The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Susan Ayres is the author of Walk Like the Bird Flies (Finishing Line, 2023) and Red Cardinal, White Snow (Main Street Rag, 2024). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals. She studied Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, practiced karate for nine years with her son, and now spends time in Texas writing, collaging, teaching, and learning tai chi.
for those who have already run the obstacle course
of history,
returning the privilege of suffrage to a comfortable,
white-sheeted nightmare
from back somewhere before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
We once stayed (in our day; not Walt’s, not King’s)
in Florida, next to the motel where they poisoned the pool
to keep those they did not wish to see at the polls
out of their purely chlorinated water as well.
Everybody out of the pool!
and nobody at the polls.
‘Some better day,’ as we so often say, we will look back
shaking our heads in horror
at what our fellow Americans got up to.
Sorry, sun-sick Florida, hypocritical Texas,
I am voting you out of the club.
Fly the battle flags of your disgrace all you want,
but you are no longer part of my America.
Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, Eunoia Review, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He is the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.
the delicate hope of asylum for whatever that is worth.
Asylum acquired narrow connotations
as in insane asylum, not a refuge
but a silencing, an abandoning.
I should be able to write
with the insistent beat of a heart on fire,
the passion of Whitman’s barbaric yelp,
the precision of an accountant
totaling the debt to be repaid.
Airlift Afghani allies to the Field Station
where I write of black-eyed susans
counting their thirteen brilliant petals
flower after flower, utterly dependable.
We should. I should. What is power for?
What are words for?
If they do not set deeds in motion,
if they do not celebrate good,
if they do not open up space,
if they allow moral failure
if they do not uncover names
of the unnamed who throw up
obstacles to justice,
then
be forever silent.
As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Margaret Rozga co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). Her fifth book of poems is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021).
While it is not true that Earl Wilcox has been sending poems to The New Verse News for 50 years, he has contributed about two dozen in the past 15 years.
"We need to save democracy from capitalism, and save capitalism from itself." —Kevin J. Delaney, “American Workers Deserve to Live With Dignity,” The New York Times, July 5, 2020
Let us pretend this leopard can
Change its spots, let us dream
The impossible dream once more.
Not this old boy, who's not ready
For one more plunge into an
Unfulfillable dream to overturn
The one created by our Indian-
Killing, slave-owning heroes by
Our greed-consumed wheelers
And dealers and salesmen from
The Frontier to Silicon Valley, a
Dream without roots in democracy
But in the cult of Mammon and Mars,
Talking the big lie, the bigger promise,
But walking in the bloody footsteps of
Absurdities and atrocities committed
Against the humanism no magician or
Leader can inject into the heart of our
Homegrown capitalism.
We can "save" democracy in America
By making it our way of life, democracy
With its own culture grown from the
Essential democratic truths about the
Values of human life, beginning with the
Long march of democracy, sustained by
The new American Dream, through the
"Unprecedented waves and storms" our
Poet of democracy predicted and, with
Grit, patience and luck reach that "city
Upon a hill" as it morphs from myth into
A place of democratic life.
George Salamon, inspired by Whitman, in St. Louis, MO.
Were we not paying attention, attention-deficited even then,
even before the term was wheeled in on some gurney
with a wobbly wheel? Brooklyn Hospital, so overrun,
where Fauci was born, where Whitman volunteered,
his beard as face mask, tending Union soldiers,
bringing peaches, poems, writing letters for them,
urging them to believe that a woman back home
would still marry them when they came home,
marching Johnnies through the rye,
missing a leg or an arm or an eye?
And Keats, quarantined in the harbor in Naples,
not nearly the quaranta giorni, the full forty days,
on the Maria Crowther, six weeks out from Gravesend,
typhus all around, bobbing like rhythm, like synaesthesia
in the bay. Keats, mortality weighing “heavily” on him,
“like unwilling sleep,” Keats half alive,
“half in love with easeful Death.”
Did we not see it, fully take it in,
poets and plagues interwoven, the world caving in,
the burst of tubercular blood in Keats’s handkerchief,
Whitman’s soldiers (“warriors,” T***p says) who survived,
stood, hobbled and grim, and married just as he told them
they would, writing back years later to tell Old Walt,
fierce believer in grasses, sheaves and hymns,
that they had named their children after him.
Or is it simply that we have lived too long
to have seen it again?
And who moves quickly now, masked, from bed to bed,
giving succor, solace, taking selfies with the nearly dead
to share with the families prevented from being there,
with Poe’s masquers, red death, double ventilated with dread?
What nurses, doctors, poets glide among us again,
like shepherds, pastorals, like trashbagged antibodies,
nearly invisible, shining with novel, singular grace?
John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry forGrace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His fourth book of poetry Heaven & Earth Holding Company is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and his first book In My Father's House has been reprinted from Lynx House/University of Washington Press. Hodgen’s fifth book The Lord of Everywhere is just out, also from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.
From Frigid St. Louis to mild Florida; From Cold Chicago to Temperate Arizona. Spring Training Migrants: What the Trucks Carry on the Open Road.
O Sing us a early spring time song of the Open Road to the warm sun, the green grass, the soft breezes, the lure of a dream for a game and a team and great American pastime.
O take me to the Open Road, send my Truck on the Day, fill it with my stuff, my life, my load.
O, Mighty Truck of the Open Road, bring my gear, carry the stuff to transform us mortal men from hot stove junkie to spring time wizards.
O Red Truck, Blue Truck, Green Truck, every color truck bring my stuff, my special bats and helmets, gloves, my candy bars, cheese and crackers, my jock straps, a few hundred baseballs, uniforms, t-shirts, laundry detergent, my own bicycle, my shoes, socks, deodorant ,bubble gum, sun screen, sun flower seeds, tar, baby cribs, birth control, medical equipment, one load of Pennsylvania dirt, our money ball stats guy, string cheese, and Tylenol.
O Mighty Maker of the Open Road, give us a season filled with the hope of spring training, the vision and energy of the summer, and wisdom of autumn.
Earl Wilcox waits for baseball season while watching spring open in his back yard with daffodils, azaleas, and dogwoods in South Carolina.
There is Jared Kushner encased in ice
Packed close to Trump gnawing
On Kushner’s head, the two shades
Wrapped in ice sheets reflecting
A mounting body of dishonesty,
A gold, Cyrillic script disappearing
As it appears, the demons awake
Long as the scroll takes, unwinding
Then winding again while the brute
Chews his son-in-law’s brain casing.
Silent, the pale skull, save for murmurs
Of a backchannel to Satan’s wing.
Beside these, Michael Flynn pecks
The bodies of wicked soldiers offering
Themselves to the stern-faced bird
Whose frozen beak prevents dining.
All this I see, with my poet guide,
Walt Whitman, beside me, the fattening
Of America, its undoing, still circles
Ahead of us, more furies unfurling.
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.
O for any and each the body correlative and attracting. Singing the muscular urge and the blending… the welcome nearness… the sight of the perfect body.
The splendor of the opening ceremony and around the
corner the reeking-of-life favelas monitored by
Praetorian Guards with automatic weapons. Keep out
the riff raff, the plenty persons near but not
the hot, the right ones.
The corruption of city-states, the poor, the beggared,
and the rich, the corporate and the incorporate; the
dopers, tokers, and politicians.
The athletes, lithe, lean, and lovely, and the “bulge.”
Ah! The fit-witless and the bulge of youth, the beauty
anyway and incorruptible discipline and dedication
irrelevanced by “commercials.”
And on Copacabana Beach, “We don’t need a stadium
to play volleyball.”
Oh Latin America, Oh Columbus, Columbanumbus!
The New World screwed screwing itself.
The hungry gnaw that eats me night and day…
I need another glass of cachaca and a plate of feijoada.
Tonight I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers. Everyone is my friend even the crooks
on the Olympic Committee.
Bob Katrin is a writer and poet living in Southern Pines, NC.
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love . . .
Embedded into this video is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from the poem "America:” Recording: Copyright Eric Forsythe, 2012–2013. Made available on the Whitman Archive with permission of the rights holder. Audio may be reused for non-commercial purposes, with credit to Eric Forsythe and the Walt Whitman Archive. For more information on this recording, see Ed Folsom, "The Whitman Recording," Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 9 (Spring 1992), 214-16.
I.
I see you, Walt Whitman---an American
Rough, a Cosmos! I see you face to face!
I see you and the nameless faceless
Faces in America's timeless crowds of men
and women who you saw in your mind's eye.
I see you crossing the river on your ferry.
I see you walking down the public road
Where everyone is worthy. Neither time,
Place nor distance separates.
II.
You once saw the currents of corruption,
Fast flowing into the land that you loved.
You once saw that which had departed
With the setting sun, half an hour high,
For when another is degraded,
so are you and I.
You once saw what had flowed in with the
Rising flood-tides feverishly pouring---
Tides saturated and soaked with exploitation,
Bribery, falsehood and maladministration.
III.
When you saw the motionless wings of
Twelfth-month sea-gulls, When you walked
Along Manhattan Island---When you watched the
Ships of Manhattan, north and west---
Could you see Wall Street banks
Seizing the homes of your beloved countrymen,
Voyaging in their fragile ferryboats? The carpenters,
Quakers, scientists and opium eaters; The immigrants,
Squaws, boatmen and blacksmiths; The farmers,
Mechanics, sailors and priests?
IV.
Could you see the monstrous megaton corporations
Feasting on America's flesh blood bones, those
Nameless faceless parasites
Sucking the soul from your loved land,
Like a malevolent disease?
V.
For you saw quite clearly the political and
Economic malfunctioning mutant ties that connect us.
Neither time, place nor distance separates.
And you saw very clearly the sickly green sludge
Secreted by lobbyists to their bought and sold
Henchmen soldier baby-kissers, to slow and
Stop the flow of nourishing rushing sea tides
Into your dear, revered democracy.
VI.
You saw the evil dark patches---the clinging selfish
Steadfast pernicious grasp of the flourishing one
Per cent oligarchs, Who lusted, grubbed, lied, stole--
Were greedy, shallow, sly, angry, vain, cowardly,
malignant--Seeking only to hold onto their fool's
Gold and preserve the status quo.
VII.
Each still furnishes its part towards the death of
America's democracy. Each still furnishes its part
Towards destroying her soul. The mocking bird
Still sings the musical shuttle to the tearful
Bareheaded child, and the final word superior for
America may still be her death, death, death,
Death. The sea has whisper'd me, too.
Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer who is currently studying poetry at Boston University, through its Evergreen program, where he previously received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Hoy received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy started writing poetry two years ago. Since then, his work has appeared in Third Wednesday, The Write Room, The Eclectic Muse, Clark Street Review, TheNewVerse.News, Harbinger Asylum, Soul Fountain, The Story Teller Magazine, Eye on Life Magazine, Stepping Stones Magazine, The Penmen Review, To Hold A Moment Still, Harbinger Asylum’s 2014 Holidays Anthology, The Zodiac Review, Earl of Plaid Literary Journal, The Potomac, Antarctica Journal, The Montucky Review and elsewhere.
My name is announced before takeoff. It’s JFK again, but this is a new terminal. I haul my carry-on past rich kids pouting In First-Class, already juiced, and step back onto the homeland.
Outside waits a man in a blue uniform and a silver badge. “Are you a writer?” he asks. There are tribal scars On his fat cheeks. I don’t ask. “Follow me,” he tells me, and we walk together back Down the tube to America. Our footsteps echo out of rhythm.
At the American Airlines check-out desk ten men are hovering over my lost notebook of poems. I relapsed in the wine bar and my God punishes. A man no older than thirty introduces himself as Tim from the Terrorism Task Force. I told him I was not impressed, and that I believe in respect for elders. I’m very traditional that way, Tim. Maybe it was my years in Africa when I lived in a hut. Tim’s training did not include humor and, confused, he steps away.
The Boss moves in, a man with the pink alcoholic shade my ancestors taught me. His face looks frozen in 1974. Very pre 9/11, with a suit that looks lifted from the costume room of The French Connection. “You’re a poet?” he starts. “You said it,” I swing back at him, “not me.” “ A woman found your notebook and was very alarmed,” he frowns. I try to break his Popeye scowl with a grin. He goes grim.
“Your poem called Bomb Threat is of concern,” he continues, Lifting a torn page out of my notebook. Everything is written in green. “And your comments about Homeland Security we all find curious.” “That shit is weird,” the black guy with the scars exclaims. Everyone nods before French Connection waves them still.
“I’m missing my plane,” I say, and a cop tells me to forget about flight. “What was your destination?” another one asks. I am going to Afghanistan to teach Shakespeare, I calmly explain. I finally get my first laugh. But when I tell them to go fuck themselves, fascist pigs, They’re back to business with my notebooks.
But not I. No, I now have a growing audience of passengers for the Paris flight And I was raised not to waste. Children are starving in Africa. THIS IS NOT AMERICA! I shout to them. I AM BEING HELD FOR POETRY! I cry, and don’t know why I raise my fist. This must be the oral thrill of the spoken word I’ve read about And I can feel Whitman and Ginsberg grinning below the New York dirt of JFK. “Front page!” I bluff to the boss, flushed with my little fame, “New York Times!” and pull out another notebook and start writing, staring into his badge.
Walkie-talkies come out and soon an alternative ticket is being printed. They give an Irish cop the job of returning my notebooks; no one else will touch them. “Hold onto these,” he gives me a wink I might, in a better mood, call Whitmanesque. “It’s a shitty job,“ he apologizes as I take back my poems and head to another gate. “Any good publications?” I hear him call out to me. “Nope,” I shout back, “my job sucks too.”
Oh America, I don’t want to leave you! I want to stay and write poems that make men huddle in airports! I want to be pulled off your American Airlines and asked by scarred men if I’m a writer! I want to make speeches about liberty to passengers to Paris! I want to alarm everyone in the country! But instead I’m off to another stupid war To pay for my daughter’s ballet. No one in America responds to my resume, only these lost notebooks that don’t pay. So before I step away from my homeland I get one last jab at the Irish cop trailing me. “I’m coming back soon!” I shout back at him from the tube. “And we’ll be waiting!” he calls back to me, waving a little blue book.
Rick Gray served in the Peace Corps in Kenya
and currently teaches at the American University of Afghanistan in
Kabul. He was a finalist for the Editor's Award at Margie, and has an essay that will be appearing in the forthcoming book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. When not in Kabul, he lives with his wife Ghizlane and twin daughters Rania and Maria in Florida.
