PERFORMANCE BONUS

by Imogen Arate

Four of the Republican senators bankrolled by the NRA. From left to right Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Richard Burr, and Roy Blunt. —Newsweek has the “Full List of Republican Senators Who Receive Funding From the NRA.”

Every time a bullet screams a child's name

Congress rings in a payday

Every time gold-strung puppets mimic "thoughts and prayers"

NRA makes it rain

The more they pile up

the cheaper they come

The higher the body count

the bigger the ROI.

The stock market may be free-reeling

NFTs may be worthless

but LaPierre makes good on his promises

though he trades in rubles 

We've arrived at the age 

of lead-pegged currency

We've come to celebrate each day

as gun-violence survival day

drunk the mercurial mead 

of gilded hearts playing 

a mental-health sleight of hand

while we thirsted for salves

that vanished as another gunman

turned the page onto another tragedy

danced our last to the whizzing rhythm

of gun-powdered blues

as we grew confused over 

which loved ones got shot when

or which crisis actors got paid

while feigning condolences 

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of Poets and Muses, a weekly poetry podcast that won second place at National Federation of Press Women's 2020 Communications Contest, where she has served as a national-level poetry judge in 2021 and 2022.  Her poetry has appeared in 18 publications on four continents.  You can find her @PoetsandMuses and @ImogenArate on Twitter and Instagram.

WAYNE LAPIERRE

by Mark Danowsky

Illustration by Tony Calabro

The world is on fire
so fire back

Fire before fire can be declared

Fire before anyone can shout fire

whether the building is crowded
or otherwise

Shout fire, fire, fire
in the hole
Fore!

Man down
Woman down
Child down

down child down

Who else is left down?

You know who
is cowering in the bathtub
fearful of a stray
bullet in the brain
Wayne saw John
Wayne or The Baptist

Showed him The Way

Fear, Love

the world becomes
a scary place

Wayne at night

his family in harm’s way

he prays for them

prays for us

pray we understand why

why guns save
not shatter
lives of a feather


collapse us with shards

a million little pieces of shrapnel

 Wayne, god
can’t you see

the rest of us shot thru

bleeding out


Mark Danowsky is a poet / writer from Philadelphia and author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press, 2018). He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

IF CONGRESS HAD LEAD BALLS

by Gil Hoy

One word was noticeably missing from President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday: guns. In a sign that the sun has set on Obama's gun control agenda, the president's prepared remarks contained no mention of the issue. Two years after the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the absence of guns from Obama's speech marked a departure from previous years, in which the president urged Congress to pass legislation aimed at reducing gun violence in America. Obama made a thinly veiled reference to mass shootings while discussing national tragedies that have brought Americans together. "I’ve mourned with grieving families in Tucson and Newtown; in Boston, West, Texas, and West Virginia," he said. --Sabrina Siddiqui, HuffPost Politics, January 21, 2015

If Congress had lead balls

in its hearts, brains, 

pelves 

If images of dead school 

children grew 

so palpable, intimate

that their fever

opened a passageway 

through the sizzling

sun, to eternity 

and back, 

would the madness 

stop then? Would 

crimson hollow paired

growths on Wayne 

LaPierre’s head 

show themselves, as

he scribbles his want 

list for bought

and sold baby-kissers, 

counting bankroll gore, 

casting cruel pecuniary 

manufacturer’s 

satanic spells 

on the provoked, 

tremulous, spurred on 

by Domitian, 

dominus et dues, 

shielded by 

mutant constitution?


Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News.  He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction in February of last year.  Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in The Potomac, The Zodiac Review, Harbinger Asylum and Earl of Plaid Literary Journal.