ADRENALINE ATTACK

by Dana Yost

Barry Blitt

Awake all night.

Adrenaline attack.

Not like the attack

in Texas. Not twenty-one dead.

But fueled by that, 

this adrenaline attack.

What is it in us,

in Americans,

that makes it

OK? One mass

shooting after

another.

Some plead,

some pray.

Some say

leave it alone.

Ted Cruz

says don’t

politicize it.

Ted Cruz

needs a bruise.

It has to be politicized.

It has to be debated

in the public arena.

It has to have meaning,

this debate of ours,

or else it’s meaningless,

the senselessness

goes on.

Gunmen squeeze

their triggers

and children die.

The rest of the world

looks at us and

asks “why.”

We have no answer.

We have no answer.

So I stay awake,

shaking, fretting,

swearing. We pray,

we vow, we say

never again,

but they are hollow

phrases until

we put the gun lobby

down like a dog

with a hole in its gut,

which in any logical

world would be

the case: the gun

lobby allowing

these wounds

to open, to fester,

to be picked and pulled

at until the gut is

an open sore.

Awake all night.

Adrenaline attack

the day of a school

attack, the day we mourn

yet again the loss

of little lives.

Dana Yost was an award-winning daily newspaper journalist for 29 years. Since 2008, he has published eight books. His poetry has been published in numerous reviews and magazines, including The New Verse News. Yost is a three-time Pushcart nominee in poetry.

ANAPHORA: UKRAINE ENLIGHTENMENT

by Bonnie Naradzay

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

Asked about Ukraine, Trump talked about windmills

due to concern about his Scottish golf resort.

Asked about Ukraine, Don Jr. crowed that his dad

played Putin like a fiddle.

Asked about Ukraine, Alex Ovechkin said I am

not in politics.  I’m an athlete.

Asked about support for Ukraine, the House easily passed

another $1 billion to add to Palestinian suffering.

Asked about bombing Ukraine’s hospitals in Mariupol,

Russia’s foreign ministry said it’s fake information terrorism.

Asked about Ukraine, fans said they don't want to miss 

baseball season.

Asked about Ukraine, Paul Gosar said, I remain firmly convinced 

that our southern border security should take precedence.

Asked about Ukraine, Tucker Carlson of Fox News claimed Russian

buildup of troops on its border was about a simple border dispute.

Asked about Ukraine, Congressman Good said we should secure our border.

Asked about Ukraine, Congressman Norman said it’s too late

to help now that Russia has invaded.

Asked about Ukraine, Madison Cawthorne called its president a thug

and said its government is evil.

Asked about Ukraine, Ted Cruz, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, said truckers

want the government to leave them the hell alone and to keep their gas prices low.

Bonnie Naradzay's poems have appeared recently in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review Online, Tampa Review, Florida Review Online, EPOCH, Split This Rock, and 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.

SOME DAY, PERHAPS...

IT WILL HELP TO REMEMBER THESE TROUBLES AS WELL.*

by Bonnie Naradzay

*Aeneas to his men, after theirs is the only ship

  to survive a violent storm at sea near Carthage.

         

Friends, a study of The Black Death states the plague 

may have come from outer space. The Mars Rover 

landed in a dried up lake. Perseverance is transporting 

images home from the red planet. On earth, we learn 

that magnetic north and south may be flipping sides, 

an ominous event, according to weakening attractions 

and ancient iron shards stuck pointing the wrong way. 

In Galveston, medical workers asked for a refrigerated 

truck to store the dead bodies. Thousands of turtles 

stunned by the cold have gone to a convention center 

in the backs of station wagons. Ted Cruz got on the plane

in jeans but went the wrong way, or the optics were wrong.

Sweet Thames, and Virgil, flow gently while I end my song.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry workshops at a day shelter for homeless people and at a retirement center, both in Washington DC.  Recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), Kenyon Review Online, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, EPOCH, Northern Virginia Review, Anglican Theological Review, Seminary Ridge Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

THOUGHTS OF THE FORMER PRESIDENT

as He Languishes with Dementia 

at Age 83 in the Year 2030

by Albert Haley

                            

Disgusting. Corrupt. Liars!

Who is Melania?

Really, Junior, again?

Tower, tower, tower.

Haters. Where’s Vlad?

Make America grate?

Gold plated and Colonel KFC.

How to spell anything.

Perfect. Ivanka. If she weren’t

my daughter.

Was a time I could have shot someone.

Right in the middle of Fifth!

Wall, we were going to have.

What happened Tim Apple?

Gold plated wall. Good!

Have I said “pussy” yet?

Where’s my phone? Sad.

Me, me, me, my country tis of me. 

Do you like this hair?

In the middle of Fifth.

Put a tariff on it.

Put a businessman in 

the White House and acquit him.

They rip babies out of mothers

and smother them. Bullshit!

Sharpies predict the weather

better.

But who is this Mitch? Why do I miss

him. Lyin’ Ted sure knew how to lie

down with the lion. Good crew,

kept their heads off the pikes.

  

Greatest hits. Rallies                                                  

and media is enemy of the state.

Some people say. Snow falling. 

Told you it was a hoax. 

The earth’s cooling—me too?

If they’d only respected

the Second. Right in the middle of Fifth. 

Might have spared me 

(A-l-z… how you spell?) this.

The focused hot blowtorch

of hatred so carefully cultivated. 

Main act in the middle of their circus.

Cancel the failing show

with a ratings bang.

Obama? Birth certificate?

Never saw it. Get him out of here!

Highest form of love

a man like me can ever know.

Albert Haley's poems have appeared previously in New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, and Rattle. He lives and teaches in dry, dusty Abilene, Texas, which at present seems far away from any refreshing blue waves. Haley's poems have appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, and Rattle. He lives and teaches in dry, dusty Abilene, Texas, which at present seems far away from any refreshing blue waves.

REASONS FOR WATCHING FOX NEWS

by Max Gutmann

to the tune of "My Favorite Things"

Gawking at lovely harassable females,
Daily reminders of Hillary's emails,
Colorful theories Sean Hannity spews,
These are all reasons for watching Fox News.

Hearing acquaintance rape labeled as courtly,
Learning what Donald will tweet about shortly,
Laughing with anchors at liberal views,
Very good reasons for watching Fox News.

Anger at libbers and cornerbacks kneeling,
Ads for gold coins that sound very appealing,
"12 Easy Ways to Try Liking Ted Cruz,"
Excellent reasons for watching Fox News.

When the Dems win, when the news stings,
When I'm feeling bad,
I turn on Fox News for my favorite things
And soon I'll be hopping mad!


Max Gutmann has contributed to The Spectator and other publications.

CARLY'S POLITICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

by Richard Hacken

Image by DonkeyHotey

Ms. Carly Fiorina once ran Hewlett-Packard,
Reaping pay package privileges stock-option lacquered.
Critics say she ran HP straight down to the bottom,
And the Board sent her packing four months after autumn.

With executive branch as next target for Carly,
Sure, she lost the primary, but proved herself snarly.
So Cruz tabbed her for VP and heaped her with praise,
And at that announcement she fell off the stage.

After Carly’s VP gig in utero aborted,
A new world record for her was reported:
She had set a new standard of debacle perfection
By losing two times in the selfsame election.

Richard Hacken, an ultraviolet Soul politically trapped in an infrared State, has never been in Hackensack.  A librarian and poet, he has translated the poetry of Galsan Tschinag, a Mongolian poet who writes in German.

OCTOBER SURPRISE

by Ed Goodell

Photo: Susan Walsh/AP/Corbis via New York Magazine

a dramatic dialogue

dedicated to "Lyin’" Ted Cruz

and that "Sniveling Coward," Donald Trump

Speaker 1

Did Jupiter blink when the sun slid low

In the fall of a savage year?

Or was it something else, a weight, I fear,

That subdued what truths we did know?

Speaker 2 

Your concerns are of no concern to me,

Less real than an effervescence.

This purchase you seek bespeaks no presence –

Let us trust in fortuity!

Speaker 1

I never questioned the unintended,

Nor held certainty above chance;

But this is head-knocking, not providence:

Little fists, duress, lies tendered.

Speaker 2 

Trifles trifling! Change inevitable!

These old gods – we’d never progress!

From a future of ease you would digress,

Your plaints most plainly pitiful.

Chorus

New alliances forming, landscapes shifting,

Nestlings stay nested as trees take wing;

For November winds bring indefinite things

When the leaves are adrift and drifting.

Ed Goodell is a teacher of English and Journalism at Jakarta Intercultural School in Indonesia. When not in Jakarta, he makes his home in Olympia, Wa.

GENUFLECTION

by George Held

Senators Mike Lee abd Ted Cruz. Image source: Twitter/Ted Cruz.

“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this country.” — Ted Cruz at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa, Nov. 9, 2015


Ted Cruz in Iowa courting Christian
Fundamentalists by declaring genuflection
the default prayer position
for US Presidents recalls
Abraham Lincoln (“I would neither slave
nor master be”) who would bow
his head in communion with his deity
but would not sink to his knees like a slave
nor would he rave like the Canadian-Cuban-
American even to climb in the polls
were there polls in his day when “poll”
meant “head” as in “poll tax”
or the “shaved poll” of a prisoner
and Lincoln would simply ask God
to bless this rough and unready,
agonized and striving country
as it writhed in second birth (the first
being in 1776) from 1861-1865, when
the great commander-in-chief would bow
his head and bow his neck without shamelessly
courting the fundamentalists of his day
by telling them what he thinks they want to hear.


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

CHRISTMAS DOLLS

by Earl J. Wilcox

 Cartoon by Jeff Stahler.

For Christmas, I want my own Ted Cruz
bobble-head, stolid from the neck down,

feet planted firmly toward the right ventricle
of our hemisphere---slicked down, cropped

hair flat atop a head jerking up and down—
erratic rhythm, so wobbly my Cruz doll

makes me dizzy watching it teeter and totter
smirking its fake, fixed smile, the way all

bobble-head dolls carry on. Aloof, my doll
hunkers on a top shelf in a store with metal bats,

acrid-smelling leather gloves, bobble-heads
Rush and Rand and Sarah and Michele. Bob on.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to TheNew Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

ALBERT CAMUS INTERVIEWS TED CRUZ

by Judith Terzi

Camus:               Did you become a Tea Party member today
                      or yesterday?

Cruz:                  Je ne sais pas. What difference does it make?
                     Adamant or ablative?
                     Buttonhole or brandish?
       
Camus:              Can I call you Ted?
                     Is the welfare of the people the alibi of tyrants?
           
Cruz:                 Entente or egregious?
                     Filibuster or fricassee?

Camus:              Ted, think about your Caucus. Do you consider
                     suicide as the only escape from the absurdity of
                     politics?

Cruz:                 Golf would be that, Albert. Golf. No question.
                     Herring or hubbub?
                     Infuse. Refuse. Refuse. Accuse. J'accuse! Zola, right?
           
Camus:             Eh bien mon frère, vous connaissez Sisyphe?
                    You know Sisyphus, right?

Cruz:                Oui, oui Albert. I graduated Princeton cum laude.
                    Judicious jab.
                    Kebob kingdom.
           
Camus:             LOL. I don't get the metaphor, Ted.

Cruz:                Mordant mincemeat.       
                    Nefarious narcolepsy.
                    Obama!

Camus:             Mon frère, we should be a rockin' & a rollin',
                    pushin' that boulder up the slope ensemble.
                    Together. Juntos! I didn't write that damn essay
                    to waste time. You've read La Peste, right?
           
Cruz:                Plague!
                    Quite a story if I say so myself.
                    Rats, rats, rats, rats.
                    Socialist rats. Everyone helping each other. So creepy.
           
Camus:             TMI, Ted.
           
Cruz:                United we stand, Albert.
                    Vouloir, c'est pouvoir. Where there's a will,
                    there's a way. Voulez-vous . . . High school French, man.

                         So tell me, Al. Why did the Stranger want a crowd
                    at his execution? Can't remember the weirdo's name.

Camus:             Very strange question from you, mon frère. Surely
                    you get off on les cris de haine, cries of hatred, right?

Cruz:                Wrestle with the wrath like I always say.
                    Xerox the xenophobia. You get my drift.

Camus:             Yak or yodel?
                    Zion or Zen?
                    Zut alors!

Cruz:                Yesterday or today?           


Judith Terzi holds an M.A. in French Literature. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Centrifugal Eye; Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (FutureCycle); Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo); The Raintown Review; and Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes). Her fourth chapbook, Ghazal for a Chambermaid, is forthcoming from Finishing Line. A former high school French teacher, she also taught English and ESL at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

THE CRISIS 2013

by George Held

Safe in gerrymandered districts
House Tea Partiers vie
To end the democratic process
Through calumny and lies.

Hateful of our President
And much in love with Cruz
Tea partiers set new precedent
For filibustered schmooze.

Ask not what to do for country
But just for Red State views –
Pro-gun, pro-life, and anti-tax
And poor and migrant crews.

Safe in gerrymandered districts
Untouched by Reason
And wed to right-wing cliques
Tea Partiers foment treason

And call it Constitutional;
While liberals quake and quail
And cry, “Delusional!”
The nation lies derailed.


An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com

I'VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU

by Rick Gray




                               
                       for Tony Hoagland


When real people shut down
their children go hungry
their lovers split
and they die or beg
between the simmering gridlock.

Or maybe they go rogue and
Invest in the promising heroin boom
to keep people fine with
Shut Downs.
But I've got news for you, Mr. Cruz,

even the junkies on the clogged riverside
here in Kabul----remember there?-------
know things shut down don't stop, they rot
and you'll need to score soon, brother, or feel
the shut down in your aching nerves

every fiscal second.


Rick Gray teaches in Kabul. He has work forthcoming in Salamander and the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock.