THE SUMMIT

by W. Luther Jett

Kim pledges to back Putin’s ‘sacred struggle’ during rare summit —The Washington Post, September 13, 2023

See the two men smile

as they shake hands—

clean-shaven, well-dressed,

and well-fed. Comfortable

in their suits under a round

sun, blue sky. Together

they make history, sing,

ride a train. The platform

is so clean. Their shoes

gleam. Never mind that one

red spot the polisher missed,

there by the heel. It is

nothing. It can’t be blood.

W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. He is the author of five poetry chapbooks: “Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father” (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Our Situation” Prolific Press, 2018), “Everyone Disappears” (Finishing Line Press, 2020), “Little Wars” (Kelsay Books, 2021), and “Watchman, What of the Night?” (CW Books, 2022). A full-length collection, “Flying to America” is scheduled for release in the spring of 2024, from Broadstone Press. 

OLD MAN IN THE BUNKER

by Robert Darken

Five-year-old Vladimir Putin with his mother, Maria, in July 1958.

You too were once a child.

Learned to lace boots, the rabbit round the tree.

Slung school books in a sack, 

crunched snow underfoot along the river,  

the Neva black enough to swallow dawn.

Rain dripped from the larches.  

There was only you–

your brothers ghosts before you were born.

One died under siege,

a casualty of co-conspirators:

Nazis, starvation, diphtheria.

You learned German, loved the clarity of Marx.

When the many act as one, they are an unstoppable engine.

Be sure to bury dissenters.

The bond of unity is their blood. 

Your grandfather knew who to serve:  

in the scullery, spiraling skin

from potatoes, simmering Stalin’s own soup.  

And now there is you: eyes lidded like hangman’s hoods, 

a smile like razor wire. Fingers that drum 

commands to missiles and men.

There: another apartment block, its insides clawed open.

There: the wet pavement, the body of a mother 

in her bright kerchief,

Beside her the body of a child, 

rain falling on its open hand.

Originally from the Midwest, Robert Darken now resides in Connecticut, where he teaches high-school English. His poems have appeared in One Art, The Orchards, and Red Eft Review.

WHAT HAST THOU DONE?

by Kyle Gervais

To be or not to be, the president 

asked all the world today, and chose the first.

And if he reached for the obvious, I don’t

begrudge a player of many parts his thrift.

 

But I in my distant unpolitical ease

have time to mine a deeper buried gem,

a coward king’s belated penitence:

It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,

a brother’s murder.   

 

                    They weren’t the same, of course,

Abel and Cain, and Vladimir is not,

can never be, Volodymyr might say,

his brother’s keeper. 

 

                    But the men who crossed the line

on the map from west to east met men (and more

than men) with names like theirs, with songs and food

like theirs, with roots that reach, tangled, chafing,

downward deep in a fertile common soil.

 

And when the guns are stilled and angels’ mouths

have sung so many brave souls to their rest

above the earth that cries out with their blood,

one man will turn, and hide his face from God.

Kyle Gervais teaches Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He has poems, published and forthcoming, in Arion, Canadian Literature, Defenestration, Eunoia Review, Literary Imagination, PRISM international, and Triggerfish Critical Review.

RUNAWAY COVID AND THE HAVE NOTS

by Terese Coe

"Did Trump Say More COVID-19 Testing Makes the US Look Bad? The president has been accused of forgetting the people behind the coronavirus case numbers. True." —Snopes

With the poor, poc, and seniors dead,
the Dotard and Bojo are raking in bread.
Few testing sites means few revivals,
no masks or meds, then no survivals.

The people spoke, but they were clawed
by racist, ageist dotard frauds.
The people spoke, the people died.
Covid was oversimplified.

Did Vladimir think of everything
for the cliques of the turkeys à la king?
It’s hardly a story you’ll find is new:
more for the toffs and nothing for you.

Terese Coe's poems and translations appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Threepenny Review, and the TLS, among others. Her collection Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and her poem "More" was heli-dropped across London for the 2012 Olympics Rain of Poems. Her most recent book is Why You Can’t Go Home Again, and her black comedy Harry Smith at the Chelsea Hotel was recently presented at Dixon Place, NY. 

HIS FOREIGN POLICY

by Jan D. Hodge





He's rather hard pressed to explain,
however stupendous his brain,
      giving Kurds to the Turks
      and to Putin (with smirks)
Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.

Jan D. Hodge's poems have appeared in many print and online journals, several being awarded prizes in open national competitions. Two of his books, Taking Shape (a collection of carmina figurata) and The Bard & Scheherazade Keep Company (double-dactyl renderings of Shakespeare, tales from the Arabian Nights, and Reynard the Fox) have been published by Able Muse Press.

AFTER HELSINKI

by Robert West

President Trump chaired a meeting Friday of his most senior national security advisers to discuss the administration’s effort to safeguard November’s elections from Russian interference, the first such meeting he’s led on the matter, but issued no new directives to counter or deter the threat. —The Washington Post, July 27, 2018. Cartoon source: Dayton Daily News.

Lower and fold the flag, my friends, assign it a sacred drawer:
to fly it now would only mock the good we’d flown it for.

And don’t repeat that noble pledge we said each day at school,
till we’ve regained our self-respect and fired that fascist fool.

Robert West's poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poetry, Light, and other venues. His latest chapbook is Convalescent (Finishing Line Press in 2011). The editor of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, published by W. W. Norton in 2017, he lives in Starkville, Mississippi.

TWO NEW NEWS BROADCASTS

by Alice Twombly

                      I

The Evening News: July 4, 2018

A stag, with a full rack of antlers,

stands stationary on my front lawn  at dusk.

I run outside with my only weapon—

a mop still damp from washing the floor,

point it at him, shouting: Nothing.

I charge him, waving the wet rags back and forth, like a flag.

He moves a few feet away and stares at me.

I advance further, but each pause generates only

small indifferent changes. Finally, I run towards him screaming with all the energy

I possess. He bounds at last into the next yard,

turns for a final look, and disappears into the dark.

The next morning, I see what he had done before I’d noticed  him—

petals strewn everywhere, and every plant I’ve nurtured

all  summer, decapitated at the bud, eaten, and destroyed.

                            II

The Midday News: July 16, 2018

He sells the farm, the antiques and the wall hangings,

chases away the loyal dogs,

poisons the wells, floods the crops with leaded water,

jacks the flagpole, torches the flag

and takes down those old Post Magazine covers of the Four Freedoms

that had hung on the wall since World War 11.

Driving the landowners off their historic land

he buys it on the cheap,

and using the unskilled, dazzled, and defrauded labor that remains

begins erecting the first stages of the Putin Trump Tower

on the burnt fields of that defruited and polluted plain.

Alice Twombly is a teacher, photographer, poet, and political junky. A New Jersey resident, she curates a monthly poetry reading in Teaneck, NJ: “Thursdays Are For Poetry at Classic Quiche.” She teaches adults at The Learning Collaborative in New City, NY and lectures at local libraries. A member of “Brevitas,” an online poetry collective in NYC. Her work has been published in The New Jersey Poetry Monthly, First Literary Review-East, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Brevitas.

T***P'S MAGNIFICAT

by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Saint Putin by aegragru at DeviantArt

in praise of Putin the Red Dragon

My heart does magnify your wind

And my head rejoices in you my savior.

For you have annotated the low esteem

of your apostle; for, it is great,

from henceforth all hysteria

will call me blasted.

For you who are haughty

have done to me naughty things;

and ghostly is your name.

And your mendacity resides in them

who hear you from her story to history.

You have sown despair

with your hands; you have

scattered hubris

in the imagery of my soul.

You have desecrated the mighty

in their seats and rescued me from prevarication.

You have brained the rich

with good things; and the hungry,

you have sent to the garbage pails.

You have exalted me, your most obedient

serf, in remembrance of your mercy;

as you preached to my father,

Judas in the chariot, and to my spawn forever.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr. is the author of The Katrina Papers (2008), The China Lectures (2014), and Fractal Song: Poems (2016) and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African American Literature (2011). He lives in New Orleans, LA.

COMRADE VLAD

by David Southward

President Putin
must be hootin’—
tricked the Yanks to vote a brute in!
Tried some far-out
home computin’
to keep the stateside rowdies rootin’.

The guy’s too sly:
all smiles, refutin’
prissy liberals’ highfalutin
complaints their voting wasn’t free.
Electoral integrity?
Just pretty words those Yanks look cute in.

How to keep
the troops salutin’—
that’s a man’s concern, darn tootin’!
Roll up the shirtsleeves,
start recruitin’
loyal subjects; start transmutin’

this carved up world
to one more suitin’.
Invite your enemy
out shootin’. Tell him,
“I’ll drive from here. Now scoot in.”
Lead him on

like old Rasputin—
propaganda’s Isaac Newton—
with money pits
to stash his loot in.
Seal the bargain.
Plant your boot in.

David Southward teaches in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poems have appeared most recently in Bramble, POEM, Measure, Verse-Virtual, and Unsplendid.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

by Chris O’Carroll

Confronted with new evidence of torture and mass hangings in one of his military prisons, Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an exclusive interview February 10, 2017 with Yahoo News that the allegations were the product of a “fake news era” and charged that a human rights group, Amnesty International, had fabricated evidence to discredit his embattled government.

Our prez now finds a brand new soulmate;
Putin’s not his only bro.
Assad, fellow fan of torture,
Learns to whine that news is faux.

Chris O’Carroll has published unfair attacks on the president in dishonest journals on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s disgusting the stuff he gets away with. 

THE BRIDGE CLUB DISCUSSES THE ELECTION

by Susan McLean

Image source: Yahoo News Photo Illustration; Photo: AP/Getty)

“If he groped her, she’s a liar."
            "If he didn’t, she’s a frump.”
“If she blabs, he’ll call his lawyer.”
            “What a bozo!  One no trump.”

“Thinks he’s smart to pay no taxes:
            ‘If you pay them, you’re a chump.’”
“He’ll give safety nets the ax.” “As
            well as poor folks!”  “Three no trump.”

“He’ll wall off the southern border.”
            “And haul Muslims to the dump!”
“He’ll show blacks what law and order
            really stands for.”  “Four no trump.”

“He’ll throw Clinton in the slammer.”
            “Then he’ll lift us from our slump,
helped by Putin’s blade and hammer!”
            “What’s your bid now?”  “Six no trump.”

Susan McLean is an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University. Her books of poetry are The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife. She has also translated over 500 satirical poems of the Latin poet Martial, published as Selected Epigrams by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her light verse has often appeared in Light and Lighten Up Online.

SCHOOLYARD RETORT WITH 14 LETTERS:

a found poem by Dale Wisely

i

Putin would rather have
a puppet as president. 

No puppet, no puppet.

And it's pretty clear --

You're the puppet.

It's pretty clear you won't admit —

No, you're the puppet.

ii

For the clue schoolyard retort
you can find ten possible solutions. 

Schoolyard retort with 4 letters

AMSO ISSO

Schoolyard retort with 5 letters

AMTOO ARESO CANSO IAMSO ISNOT ISTOO

Schoolyard retort with 6 letters

ARENOT  YOUARE

Sources: Transcript of 3rd Clinton-Trump debate; Crossword Solutions Dictionary.

Dale Wisely edits Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, and White Knuckle Chapbooks.

HELLO, ALEPPO

by Siham Karami

France has announced it will ask the international criminal court to investigate possible war crimes committed in Syria's Aleppo. Rebel-held eastern Aleppo city, besieged since early September, has been the focus of an intense aerial bombardment campaign by Russian and Syrian fighter jets. For their part, anti-government fighters are trying to break the siege and connect with other rebel-held territories to the west of Aleppo, Syria's second city. "We do not agree with what Russia is doing, bombarding Aleppo. France is committed as never before to saving the population of Aleppo," Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, told France's Inter radio on Monday. —Al Jazeera, October 11, 2016. Image source: Reuters via Al Jazeera.

Aleppo wakes to brute victory nonsense,
another corpse called dawn, pale scar of incense.

This week this family had but stones to eat,
and played with rubble. For Syria? Bashar's two cents.

Put a plan in place. They'll kill food convoys.
Outlaw love. Throw feathers, tar on sense.

Dear Russia, count the children killed for one stuffed scarecrow.
What could your heart, dead now, live for or sense?

They wash up on the shores of everywhere
in waves of family—keep out!!—each pair of eyes, ignored, dissents.

Rag-tag fighters with their cobbled guns
blew the superpower's mind to lower sense.

A father plants impossible red roses, hears bombers
play Beethoven overhead: a brief soaring sense.

I shoot this arrow to the deaf-mute smoke
rising from the shattered core of innocence.

Siham Karami lives in what was the path of Hurricane Matthew, and survived. Recent work can be found in such places as Measure, The Comstock Review, Sukoon Magazine, Mezzo Cammin, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Rotary Dial, Right Hand Pointing, Angle Poetry, Think, and the Ghazal Page. 

IN RUSSIA WE TRUST

by Alejandro Escudé

Image source: Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off

As the giant bulldozer sets on the Pacific Ocean,
the sidewalks like lines of code, we stalk the tributaries
for the basket carrying a babe who will save us
from ourselves, rotund Botero-like madres slap tortillas
of treatises on the why and how, while u-boats listen in,
a wave breaks, five white horses carrying five bare dictators.
Some remember the Cold War, and Reagan, a nice old man,
I recall feeling for him as a child, knees pressed to my cheeks
beneath a desk, not really understanding what nuclear meant,
a helicopter with a red star, a boxer with platinum flat-top hair,
not this chaotic whispering, a country hardly unearthed
from the rubble of the last century, heroes resigned to knocking
on the president’s door for a medal, a dog bowl of decency.
This nation has gone to war for less, these protean times can’t
always can be summed up by the word “mess.” Now Putin
slams a cold coin on his desk, one head Hillary, the other Trump,
landing with a reckoning thump, a crimson wall behind him,
the words perestroika and glasnost spray-painted in white,
a black pen and a black pen, the wind, the dot of his blue eye.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

BAD THINGS HAPPEN WHEN ROOSTERS CROW AND DANCE

by Marsha Owens

Image source: Democratic Underground

the slimy egg, salted and peppered,
slurs sideways on the plate as if to plead
hold on to sanity. Then I see the sign,
whoever killed my hen may you rot in hell,
which is on everyone’s mind these days,
hell
that is, and I had met Shakespeare before
all ruffled red and cock-sure, watched him
prance and dance around the yard, circle
the girls, cluck how he loves them like they love
him,
just like the Donald proclaims insidious love
for his chattel, then adds oh-by-the-way
they must be punished
should their eggs get sucked into some
venomous void, and I watched him mount
the stage with bullets in his skull where eyes
should be, where the soul of Putin, we’re told,
resides, and I sip from my coffee cup the rancid
taste of deceit, I drive by rough-hewn boards
splintered around the yard make-shift
marking the territory where the wall wasn’t built
to keep the hen in whose tiny brain
and chicken feet walked right on down
to Mexico into the hot oil, stewed
into oblivion, a delicacy of chicken
bones just a few miles up the road
from hell.

Marsha Owens lives and writes in Richmond, VA, celebrates her roots in the Chesapeake Bay area, and looks forward to tomorrow.

SOCHI'S CHOICE

by George Held

            "That old black [widow] has me in its spell . . . "

            “‘You carry enough stuff in your pocket to blow yourself  and everything within sixty yards of you to pieces.’”          —Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)


Those young Moslem women terror-bent
from Dagestan and Chechnya now are sent
to Sochi with bombs embracing their bodies
like the arms of their dedicated husbands,
already blown to bits by suicide bombs
to earn their tickets to Paradise.

The young ladies now arm themselves
like Conrad’s Professor, “hand closed round”
the detonator in his pocket,
an armed flask bomb sitting
in another pocket like a sleeping
black Angel of Death.

Call these young women “black widows,”
conjure our primal fear of black spiders
with red hourglass shape on their abdomen,
who devour their mates for giving the gift
of fertilization. The old misogynist myth
is summoned again to feed nightmares

for the well-heeled with tickets to Sochi,
the Winter Olympics Paradise,
with palm trees, by the Black Sea,
while at its back, in the snow-clad Caucasus,
Moslem revolutionaries fight
for independence and send (black) widows

to detonate the fun and games.
Which is your choice: the curious
tourists who require armed security
to bolster Vladimir Putin’s coffers
or the widows dedicated to avenge
their husbands and help to liberate

their ancient/nascent nations
from Putin’s pitiless grip?
Let the games begin.

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