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.

THE HORA FOR THE FIRST PASSOVER UNDER PRESIDENT T***P

by Zev Shanken

It's a chilly afternoon for Tel Aviv,
but we swim like we used to
and shiver and laugh,

because we’re not that old,
though I’m fat and bald,
but as soon as I visit you, you—

No!  You don’t turn me young and thin and hairy again.

Instead, you teach me the Hebrew
for loving a land
even when bad guys win,

for you've shown me the movements
for dancing on sand
with partners whom you pray to change.

Zev Shanken lived in Israel in the mid-1960s before, during and after the 1967 Six Day War.  His poems “Twilight of the Greatest Generation” and “High Noon” appeared in earlier issues of TheNewVerse.News.  Last year, Full Court Press released his selected poems Memory Tricks.