LAST CALL

by Jane Blanchard

Scientists discovered a 2000-year-old white wine inside an urn that also contained a man's ashes in a Roman tomb in Spain. Photo: Juan Manuel Roman/ Journal of Archaeological Science via Yahoo! News, June 20, 2024

Morticians in the USA

could monetize this news

by marketing more options for

their customers to choose.

Pre-planners might prefer to go

with booze instead of wine,

and any brand of vodka, gin,

or bourbon would be fine.

Survivors might remember how

Big Daddy liked Bud Light,

but Mama went for Diet Coke

while Auntie favored Sprite.

Whatever is the beverage poured

into a funeral urn,

the ashes must be treated with

due measure of concern.

Jane Blanchard of Augusta, Georgia, has recent work in Light, Merion West, and Pulsebeat. Her latest collection with Kelsay Books is Metes and Bounds.

GRAB-'EM-BY-THE-PUSSY ℞: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

by Steven Shankman

The former guy and a detail of “Oedipus and the Sphinx” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, part of the collection at the Louvre in Paris. (Trump photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images; “Oedipus” image by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images via The Los Angeles Times) 

King Oedipus was certain he alone

Could fix it. When he heard his Thebans groan,

Then die en masse, he offered his expert

Advice. Blame Creon, blame the seer! Hurt

By the grim news, he vowed to find the cause

Of the great plague, to act at once, not pause

To look within himself. It soon was clear

He was himself the cause, his pride, his fear

Of self-examination. Sophocles

Saw Oedipus as Athens, her disease

A plague of arrogance. Our former leader

(Unlike King Oedipus), a bottom-feeder,

Has none of the ancient king’s nobility

But like King Oedipus he fails to see

He is the plague. Devoid of empathy,

Obsessed with money and celebrity,

He feeds red hats to haters. USA!

USA first! We’re winners, led the way

In COVID-19 deaths! The plague will stay

Until the voters make it go away. 

 

Steven Shankman holds the UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Classics Emeritus. His poems have appeared in a number of journals including Sewanee Review, Literary Imagination, Tikkun, Literary Matters, and Poetica Magazine. He is one of the co-editors of The World of Literature (1999), an anthology of world literature from a global perspective that contains some of his own poetic translations from Chinese, Greek, and Latin. His Penguin edition of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad appeared in 1996. His chapbook of poems Kindred Verses was published in 2000. His book of poems Talmudic Verses (Finishing Line Press) appeared in 2023. He is the author of many scholarly books, including Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies (SUNY Press, 2010), which contains some of his own original poetry, and Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Northwestern UP, 2017).

THE GREAT WALL OF AMERICA

by Martin Elster

A family of javelinas encounters the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border near the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona. (Image credit: Matt Clark / Defenders of Wildlife via Stanford Earth)

On a planet in a cosmos far away
there’s a USA that’s not the USA,
edged by a wall so ugly, Cooper’s hawks
and vultures will not perch atop it. Flocks
of bats and buntings ram it, while the turtle
and turkey blink and boggle at that hurdle
whose stainless teeth impale the stratosphere,
whose reach makes creatures prisoners all year.
Poets and meditators often wake
with hearts and kidneys missing. A mistake?
or just a program glitch inside a dream
hammered into heads by the regime
which built that barrier? Not the fiercest gale
nor hurricane nor earthquake can upset it.
Even the butterflies, bees, and beetles dread it.
Jumbo jet or Zeppelin or kite—
none dare traverse it. With the appetite
of a thousand whales, it gulps them in a bite.
When master mountaineers attempt to scale
the wall, they fall, or languish in a jail
with all the rest who waste away inside
a country or a cooler and abide
by the common rules in a cosmos far away
where the USA is not the USA.

Martin Elster, a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, has poems in numerous journals and anthologies. Honors include co-winner of Rhymezone’s 2016 poetry contest, winner of the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014, third place in the SFPA’s 2015 poetry contest, and three Pushcart nominations.

IMMIGRANTS SPEAK TO THE NEW PRESIDENT

by Austin Alexis

We flee poverty
the way the U.S.A. will,
at some point,
seek escape from you.
You are to us
as a flaw is
when it mars a $1000 bill.
We so need that capital,
that liberating opportunity,
that expanse of fertile green.
If only you didn't shed
your blot on its face,
rendering it nightmarish,
its once-prized images and concepts
now garbled, unreadable.

Austin Alexis has been published in The Ledge: Poetry and Fiction, J Journal, Chiron Review, The Lyric, Home Planet News, TheNewVerse.News, and the anthologies Rabbit Ears: TV Poems and Poets 4 Paris (bilingual edition). His full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014), and he has two previous chapbooks from Poets Wear Prada.

WEATHER FOR DOGS

by Howie Good

Mothers and babies fleeing the red death
disappeared down a hole in the sea. And
now what do we do? Chant, “USA! USA!”

Chant, “Build a wall.” This is weather
for dogs – bomb-sniffing dogs. No one
is safe. Police are throwing their critics

out windows. Here, as Primo discovered,
there isn’t any why. There’s always only
the creep of shadows. They move, we follow.

Howie Good is the recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his new collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.

GAZAPPED

by Charles Frederickson




Unemployed Gaza youth unruly majority
Disheartened break out Manifesto declared
Challenging miserable conditions faced everyday
Mental incarceration suffering post-traumatic stress

Fuck Hamas fuck Israel fuck
Fatah fuck UN fuck USA
Dissatisfaction desperation frustration aggression depression
Mission Impossible leading normal lives

Sick of imposed shitty existence
Being jailed for inexcusable offenses
Mentally emotionally tortured by Hamas
Totally ignored by indifferent cowards

We want to scream breaking
Shameful wall of unjust apathy
Shedding sleepless nightmares outraged tears
Overhead F16’s breaking sound barriers

We cannot say what we
Want do what needs doing
Nowhere to run hide escape
Move No shunned hope options

We don’t want to hate
Fear being heavy-hearted victims anymore
We desperately want freedom is
Peace too much to ask

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 

AMERICAN KGB

by Phyllis Wax

We who are under surveillance
in more ways than we know
tonight notice the stealthy moon      
as it slips behind the trees.

Hiding is useless.  That moon
could be an eye.  In these woods our whispers
might be seized by murmurous leaves.
Only handwritten notes are safe
if burned or swallowed after they are read.

One is not paranoid
if one is really being followed.


Phyllis Wax muses on the news and politics from a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  She's been widely published, recently in The Widows' Handbook:  Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival from Kent State University Press.  When she's not writing you might find her escorting at a local women's clinic.

THE FALL OF MOSUL

by George Held

Refugees flee the city of Mosul. The delicately balanced relations among the many communities were permanently shattered in 2003. Photograph: Str/AP. The Guardian, June 13, 2014.

Take it back, we left it,
We will not summon the troops
To fight again for it,
We will not countenance

Another long drawn out
Battle on your homeland,
The corpses, gutted and bloodied,
Strewn, like trash, on the ground.

Mosul is Assyrian, Kurd, Iraqi,
Turkmen, Shabak, Shi’ite, Sunni,
And the oil refinery earns more
Per hour than the marketplaces

For fruits of paradise, leather toolers,
Carpet merchants’ stalls
And sheep-herders’ pens
Combined do per year.

Mosul, you fell in 2003
And now ISIS (not
The Egyptian goddess
of magic and life),

initiates in the sacred order
of hatred and arch violence,
Have achieved the latest fall
Of Cheney and Bush,

Who on 3 May 2003
Declared from ship’s deck
“The Battle of Iraq is over,”
But that mission will never

Be accomplished despite
4,447 American dead,
32,000 wounded plus
Thousands with PTSD

And other extreme debilitations;
Plus one trillion dollars
(Think what this sum could mean
For schools, bridges, healthcare).

Now 68% of Americans
Polled feel no obligation

(<F obliger) to help Iraqis
After we destroyed their country:

No noblesse, no oblige;
No ligature (the “lig”
In “obligation”) tying us
To this desolated land.

Mosul, Baiji, Samarra—
All fall on the road to Baghdad.
(Where are Crosby and Hope
When we really need them?)

Where can we find any hope
In stopping the ISIS advance?
Will the fall of Mosul end
In the union of Syria and Iraq,

A wide swath from the Med
To Iran, the destabilization
Of the Middle East, a threat
To Turkey and Israel?

Where are the leaders
Who can reverse America’s
Knee-jerk reliance on military
Solutions to geopolitical problems?

Is the fall of Mosul a milestone
On the road to the fall
Of (God bless) the
United States of America?


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