THE SHINING CITY ON A HILL

by Rose Mary Boehm

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

1

The dark shelter had low ceilings, smelled of damp and coal,

and the deafening blasts sent shards of glass and chunks

of walls across the street; we heard that friends had been buried

underneath their homes. The town smelled of rotting flesh.

 

There were those who resisted. They soon disappeared.

We learned to hold our tongues. Still, my brother and I (pssst)

listened to the AFN, The American Forces Network.

Chattanooga Choo choo.

 

It was May, the first green shoots promised a rich harvest,

and the GIs, who had parked their planes, jeeps, and tanks

on our fields, moved out, letting the Bolsheviks—as Mum called

those squat, goose-stepping men—move in.

Ochochornia, ‘Dark Eyes’.

 

They sung, they marched, they raped, they killed.

German girls drowned themselves in the river Elbe rather

than waiting to find out what the soldiers of the Red Army

were capable of.

 

2

We saw pictures of skeletal beings, eyes deep in dark

sockets, wearing striped ‘pyjamas’. We learned

what the Germans were capable of.

 

3

Our small family escaped from Stalin’s DDR

and learning Russian to learning English,

to nylon stockings and cigarettes from the PX stores.

To food in our schools, to that rich, brown,

wondrously melting-in-the-mouth thing

called chocolate… And we saw German girls

on the arms of well-fed soldiers

who walked with a swagger.

 

We learned that everything was better in America.

Films don’t lie. Everything was big in America: the houses,

the fridges, the cars, the plates heaped with food, the cows.

And they were free (so they said); the women were pretty

and wore deep-red lipstick, the men were handsome

and rich. And America was powerful and ruled the world.

Wherever they didn’t like something, they would

bomb the place and kill everyone to make peace.

We learned about it all in school.

And we believed.

 

America shone, and beckoned, seduced, and promised.

Now we could see it on TV, our newspapers were full of stories,

our friends would emigrate, sending long letters

full of tales of hardship and breathtaking achievement.

 

Temptress America, counterweight America, example

America, the American dream we all shared. Day-by-day,

week-by-week, month-by-month, year-by-year we began to comprehend

the fullness of your imperfections and your vulnerabilities.

Now here you are, shiny people without our experience of the worst

that humankind can do. You blindly stepped right into it.

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She was several times nominated for a Pushcart and Best of Net. Her eighth book, Life Stuff, has been published by Kelsay Books (November 2023). A new MS is in the works.

IMAGINE

by Steven Croft

AI-generated graphic for The New Verse News by Shutterstock

If instead of munitions, we could send Ukraine a spring

without war,

see Russian soldiers march off singing, "There is No Rank

Higher Than a Soldier's Mother," as mothers

who love them call them back home,

As the Dnieper thaws, let Ukraine beat its swords

into ploughshares for its golden fields of wheat, the farmers

no longer molested by fighter jets,

Let its cities be beautiful European cities again, free of

shelled and crumbling buildings, with

vibrant commerce and carefree nightlife, let people

sit idly in cafes, reaching calmly for coffee cup, newspaper,

its list of dead gone – for now,

Unwind stacked car graveyards of burnt-out husks,

bomb-twisted chassis, put them new again on roads

unpocked by explosion,

Let the countryside host tortoiseshell butterflies and roe deer,

the sound of bees visiting flowers, instead of armies

of tanks,

Let unstartled horses and cattle whip their tails idly in pastures

behind mended fences,

Let Ukraine part the dark curtain of daily anticipatory death,

box up the war strategy, the screams of wounded and dying, grief

of the living, tape them shut—for now,

Send home its stretched-thin, worn-out army of war,

Let its President wear a suit again, let his face cast off its war

fatigue, his body the green battle fatigues,

All over Ukraine let bells of peace and respite ring from the shingled

belltowers of wooden churches, let them dance the hopak

with fevered joy.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, December 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

HURRICANE IAN: GIFTS IN THE MISERY OF AFTERMATH

by Claire Matturro

Ashley Garner had given up on ever seeing her wedding ring again. She lost it outside her Fort Myers home just days before Hurricane Ian crashed into the coast of southwest Florida last Wednesday… The family stayed at their home during the storm and went outside to clean up as soon as it had passed. “We’re about 10 minutes into cleaning, and my husband is cleaning up the brush and the trees right next to the garage door,” Garner said. “There’s a pile of brush and trees, and he moves over one pile, and the ring was right there.” —AP, October 8, 2022

Garbage swirls around broken people and

lost, bewildered pets while cadaver dogs

prowl mounds of wood and concrete bent to

waste by hurling winds and storm surge. Newly

homeless people crowded into shelters, 

feeling the roughness of unfamiliar pallets 

hard against their skin, are warned that they

must leave though they have nowhere to go.

 

Across the globe, Russians continue

killing Ukrainians, but here

in Florida our focus narrows—

How do we find our missing

mother? Where can we get fresh water?

Find food which tastes fresh

on our sore tongues? Shower off this itch and

stink? Is it safe to flush a toilet?

 

Inland, farmers search for lost horses in

swamped pastures and count dead cows flung

into ditches by river currents broken

free of levees in two feet of rain.

Someone’s pink umbrella floats by

in flood waters spun off a Gulf beach once

seemingly benign and filled with summer kids

splashing in waves not yet turned violent.

 

In all this cursed misery of aftermath

still strange gifts are bestowed—the neighbor

who never spoke to us arriving with chainsaw

to clear the cracked tree sloping over our porch;

hummingbirds unharmed returning to feed;

the perfect stranger who hands clean water,

tangerines, and $50 to an elderly man

crying inside his car that won’t start.

 

Then this, a woman finds her lost

wedding ring she feared was as

gone as the Gulf coast island homes.

She places the ring, retrieved from a pile of

brush and tree limbs, on her finger

soiled by the grime of recovery. She rests,

sitting on the curb, and prays to God, giving

thanks for what she sees as a sign of hope.

Claire Matturro is a former lawyer and college teacher, and author of eight novels, including four published by HarperCollins. Her poetry has been published in Kissing Dynamite, The New Verse News, One Art, Muddy River Poetry Review, Topical Poetry, Tiger Moth Review, Lascaux Review, and is forthcoming in Slant. 

TAKING BACK MALA ROHAN

by Sarah Russell

 

The snow came silent, pure,

a quilt of feathered white

to cover wreckage of the war.

Few saw the snow’s allure—

just ordinary men who stayed to fight.

The snow came silent, pure.

This ragtag, patriot corps

were confident they’d stall Goliath’s might

despite the wreckage of this war.

Russian bodies dead, left unsecured.

Tanks smoldering, explosions in the night.

The snow came silent, pure.

Families, hid in cellars, reassured,

emerged again with trembling to the light

and saw the wreckage of the war.

Old Praskovia clutched her apron. She’d endured 

two wars, was broken by the sight.

The snow came silent, pure

to cover wreckage of the war.

Sarah Russell’s poetry and fiction have been published in Kentucky Review, Misfit Magazine, Rusty Truck, Third Wednesday, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She has two poetry collections published by Kelsay Books, I lost summer somewhere and Today and Other Seasons.

ABEL ASKS HIS BROTHER WHAT CAME OVER HIM

by Bonnie Naradzay

CAIN ET ABEL (CAIN AND ABEL), 1960, an original color lithograph by Marc Chagall designed for and published by VERVE for the volume Dessins pour La Bible.

after Agnieszka Tworek

 

If I gave the best when I offered my sheep

while your harvest fell short of the mark,

why turn against me? There was still time–

 

Now my blood cries out from the ground

you have claimed as your own. You know

the land mine you rigged to me will explode.

 

Alas, the loaf of bread I’d held, this pool of blood.

How could you choose to bludgeon my cows,

to wreak your vengeance against them too?

 

We are brothers; yet you attacked my humanity,

dragged me with your arms. Let me feel the snow

fall across my face as I say goodbye to life.  

Bonnie Naradzay’s poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, Florida Review Online, EPOCH, Pinch (Pushcart nomination), Potomac Review, and others. Her essay on friendship was published in 2020 in the anthology Deep Beauty. For many years she has convened poetry salons with homeless people and with residents of retirement communities in the Washington DC area.

THE RUSSIANS

by Suzanne Morris

Top photo: ‘Things Will Only Get Worse.’ Putin’s War Sends Russians Into Exile. —The New York Times, March 13, 2022. Bottom photo: Sasha (played by Jeffrey Rockland), son of Tonya and Zhivago in the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago.

He is the only child

in the photograph–

ten, perhaps,

no more than twelve–

surrounded by a small crowd of

students and young professionals,

wearing jeans and

heavy sweaters

seated anxiously on a long couch

or straight-backed chairs

around a table

in a sunny apartment

in Istanbul

where they’ve fled,  

fearing arrest for

protesting a war

they didn’t believe in

waged by an autocrat

they all despise.

And no one is holding

a phone.

Women with long hair,

men with short, neat beards,

eyes fixed on the speaker

outside the frame–

intent as we were

on events unfolding

across the

movie screen.

The boy stands alone in the

center of the floor; and

he’s looking, too, but with

body angled away

as if the speaker had

interrupted his play.

His eyes old and serious

for one his age, he

reminds me of

Zhivago’s young son

whose life was upended

by the Russian Revolution.

How romantic it seemed:

so long ago and far away

yet the huge

Panavision screen

made it seem we were right there

living through it all when

families were forced apart

never to be together again.

The boy is right there

in the small crowd,

the speaker instructing them

on what to do now.

How to begin.

                                           

A novelist with eight published works spanning forty years, Suzanne Morris now focuses largely on writing poems. Her poetry is included in the anthology No Season for Silence—Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020). Examples have also appeared in The Texas Poetry Assignment and The New Verse News.

PRAY

by Jean Varda

This video contains black and white footage after the liberation of Buchenwald.

I light a candle for peace and everywhere I go I pray

in my room on my bed on the street in my car,

when I breathe each inhalation is an image of hope

that the bombs will stop falling, the tanks will turn around no nukes will rain down, and those who are fleeing will reach safety and not die on their way.

How can one bear the thought of the little girl in blood

stained pajamas her mother running with her for help

then dying when she reached the hospital.

Even before I was born my mother protested war,

after the horrors of serving as a nurse in WWII

“How could they have kept from us Buchenwald,

Auschwitz, Treblinka?” She would repeat as she showed

me black and white footage of the camps and told me

how lucky I was to be born where I was with my Jewish

blood. She took me on my first peace march to protest

Vietnam, we stayed up all night on an old school bus,

I had never seen so many people at one time

as we marched on Washington.

My father taught me the Russians weren’t our enemies

that they wanted peace just like we did.

It didn’t match what I learned in school. He went to Cuba and Nicaragua, he loved the countries and the people. He was accused of being a Communist before I was born. I took my daughters to protests when they were small and showed them what I believed in, 

still we pray for peace.

          

Jean Varda's poetry has appeared in: The California Quarterly, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Speckled Trout, The New Verse News, and The Boston Literary Magazine. She has led poetry writing workshops and Open Mics around the country. She presently resides in Chico, California where she is working on an anthology of her poetry.

STILL WORDS

by Martin H. Levinson

I put the 448-page report on my desk and
asked it if the president had colluded with
the Russians or had obstructed justice and
like a stone sphinx the tome stared back
at me not uttering a sound or attempting to

make contact with a person who believed
Robert Mueller when he said that he had
chosen the words in his account carefully
and that the words speak for themselves,
which they were clearly not doing despite

the fact that I was only being polite in
asking my questions and had even offered them
a cup of coffee and some cookies to help
break the ice between us that I didn’t think
should be there since I’ve always been a

big fan of words and have used them
often in my writing to express what is in
my head and heart but when I told that to
the words in front of me they just gave me
the cold shoulder, which was sad since I had

no room in my house for a chilled appendage
and what I really wanted was not a chunk
of their torso but a discussion with them
about what did the president know and
when did he know it.

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published ten books and numerous articles and poems. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

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. 

YEARS AGO AT THE TROLL FACTORY(A FLASHBACK)

by Melissa Balmain

CNN video from Oct 26, 2016.

"What to know about the Russian troll factory
listed in Mueller’s indictment" 

—Vox, February 16, 2018

Chug-chug, the googly-eye machine

goes round; a massive table brims

with squat injection-molded limbs

and fluffy topknots (orange, green)

as workers in white coveralls

toil on without a kasha break.

At last: "We've done it, no mistake!"

the comrades whoop. Then silence falls

as they behold their masterpiece—

that gruesome grin! That triple chin!

That overcooked-kolbasa skin!—

and plot its glorious release.

Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

BREAKING

by Melissa Balmain

Giphy.com

Watching our children at the beach,
we ought to smile and schmooze,
but—phones regrettably in reach—
we're swamped by waves of news:

A crook goes free. A mouthpiece quits.
More leaders mix with commies.
Each hour or so, the Prez emits
A couple tweet tsunamis.

Battered and weary on the shore,
we fight for breath and wonder
how many more can hit before
they finally drag us under.

Melissa Balmain is Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Poetry Daily and The Washington Post's Style Invitational; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

HELLO, DAD? . . .

by Rick Mullin

Image source: Dylan Vermeul Art


with no apologies to Warren Zevon the sad loser

I sat down with the Russians,
despite the repercussions,
so could you now, perchance,
send lawyers, guns and money,
Manafort, Covfefe,
Wikileaks and Pepe,
Spice the Easter Bunny,  
Fox News sycophants
and . . . HOW WAS I TO KNOW?! . . . oh,
a change of underpants.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.

YA THINK?

William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

UKRAINIAN FARMING

by Philip C. Kolin

The UN humanitarian aid chief has expressed alarm after UN agencies were ordered out of rebel-held parts of the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine. Stephen O'Brien said the agencies had been told to leave by Friday, and several international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) by Saturday. Pro-Russian rebels seized parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions last year. Almost 8,000 people have been killed since fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, a month after Russia annexed the southern Crimea peninsula. A ceasefire in eastern Ukraine has been holding in the past two weeks, although there have been reports of occasional shelling. —BBC News, September 25, 2015

In the Ukraine this year
it is hard to tell
crops from corpses
except for red cabbages
that bleed all over
the fields. The white heat
from exploding artillery shells
only rain compost heaps of
hearts, lungs, spleens, moans.
The Politburo keeps denying
that its soldiers have been
trying to impersonate farmers.


Philip Kolin is the  University Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits  the  Southern Quarterly. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, African American playwrights as well as  seven collections of poems. His most recent book  is Emmett Till in Different States: A Collection of Poems forthcoming in November from Third World Press.