THERMOGENESIS

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

 

Here in Washington, DC

Where we have some actual swamps

Glorious muddy places it would be criminal to drain

Skunk Cabbage flowers

Are bursting through the ice and snow

Generating their own heat

Their meat-red spathes

Coddling round golden spadices

Tricking carrion flies to pollinate them

Here at the Lunar New Year

Let’s make like the Skunk Cabbage

Thermogenesis!

 

Author’s note: I submitted this poem hours before the January 29th plane crash in Washington, DC. My heart goes out to the family and friends of everyone connected with this tragedy, to the city of Wichita, Kansas, and to my own city, where creative resilience is needed now more than ever.

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a Washington, DC naturalist and award-winning author of eight nature books, including Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons, City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, and Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island. She has had several previous poems published in the The New Verse News and many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice, including four that have won “Moon Prizes.” Her poetry has also been featured on nature-oriented websites.

THE POLITICS OF FAITH AND CULTURE

by Cecil Morris

At the corner of faith and culture in Southern Washington,

the Christian conservative congressional candidate 

says that she will bring Scripture-filled and Spirit-infused Prayers 

for the Battlefield to the halls of congress to fight for faith, 

to make us kneel in the benevolent and delighted light of Christ.

She says that she is MomStrong and homeschool smart, 

the author of a bunch of books celebrating bibles

and moms. She says that she puts babies first, that they are her first

and most important constituents, both gift and purpose.

She says that she stands for gun rights and ammo. She says

that she is unapologetic, which means, I suppose,

that she does not ask for or need forgiveness, does not know

contrition. She says that there are just two genders, that God

created them in his image male and female, and I think

that she believes in a hermaphroditic deity,

a god of two genders at once, that she worships a god

with cock and cunt. Or maybe her god is gender fluid,

a male today, a female tomorrow, a god who goes back

and forth as it pleases or as it is necessary

like His perfected creations the Lythrypnus dalli

or Crepidula fornicata or Cornu aspersum.

Or maybe her conception of god is genderless,

more idea or ideal than body—disembodied

and beyond gender concerns. Is creation wrong

or is God or is this Christian candidate mistaken

in her understanding of what God meant or means?

I don’t know. But here, amid the multiple wonders

of this world, amid the incredible diversity

of this life, would God have given us just two genders,

a paltry coin-flip two, an either-or, a binary choice,

a mere dichotomy, a language of only two words

while all around us hums such a rich abundance.

I do not know the mind of God (if such a thing exists),

but I do know for certain sure that I do not want

this person to have the power to govern over me.

Author's Note: The italized portions of lines 3-4 and 13-14 come from (first) Heidi St. John’s website promoting her books, podcasts, and ministry and (second) from her campaign ad aired on KGW Portland on July 22, 2022.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, divides his time between Oregon and California.  He has poems in or forthcoming from 3Elements, Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Evening Street Review, Hiram Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Scapegoat, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.

GIVE UNTO CAESAR

by David Chorlton

Tiberius Penny at The Smithsonian

Word comes down from the mountain

that Caesar has awakened

and begun to ask for what is his,

much to the distaste of the next man in line

whose shirt tells everyone he’s tuned

to a radio in the sky and he can tell you

why Washington’s to blame

for the state of all things on Earth. He orders

enchiladas. Says with pride

he’s ex-law enforcement. Smiles

at a passing thought available

only to himself.

                        With taxes comes the time

the ocotillo greens in the front yard

where the first of summer’s orioles

has found her way back

to where she came last year. She’s a flash

between red blossoms

and arrives when the Earth’s clock tells her to:

when the people empty their pockets

and count small change, when they

find news in dark rumors, sign their checks

and send them to Caesar

on the last of winter’s winds.

David Chorlton observes the coming and going of birds in the corner of Phoenix where he lives, near South Mountain. The Mountain became the focus of his short book published by Cholla Needles last year, The Inner Mountain, which featured watercolors and poems.

KNOWING YOU ARE A POET (OUTSIDE WASHINGTON)

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

“Truth/Poetry,” a painting by Cameron Holmes.

There is nothing quite like knowing 

that poetry is your calling  

when you’re growing up in a Washington 

D.C. suburb where the word is power 

for in the nation’s capital no poem passes 

laws no verse crafts policy no poem ever 

delivered a constituency 

Poetry is a gesture so vital 

as to be without use 

it’s like telling the truth

about the deficit 

how we should curb our penchant 

for violence Poetry is a useless means 

of pulling bounties off wolf heads it is hardly

a writer’s rubber to hatred’s glue 

for nothing bounces off of me 

and sticks to you 

why write a poem to change the world 

when you could become a lawyer 

or banker 

a dynamite maker 

whose lucrative investments 

bear witness to capital’s power 

why write a poem when you could 

become a shield to the truncheon’s 

bludgeon hear 

a bomb’s whistle bullets over Baghdad 

or the silence that comes when there’s no one 

to listen to the words you’ve just written.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. New work appears this fall in Anti-Heroin Chic, Dissident Voice, So It Goes, Chiron Review, Bewildering Stories, The Last Leaves, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Expressive Writing, Boog City, and Ginosko Review.

PENCIL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

for Sara Cahill Marron

There is a time to mourn and a time
to review the cards and cast them
again on the table trusting God
to guide your hand, to say this pencil
you left with roses, chrysanthemums,
lilies, in a riot of passionate flowers
before the Supreme Court, will be
picked up by a girl after the period
of mourning, not to be conserved
in the Smithsonian's Museum
of American History, but to write
the story of a young lawyer come
to Washington to interpret laws
with grace, acuity and impartiality,
to the best of her ability, until
such time as their articulation
becomes almost unnecessary,
so ingrained they would become
in the social conscience of
Americans walking then freely. 

Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has 19 poetry books, including The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, 2020) and Sur l'île nostalgique (L'Harmattan, 2020). In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, is a columnist for Haiti en Marche, won the Paterson Prize, and is a 2020 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts fellow.

LAST BUS

by Margery Ross





I catch the last bus
out of downtown DC on April 4, 1968.
Fires loom and looters
have a field day at
D. J. Kaufman’s across
Pennsylvania Avenue from the DOJ
where I monitor urban riots
for the Attorney General. Now
it’s me in the midst of the melee
headed toward Georgetown
hoping to get home.

Fifty-two years, history repeats,
it’s one step forward, five back.
Police still kill with impunity,
cities burn, no end to toxic words
from a reality TV celeb—
good trouble trashed as anarchy.
When reading Ta-Nehisi Coates
five years ago I protested
exaggeration. No more.
Between the World and Me—
That last bus is leaving.


Margery Ross is an artist, poet and avid book listener trying to survive in Washington, D.C.

DEAR SENATOR. BOLIVIA.

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

“Evo Morales’s Chaotic Departure Won’t Define His Legacy: History won’t remember him for the ongoing unrest, but for the enfranchisement of Bolivia’s indigenous population.” –Foreign Policy, November 22, 2019. Photo: A supporter of former Bolivian President Evo Morales stands in front of graffiti that reads "Long live Evo" during a protest in La Paz, Bolivia, on Nov. 14. GASTON BRITO MISEROCCH/GETTY IMAGES via Foreign Policy.

Dear Senator,

Did you ever hear of the valley where they found Che Guevara—
you were either in college or unborn when they corralled his band
in the valleys of tin in a country most boardroom men

Called Potosi

Bolivia

1967/2019

A land of riches governed by highland royalty who might have found
common cause with a Coca farmer from Cochabamba named Morales.

You have heard of him haven’t you, Senator? He’s in Mexico now.
Isn’t it a shame. What say you? Cocalero.
She and he and they see their compañeros y compañeras under the gun
of Uncle Sam’s war against an indigenous plant and the way of life its people
led because in the halls of Washington lucre flows in subsidy form to Big Pharma
and Law and Order.

What say you, Senator? Latin America. Has open veins and the president
at home is a tyrant but where are you when the indigenous working class see
their comrade presidente flee because the Americas are open for a certain kind
of business that will not obey the rights of Mother Nature who is a storyteller.

She’s a slam poet, Senator.

The rights of the forest. The breast of Mother Earth. The golden goose.
I’m sure there’s a hashtag for it. John Wayne fleeing the Indians riding
switchback across all of our constituencies.

Jeremy Nathan Marks is an American based in London, Ontario. Recent poetry, prose, and photography can and will be found in Literary Orphans, Writers Resist, Poets Reading The News, Unlikely Stories, Ottawa Arts Review, Bewildering Stories, 365 Tomorrows, The Courtship of Winds, Poetry Pacific, Eunoia Review, The Blue Nib, Stories of the Nature of Cities, and Lethe Magazine among others.

CAPITAL SPRING HAIKU

Sari Grandstaff is a high school librarian and writer in the Mid-Hudson Valley/Catskill Mountains of New York State. Her work has appeared in many print and online journals including TheNewVerse.News and Eastern Structures.  She and her husband are the proud parents of three adult children.

SAME OLD MOTIFS, SOUNDING OFF AGAIN

by George Salamon

The Washington Post, April 22, 2018

Only old folks and children
Do no harm to the present
By thinking of the future.
In the corridors of power in Washington,
In the bunkers of Pyongyang
They plot our future
For which we'll pay the usual price
In corpses, cripples and orphans,
In poverty, disease and despair.
During our long march of folly
We have rarely allowed history
To become our teacher,
Preferring to gulp the snake oil
Of one ism or another.
Like fireworks on the 4th of July.
Teachable moments soar and sparkle.
And then, in a puff, they are gone.

George Salamon would like to be but does not expect to be surprised by headlines. He lives and writes in St. Louis, MO.

DC APRIL '68

by Sally Zakariya

Front pages of The Washington Post, April 5 (left) and April 6, 1968, during the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. (The Washington Post)

I was there when the city burned
smug-safe in white girl invulnerability
watching the angry smoke rise
over 14th St., hearing the sirens blare.
Mother wanted me to leave but
D.C. was my city too. Evenings
I’d walk home up 18th St.
with my black boyfriend
in time to meet the curfew
the acrid smell of tear gas
clutching at our throats.
And then we’d stop and kiss
good-night as soldiers watched.
It felt like a small victory
proof that it would all come right
but in my heart I knew
some dark veil had been lifted
some page turned and we
could never close our eyes
again to the cold facts
of what my people
had done to his.

Sally Zakariya’s Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has appeared in some 70 print and online journals. She is the author, most recently, of When You Escape (Five Oaks Press, 2016), as well as Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic and other verses (2011), and the editor of Joys of the Table (2015). Her chapbook Personal Astronomy is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

MIXED MESSAGE: A HISTORY LESSON 2017

by Alan Catlin

Capitol Police drag disabled protesters out of wheelchairs during Trumpcare protests. Forty-three people were arrested in connection with the protest. In some instances, police helped protesters back into their wheelchairs before forcibly removing them, but others weren't treated so generously Jacquelyn Martin/AP via The Independent (UK) June 22, 2017.

This is what
the Fascists did
in the 1930s and 40s:

cleansed the race
of the genetically impure

the mentally ill
sexual deviants
gypsies
jews

the cripples
and the infirm

Now here
in Washington DC
Today in June of 2017

republicans release
details of crafted-in-secret
No Health Care bill

arrest the protestors
in the halls of Congress:

the disabled in wheelchairs
on oxygen
disability disadvantaged all

and either forcibly carry them out
or escort them from in front
of the Majority Leader of the Senate’s
office door outside

to where the box cars are waiting.





Alan Catlin is poetry editor of online journal misfitmagazine.net. His latest book of poetry is American Odyssey from Future Cycle Press.

TICKLED PINK

Sarah E. Colona lives and teaches in her home state of New Jersey. She is the author of three poetry collections: Hibernaculum (Gold Wake Press, 2013), Thimbles (dancing girl press, 2012) and That Sister (dancing girl press, 2016).

3 EXCUSES FOR NOT MARCHING AND THEN A POEM

by Melissa Fite Johnson

A woman wears a Statue of Liberty crown and holds a torch at the Women’s March in New York on Saturday. Credit Sara Hylton/The New York Times via Alaska Dispatch News, January 22, 2017



1. Dry throat I must coat with water or I’ll cough. 
2. Dog-sitting for a friend so she can march. 
3. The angry parent who checked Facebook 
to confirm I’m a liberal teacher.  

He might find this poem.
It makes me squirm, the thought he could take 
my thoughts from my head. My old professor 
always says, It’s easier not to write. 
Today, it was easier not to lurch 
open the garage, turn the key, thrust myself 
into history, into the brave crowd 
filling their lungs with songs instead of doubt. 
My body won’t speck a grainy photograph. 

August 28, 1963, a young girl rested 
her arm on a rail, her head on her arm. The video 
unspools her at “sweltering with the heat of 
oppression.” Every phrase was 
a lighted match. Each flame passed through her. 

January 21, 2017, what words, what fire
I could have carried home like a torch.


Melissa Fite Johnson’s first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book.  Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, Broadsided Press, velvet-tail, and elsewhere.  Melissa teaches English and lives with her husband in Kansas.

SOME WORDS FOR MEANWHILE

by Lucia Galloway

Poster by Jennifer Maravillas for the Women's March on Washington

There is only this way,
this one way,
to breathe   while
rain falls­—
finally falls & falls­—
in Southern California.
Comes in repeated fits,
storms over parched lands
& lawns.  Pools at our doorsteps
from overflowing gutters, sheets
off the pavements of parking lots,
carves new rivulets
in our gardens, our
paths and trails.

One way    while
crews erect viewing stands
in DC­-mile after mile
of bleachers, media towers­-
along the storied route.
While in airports, passengers
clutch boarding passes, eye
podium monitors.
While on basement floors
& kitchen tables, women paint
slogans: Resistance is Joy.
Pack boots, mufflers
& down jackets.
D.C., Chicago, Tucson, Denver, L.A.
. . . (will the buses make it?)     while
the women hope that nothing happens,
knowing that nothing
can mean anything now.

Lucia Galloway’s chapbook The Garlic Peelers won the Quill’s Edge Press 2014 inaugural chapbook competition.  She is also author of Venus and Other Losses (2010) and a chapbook, Playing Outside (2005), and has published work in Tar River Poetry, Comstock Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, among other publications.  Her poems have received awards from the Bread Loaf School of English, Artists Embassy International, Rhyme Zone, and the MacGuffin National Poet Hunt.  She lives in Southern California, where she curates a reading series in her home town of Claremont.  

TO EAT AND LEAVE THE NIGHT AN EMPTY PLATE

by Alejandro Escudé

A Donald Trump mural painted by street artist Hanksy on Orchard St. between Canal and Division Sts. on the Lower East Side. —NY Daily News Photo by SHAWN INGLIMA

In the blonde hair-skunk, in the barbershop of the mind
where the scissors raise hairs and pat them down
to demand what one wants not needs, the patience of a lion,
ingenuity of a roach, America with a Trump at its head,
the roach motel of the world, on his knees, a nice picture…
what he said to the young woman on t.v.,
a working class woman, it’s a nice picture, you
on your knees. Walled off in the mind, the soul
a mountain range of rage and nowhere to go but
to the streets where a young man bears the likeness
of North America on his bloodied face.
Do we recall the ISIS terrorist in his jeep
happy to drag five corpses? Five corpses
hanging from the moon, five corpses loaded like bullets
into the chamber of a gun, you fire-walker, you brandist,
you woman-basher, you human torture chamber,
you radioactive toad, you lacquered manipulator,
you burnt toast anachronism, you oversexed missile,
you Roman fop, you Towers burning, one man leaps
from a window of the World Trade, martyr man,
L-man, J-woman, moon feces in the shape of Trump,
in the shape of Mar-a-Lago, in the shape of Chris Christie,
piles in the cemetery where Lorca’s body lies forever
falling, never forgetting the artists’ Golgotha
in the rainstorm of human history where Trump’s foot soldiers
come to take Federico away at dawn as the rooster crows
as the apostle drowns his only son as George Washington
steps on the muddy bank as Hamilton takes aim at Burr
as Burr is borne again as the harrowing present grows wings
as the Star-Spangled Banner itself sings as the baseball field
turns to boner flowers or red licorice for wealthy trophy wives
as the hives of the rich enlarge as the states pronounce
themselves more significant than the next. Who comes
in the name of business rats? Who’s driven in Picasso
limousines? Who comes in chariots of designer
water bottles? Who comes in light-clouds Wall Street?
Who comes wagging an Arizona finger? Who comes
riding a marble horse? To eat and leave the night
an empty plate for children to weep, for the landlord
to tie our wrists down in the apex of our city streets
where the thief is arrested, shouting in stressed vowels,
as the helicopter shakes our house out of its safe slumber
and into another broken eight years of politicos and bankers,
eight years of sourceless regrets, eight years of teachers
blamed like communists, eight years of flogging
middlemen, eight years of clown-hog campaigns,
eight years of pornographic magazine covers, eight years
of cigars and neon caviar, eight years of swimming in pools
full of sheep semen. We, it began, we, it finishes, we.


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.

THE FATHER IN SUMMER PLAINETH FOR HIS SON

by Cally Conan-Davies






O western fire
Take this day back
Reverse the truck
Unburn the wreck.
The fire fighters
Of the forest service
Hell-bent to save us,
Rain down on them,
Drown every forest plant.
Then bring him home,
Because for every day to come
I can't.


Cally Conan-Davies hails from Tasmania. Her poems can be found in periodicals such as The Hudson Review, Subtropics, Poetry, Quadrant, The New Criterion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southwest Review, The Dark Horse,  Harvard Review and various online journals.

RIGHT TO WORK FOR LESS

by Paula Schulz

Gov. Scott Walker Monday signed so-called right-to-work legislation banning requirements that private-sector workers pay union fees, prompting one business to say it will add workers in Milwaukee and another to say it will expand in Minnesota instead. --Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel, March 9, 2015

Earliest morning, the moon a mirror,
the sky that deep, hopeful blue.  And for those
few moments all plans are possible.

You feel it--to walk into the world is
to walk into a fairy tale where the king
is a good man who loves the beautiful.

All the old witches grow backward into joy,
straighten up, fly right, drop glittering
educators in Wisconsin schools.

Every child is beautiful, strong, well-nourished:
factory and government jobs pay
a living wage.  Police and protesters

carry potato guns.   After they face
off, all gather ammo, take it to their
local soup kitchen, cook up a rich

chowder, pass warm bread, talk of family.
Governor Walker goes to Washington,
takes his dislike of the arts with him where,

despite his best efforts, a new WPA
is formed and funded and we learn again
each others stories, paint new portraits

of dignity, sculpt a strong citizenry,
paint with bright colors, polka to a new
American song.


Paula Schulz is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, a recent Pushcart nominee and an educator.  She is hopeful, blue.

WASHINGTON AND THE REDSKINS

by James Penha

The Map Is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths—Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish

Fleeing European horrors,
God's chosen landed at a great rock
on which they built their havens,
their temples, and their theocracies
and squatted the nomadic tribes
ignorant of salvation and so damned
(if human enough to have life
after life at all). Settlers made
manifest their destiny
to exploit, expropriate,
disease, enslave,
blanket, and reserve the savages.
And when the natives resisted
eternal occupation, the settlers,
republicans by then and democrats,
made war and baubles
of redskins.

And now Washington mouths
itself agape in the mirror of the middle east.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

SAILOR

by Mick Murphy





The woods are quiet today.
Not even birds
this late November.

Oddly warm for one who can
remember another day-
chill wind-
in Washington.

Drums
hoofs
gravel

a boy in a short coat.

Mother, who rarely wept,
weeping
by the TV.

A coastal boy,
he once carried a man
for miles through turquoise water

unharmed by the Great White
or other creatures of the sea.

Mick Murphy is astudent of Amy Holman at the Hudson Valley Writers center in Sleepy Hollow New York. A former business executive, he has studied and written poems for many years. His work looks at personal and spiritual issues and the intersection of these with the life of his generation. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. He also writes about sports.

THE DIMINISHING MONUMENT

by Daniel Patrick Roche

An ivory mockery of King erected
in the shadows of two slave owners
and the Great Emancipator.
Carved in a foreign land
erected with scab labor
it is a monument--
to Establishment ignorance
rather than to the man himself.

The misunderstanding of its subject
carved upon its walls.
"I was a drum major for justice,
peace and righteousness.”
And then later chipped away,
corrected, like a poor student
unwilling to parade his ignorance.

King died defending workplace dignity.
He is not memorialized by hard white rock
hewn from the earth by exploited peoples
working in unsafe working conditions
for substandard pay, if the pay ever comes.
His legacy is diminished by it.
Go, shutter the Mall.
Hide this porcelain disgrace
from the eyes of workers
furloughed during the pissing match
after five years of frozen wages.
Perhaps they will remember the man
when this graven image is out of sight.


Daniel Patrick Roche is a political organizer and writer living in Northern California. An alumnus of UC Berkeley, he has worked for Nevada for Change, Joe Sestak for Senate, and Diego Bernal for San Antonio City Council District 1.