A TEAR FALLS FROM THE MOON

by Richard L. Matta

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

Hideous weeds hide

in high grasses. Experts examine

lawns with satellites, surveil 

with drones, send in spies.

Intelligent eyes can’t locate 

the wild pests so tap-tap-tap 

go the buttons and neighborhoods 

are bombed and burned and stripped 

bare and young lingering eyes of flowers 

are cut off at the head.

I could ask a question of the wise 

pale moon in the thick evening heat 

but it’s dusted with debris. 

A speaker echoes…

         indiscriminately

                   inhumanity.

And I ask myself is this not a swarm

of bees in the making, generations 

of hate stewing, a turn of minority 

to majority, a dark legacy.

Richard L. Matta grew up in New York and now lives in San Diego. Some of his work is found in Ancient Paths, Dewdrop, San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday, Slipstream, and many international haiku journals. 

POST-ELECTION BLUES

by Peter Calder

after seeing a small rally of people in George Square, Glasgow (file photo above) following the recent election results in the UK

He says they’re
all in on it.
Every single 
bastard one.
 
They know what 
they are doing.
Death of Scotland.
That’s what he says.
 
Politicians. Scientists. 
Journalists.
All of them—
Liars.
 
A ripple of hands
startles a pigeon
and sends the flock
soaring above the square.
 
But this Rally—he says
is rewriting history.
A pocket of truth 
in a new skin suit.
 
And I guess he’s right.
It is just skin 
holding us together.
We’re all in on it.
 
The left. The right. 
The indifferent.
Every single one of us 
wrapped up in it.
 
From Westminster 
to Glasgow lies
a body, bruised 
in patches of blue.
 
It happens almost
unnoticed. The birds
loop and scatter 
on the ground.
 
An old man
tosses crumbs—
and the flock
follows.

Peter Calder is a Primary School teacher living and working in Glasgow. He is the co-founder and editor of the Hull based magazine Descent Spread and has had poetry and short stories published in various UK-based magazines.

DEMO

by Michel Steven Krug

Jeff Koterba / Cagle Cartoons

In the House

there’s treachery afoot.

 

A leader sandwiched by volleys

of red sensation

and

what formerly was known

as consensus.

 

And the price to be paid:

parliamentary

demo-

li-tion. 

 

I move that the Country

Avert economic infanticide

By installing cold showers

That spray the margins where

Passion plays like theatre 

To astound the outer rings.

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and he litigates. His poems have appeared in Sierra Nevada Review, Jerry Jazz, Whistling Shade, St. Paul Almanac, Liquid Imagination, Blue Mountain Review, Portside, New Verse News, JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, Poets Reading the News, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag and Brooklyn Review. His collection Jazz at the International Festival of Despair is scheduled for publication by Broadstone Books, in the spring, 2024.

ANOTHER DEAL

by Michel Steven Krug

Call back after call back.

Each reel like a test flight

Because my peers look at

 

My prior roles like an IMDB,

(Although I call it DIMB)

Because the country as a whole

 

Won’t embrace me,

Though I’ve acted out every role

To perfection. So here I am now,

 

The 14th, 15th, who knows how

Many rounds, still standing, but my smile

Muscles so fatigued. I need a drink. But

 

Craft service won’t serve on the House floor

Anymore, the way they did, I’m sure,

When Frederick H. Gillett could get

 

All the recesses and bourbon he needed

To convince the zealots that the Roaring 20s

Would only prevail under his leadership,

 

And lead to unrivaled economic prosperity.

And what about Speaker William Pennington?

He maintained his 1859 principled approach to

 

State’s rights, bringing the Country to

Brinksmanship, where it belongs again, so

Who, I ask, is the real reformer?

 

Fine, I will pledge to insurrect.

I will pledge to abandon rules.

I will pledge to renege.

 

I can’t be Hakeem

I can’t alliterate

I can’t inspire, but

 

I must be your next leader. Don’t pull the plug,

Please don’t, surely, we can strike

A deal for more donations, another deal, for G*d’s sake.

 

 

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and he litigates. His poems have appeared in Whistling Shade, St. Paul Almanac, Liquid Imagination, Blue Mountain Review, Jerry Jazz, Portside, The New Verse News, JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, Poets Reading the News, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag, and Brooklyn Review.

INMATES IN CHARGE OF THE ASYLUM

by Howard Richard Debs

Win McNamee/Getty Images accompanying “The Big Picture: Danger ahead,” NPR, January 7, 2022

I stayed up until the wee hours

wakeful and fearful, riveted by

the proceedings of the U.S. House

of Representatives, 435 voting

members officially; as if votes matter—

which they do indeed since sold

on the auction block of avarice

and greed for power for the sake

of it, for with power comes privilege,

aggrandizement, garnering the purse

of a play plot based on chaos theory

its final act to be the end of a democracy.

Howard Richard Debs is a recipient of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards. His essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally in numerous publications. His photography is featured in select publications, including in Rattle online as “Ekphrastic Challenge” artist and guest editor. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words (Scarlet Leaf Publishing) is the recipient of a 2017 Best Book Award and 2018 Book Excellence Award. His latest work Political (Cyberwit Press) is the 2021 American Writing Awards winner in poetry. He is co-editor of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust forthcoming from Vallentine Mitchell of London, publisher of the first English language edition of Anne Frank's diary. He is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory.

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.

MICE

by Samantha Pious

TheNewVerse.News construction from images found at Zimbio and Meridian Magazine.

after Eustache Deschamps’ “But Who’s the One to Bell the Cat?”

Among the mice (I’ve heard it told)
a special Congress was convened
against the Cat, their hated foe,
to seek some implement or means
whereby they might at last live free
in safety and security
without resorting to extremes.
—Why not achieve a coup-d’état?
Together we can bell the cat!

The caucus met, the bill was law,
the congress-mice adjourned their session.
One country-mouse, from out of town,
she shoulders in to ask a question —
what’s been done? We have a weapon,
they reply, to smash that wicked feline flat.
This bell, which shall be hung from round
his neck, will sound whenever he attacks.
Together we can bell the cat!

There’s strength in numbers. One gray rat
requests to know to whom the Bell
shall be entrusted. As to that,
none of the congress-mice can tell!
The Speaker squeaks for personnel.
Not one brave mouse will go to bat
(not even for a subcontract)
though catchy slogans always sell:
Together we can bell the cat!

These words ring hollow now. Alack.
But there’s still time for one last act.
Can we protect our habitat,
Republicans and Democrats
together? We can bell the cat!

Samantha Pious is the author of A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2015), a selection of translations from the poetry of Renée Vivien. More of her translations and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Doublespeak, Lavender Review, Mezzo Cammin, and other publications.

THE COACH

by Howard Winn

Dennis Hastert. AP photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais via ThinkProgress.

A hero in his small town
as is often the case where
there is a wish for local heroes
and some must be found
to satisfy the need to brag
therefore he and his students
fulfilled the boosters need
for his young disciples won
their matches in the
wresting ring to the glory
of the school and these
adolescent athletes who
spread the fame of their
coach who seemed to love
his young charges learning
the holds and the tricks
of the wresting trade
and much more hidden
from public and pubic
view concealed outside
the showers or the gym.
Taking his deceitfulness
to the shadiness of politics
he smiled as he corrupted
the democratic process
of government while reaping
the financial benefits of that guile
to fatten banks accounts
 both his own and that of
certain colleagues who
shared his lack of ethics
until caught manipulating
bank accounts with an
illegal wrestling of his
fortune to silence a now
grown lover boy who
demanded hulking payment
for his silence so caught
and sentenced as ironic
reward to the prison he
bought with his conduct.


Howard Winn's work has been published in Dalhousie Review, The Long Story, Galway Review, Descant.  Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Main Street Rag, Evansville Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, 3288 Review, Straylight Literary Magazine, and Blueline. He has a novel coming out soon from Propertius Press. His B.A. is from Vassar College. his M.A. from the Stanford University Creative Writing Program. His doctoral work was done at NYU. He is Professor of English at SUNY-Duchess.

LES MISERABLES

by Edmund Conti

Image source: DonkeyHotey

Speaker of the House
Keeper of the zoo
Hoping I can please ‘em
The forty-one or two.
Obamacare, goodbye
Planned Parenthood, so long
Doing nothing here at all
How can we go wrong?
Everybody loves the Right Wing
Your good old buddy friend
We’ll do what pleases just us few
You’ll get it in the end.


Edmund Conti is an impartial observer of the idiots in Congress.

LEGAL ACTION AGAINST THE PRESIDENT

by Paul Dickey




Speaker John Boehner is planning to file a lawsuit against President Obama on behalf of the House of Representatives. Though he's been extremely vague on what exactly he plans to sue for, Boehner wrote on Sunday that Obama has "circumvented the American people and their elected representatives through executive action," and that the House "has an obligation" to try and stop him. What, exactly, would this lawsuit entail, and how would it proceed? --VOX, July 9, 2014


I hear Boehner wants to sue
the President who will not do
just as Johnny likes.
He’s got nowhere with strikes,
but his cud maybe judges might chew.

But the Speaker has no issue.
He sobs into his tissue:
“What charge can I raise?
It’s no good just to curse the Gays.
Should I call Barack a Hindu?”

So he got a lawyer from Texas
experienced with a couple of ex-es
who wrote up a charge
and biggie-sized it to go large
and eat fries all the way to D.C. in his Lexus.

The charge, of course, was serious
but much too confused and mysterious
that Bachmann’s hot air
had barely a prayer
of even getting Fox News delirious.

And thus John comes to grips with his fate.
His put-down of Obama must wait,
so he asks him to golf
while Congress takes July off,
since nothing so big’s on their plate.


Paul Dickey’s first full length poetry manuscript They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in January,2011 and was nominated by the press for the 2011 National Book Award in Poetry.  His second book Wires Over the Homeplace was published in the Fall of 2013 by Pinyon Publishing.  His poetry has appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Mid-American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Pleaides, Bellevue Literary Review,  Crab Orchard Review and online at www.linebreak.org.

THE MEASURE OF A LEADER

by Ed Bennett



SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: Well, Bob, we should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal.


And each broken bridge,
each rutted road paid for,
abandoned by our indolence,
these are the marks of progress.

Every hungry stomach rumble,
every second job to meet ends,
every idle worker without benefits,
these are the stories of self reliance

by those of us, four hundred fifty strong
(more or less)
who get full time pay
for part time legislation
(or none at all)

and nothing to show except
a blockade of obfuscation,
an obdurate session with
our greatest strength:
a calculated, orchestrated
shout of "NO!".

I am their leader,
the New Moses,
who would rather
sit in the desert heat
than move on to promises.

Let me lead you, brothers and sisters,
away from the evil of the Common Good;
kneel with me here in this desolate 'scape
to worship the imaginary calf
of a Laughing Baal.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.