeys are always funny.

 

Remember when Sergeant Bilko inducted the little scene stealer into the Army

or when Ronnie Reagan put Bonzo to bed?

Lance Link Secret Chimp did a helluva Ed Sullivan imitation.

 

We all have Neanderthal DNA. Someone must have shtupped a Neanderthal

on a dare or maybe it was some type of prehistoric performance art

or the drunken jerk did it for laughs apparently before there were any

rules of comedy.

 

Should we get another dog after Edie dies, my wife asks.

Yes, let’s get two. 

One for me and one for you.

Yours can have the booties and the rain coat.

 

How do we know when something is over?

Why are we so slow to realize the death

of a plant or a season or a library

or a democracy?

 

Even so, Senator Hawley’s mad dash through the hall broke me up

which reminded me of the second rule of comedy: 

Always leave them laughing.

Thomas J. Erickson is an attorney in Milwaukee.  His latest book is Cutting the Dusk in Half by Bent Paddle Press.

THE BIG SLEEP: ARE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WAKING UP?

by George Salamon

“Sleepwalker” sculpture by Tony Matelli at The High Line in NYC.

"...an age when Americans were sleepwalking through history..." —Haynes Johnson,  Sleepwalking Through History, America in the Reagan Years (1991).

It feels like we've been asleep since

The movie star charmed us to sleep,

Since our aspirations and expectations

Were stamped out of date and we decided

To sleep through the times when roles of those

On the national stage became vacant, when

Nothing could move anything to animate the

Emptiness we'd sleepwalked into, when every

Movement failed to resuscitate our consciousness,

We found ourselves alone and blind to what was

Waiting for us beyond the bend in the road, so

Today we cannot tell if everything has stopped,

Waiting for everything to start and we're just

Looking to find the right sequence so we can

Join again and, if all goes well and we the

People can find our voice and finally learn

To play against the rules and the rulers.

Is there reason to hope, or is hoping merely

Lying to oneself and  this poem merely

What I dreamt?

George Salamon lives in America's "heartland," but even so he cannot tell if there is still enough in the heart and vision  of Americans they can share and make known to those who look with contempt and condescension on "bleeding hearts."

INFIRMITY

by Rick Mullin

After the Mueller Report by Barry Blitt at The New Yorker

The faithless Democrat turns very fast
on a purported savior when that savior
doesn’t let him have his way. The last
two days bring out his worst behavior.
Now the hope of a purported dossier
is dashed, the clumsy meeting in the tower
proves another harrowing non-starter.
The Democrat hangs back at happy hour,
pining for the days of Jimmy Carter
before the Gipper took his ball away.
“Perhaps that special counsel was a ruse!”
He’ll air that out on social media.
His reverence for a savior’s fast and loose,
unlike that of the MAGA ascaridia
whose savior lives to loathe another day.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

ANOTHER DEAD PRESIDENT

by Lee Patton

Just wait,
another long week of non-news—the demise itself,
long expected, the prepackaged obits, the lugubrious
commentaries on the long-gone context of his single term,
all of it muted in longing for “better days than ours,”
because the bar for presidential behavior is now so low
that all the deceased had to do was act the decent rich guy—
anything but behave like our intimate casino gangster.

But wait—
it’s just begun. There’ll be videotapes of stilted appearances,
recountings of his public service over and over and over—
with no such tributes to nurses, teachers, roadway flaggers,
restaurant servers, farmers, or home caregivers, no—
that’s not service. No, service is being vice to a treacly phony
who lied and lied to us. It’s voting against civil rights, demon-
izing minority prisoners and gays.  It’s staging bogus wars.

But wait—
there’s more, the body flown from Houston to DC
with solemn militarist salutes, the body lying in state
in some solemn capital venue, tearful attendees
and glimpses of best-forgotten dignitaries, then finally,
finally, for sure, the deposition of the body at a military
cemetery. Please, at last, let's just bury the poor old guy
to rest in peace.

Lee Patton, a Denverite, writes fiction, poetry, drama and commentary. Quarterlies that have published his work include Best New Writing 2012, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The California Quarterly,  Poetry Quarterly, Ellipsis, Hawaii-Pacific Review, Adirondack Review and Memoir Journal. His third novel, My Aim Is True, is out from Dreamspinner Press. "Faith of Power," a novella, appears in Main Street Rag's 2017 suspense anthology Stuck in the Middle.

INSIDE DISNEY'S HALL OF PRESIDENTS

by Darrell Petska





Transported like a side of beef,
the 45th arrived on a cart,
a small hand jutting from the wraps.

"Dog hater!" growled LBJ.
"Wall builder!" shouted Reagan.
Obama stirred. "Uh . . ."

Onto the stage, positioned off-center,
went the 45th, animatronically correct,
a dead ringer for Jon Voight.

"Jesus Christ!" prayed Jimmy Carter.
"He'll mock my braces," bemoaned FDR.
"Travesty," said Washington. "I cannot lie."

Switched on, the 45th did its test run:
hands moved, head nodded, voice sounded
rather like Putin's—

"I smell a crook," muttered Nixon.
"The only natural area he knows is beneath the belt,"
Teddy complained, and Obama gestured, "Uh . . ."

The techs fixed the Putin glitch,
except for faint tweeting in the background,
and the America First dummy stood ready to wow.

"Uh . . ." spoke Obama, "anyone whose meal preference
is two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a malt
will never complete a full term!"—

which perked up Bill Clinton: "Yum!"
Abe sighed. "Shall we never stop this bleeding?"
"Lightweights! I'm huge!" crowed their silicone successor.

Darrell Petska's writing has appeared in Whirlwind, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Chiron Review, Rat's Ass Review, Verse-Virtual, previously in TheNewVerse.News and elsewhere. Darrell worked for many years as communications editor for the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

IN RUSSIA WE TRUST

by Alejandro Escudé

Image source: Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off

As the giant bulldozer sets on the Pacific Ocean,
the sidewalks like lines of code, we stalk the tributaries
for the basket carrying a babe who will save us
from ourselves, rotund Botero-like madres slap tortillas
of treatises on the why and how, while u-boats listen in,
a wave breaks, five white horses carrying five bare dictators.
Some remember the Cold War, and Reagan, a nice old man,
I recall feeling for him as a child, knees pressed to my cheeks
beneath a desk, not really understanding what nuclear meant,
a helicopter with a red star, a boxer with platinum flat-top hair,
not this chaotic whispering, a country hardly unearthed
from the rubble of the last century, heroes resigned to knocking
on the president’s door for a medal, a dog bowl of decency.
This nation has gone to war for less, these protean times can’t
always can be summed up by the word “mess.” Now Putin
slams a cold coin on his desk, one head Hillary, the other Trump,
landing with a reckoning thump, a crimson wall behind him,
the words perestroika and glasnost spray-painted in white,
a black pen and a black pen, the wind, the dot of his blue eye.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

THE VICTRESS

by James Reiss   

Hillary Clinton by DonkeyHotey

    From Ronald
    to Donald
    politics
    sticks
    to people
    who sweep all                              
away with their tricks.

     The voters
     gun toters
     scope out Reeps
     not Bo-Peeps
     while the Dems
     with ahems                      
eye Al Gore–like veeps.

     But the winner
     a grinner
     more clever
     than ever
     won’t say Trump
     on the stump                                                        
is a dirtbag—never.

     As our prez
     she says  
     she’ll drink in                              
     Abe Lincoln
     standing straight
     while we state                  
Here’s to Hillary Clinton!

Spuyten Duyvil will release James Reiss’s debut novel, When Yellow Leaves, in September, and it will publish his second novel, Façade for a Penny Arcade, in 2017. He is the author of six full-length poetry books, including The Breathers, Ten Thousand Good Mornings, and Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems. His work has appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Esquire, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate, and Virginia Quarterly Review. As Professor Emeritus of English at Miami University, he is Founding Editor of Miami University Press in Oxford, Ohio. His surname rhymes with “peace.”

WAITING GAME

by George Held

What’s His Name, the Liberian
In Dallas, has died of ebola.

“When will it get me?” That’s what
Our self-absorption wants to know.

We are now in the medieval
Days of the plague updated.

Which will get us first, ebola
Or Islamic State warriors?

That’s what we want to know.
Is it better to die instantly

From a slash across the throat
Or wretchedly after days

Of dehydration from vomiting
And diarrhea?

What happened to Sanctuary
America, the great safe place

With a dependable government
And public-health system?

Where is FDR assuaging
Our fears, TR assailing

The enemy, or swoony Ronnie
Grinning our troubles away?

When have we ever felt so feckless,
So vulnerable, so hopeless

As we witness this waiting game?

George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.