EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH TURNS TO RUBBLE

by Raymond Nat Turner

Tiny backpacks, bloody body parts litter pulverized apartment and charred-

car-streets. Stolen lives litter flattened hospitals and schools. Litter crimson

coffee shop floors. Litter blackened fields of vaporized crops.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Over and over Earth’s saddest symphony plays. Harrowing screams, wails, moans.

Same timbre, same tones. Same saline Palestine tears in Sudan. Same in Ukraine, 

Lebanon, Venezuela, Iran. The same 1% is at war with workers of the world—and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They bomb, they strut. They prance and ‘dance,’ and bomb and bomb again.

They bomb abroad shouting, “stay sheltered!” Lucrative explosions silence

music of whining saw, pounding hammer raising roofs, housing the unhoused.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Hubris high off homeland invasion, hostile takeovers weeks before, they dream

of easy money. Quick work of weekend war. But weekend morphs into weeks. 

And weeks into months. And months into long and lean years.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They send holy warriors striking Saturdays, Sundays, holidays ‘round Epstein news

cycles like pyrite wrecking balls revolving around orange planet, Pedophilia. ‘Round

its death smell. ‘Round sulphur scent and white phosphorus fragrance anointing them.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

They strike when Essential Workers catch fleeting winks on speeding trains roaring

beneath snoring cities. When countrymen and women dreaming of better worlds are

not yet woke. Over and over again Cruel Reich Cult strikes under cover of darkness and

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Cruel Reich Cult strikes when working ones are doubled over panting, catching

blitzkrieg breaths. Or, when they meditate, chant, or pray protecting souls, spirits,

minds from repeated trauma of sadistic Psy-Ops on our damn dime.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

One Big Beautiful Bank Job body count equals wreckage in the wake of DOGE:

Department Of Grifter Enrichment. And drowned, frozen, burned bodies pile up 

at feet of climate deniers battling Mengele Medicine Men for roadkill recognition.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Ugly omen, J6 white supremacists storming Capitalist Hill, ransacking offices, shitting in

halls, foreshadowed shredded social safety net. Scuttled science and education. Heralded 

War House-Offal Office golden grift; Kennedy Center shuttered; redacted Bill Of Rights.

Everything they touch turns to rubble

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

A FINGER FOR THE WORKERS

by Donna Katzin

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

In his big-boss suit, the President 

tours the Ford factory, as if he owns the place,

until a heckler calls him a predator

without even slowing down the line

that devours his labor until the bell rings

to keep the country’s machinery running.

 

The boss’s fingers have never known a callous,       

labored long hours to meet production quotas

until they ached and his back complained.

They flick disdain and disrespect to workers 

like cigarette butts or young women used up

until the men on top tire of them,

spit them out, like last night’s nicotine—traumas and all.

 

But the gesture masquerading as power

sends a message to the shop floor crew—

the truth-teller has gotten under 

boss-man’s sagging skin,

and this group knows how to organize… 

They can do it again.

 
A former union organizer, Donna Katzin has worked for more than four decades with South Africa in its struggle to defeat apartheid and advance the new nation's  democratic development.  She also continues  through Tipitapa Partners to work with vulnerable Nicaraguan communities struggling to feed their children.  She is the author of With These Hands, a book of poetry and photos of South Africans struggling to give birth to a new nation, and a published poet honored to have been included in The New Verse News.

ELEGY AS PROTEST

by Attar Topobroto

 

           for Affan Kurniawan 

 

Leaning on top of Monas’ golden flame, 

I piss over all of Jakarta. I am so high up 

that the trickle turns into precipitation: 

golden clouds carrying golden rain. 

This is what falls onto a mass of motorcyclists 

clad in green, like a carpet of moss drifting 

across the asphalt river of Sudirman street. 

Within them, sirens yelling in red and blue. 

The white car, now yellow, carries him home. 

Affan: chaste, modest, virtuous, pure. 

Affan: trapped in a crowd of bodies, run over. 

Affan: limp, pale, dead. 

Later, they will scrub his name from the history books. 

Children will watch sunlight play tricks 

on the pages, rearranging the letters into a man. 

Affan, what will your gravestone say? 

Besides God, who is most gracious and merciful. 

Besides how we have brought you here in our thousands. 

Besides how we have loved you as countrymen. 

The loam-balls thrown on your restful face 

sparkle under the yellow rain. 

When my father was in college, 

he pissed from Monas too, 

after his classmates fell like mannequins, 

full of bullet holes, like a pin cushion 

which has been poked too many times. 

Later, the students walked all over parliament 

like a child kicking an anthill. 

The day Suharto spoke the words of resignation: 

people in bars and campuses crowded TVs 

and hugged each other, laughed and cried. 

Generations of men in my family have pissed 

from the sky even before Monas was built. 

Affan: lily, banyan, person. 

Soon, a green blanket—of grass, of people— 

covers your body. Workers, rise from your slumber. 

Affan, when the yellow rain gives way, 

the blessed sunlight then shall stay. 

Attar Topobroto is a student at the University of Sydney. His poetry appears in 34 Orchard. He is currently working on his first book, an illustrated novella, with Gramedia, Indonesia’s leading publisher.

THREE ICEFOUND POEMS

by Melanie DuBose

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

1

children formed

a human wall
around
their mother
as 
masked men
reached for her
 
Don't let go
don't let go
a child said
 
"I'm still shaking," —a bystander

2

It's about 

crazy spectacles of violence
dismantling resistance
suppressing dissent
paralyzing the community
authoritarianism and control
gestapo-style intimidation
 
We let them in 
they asked to use the bathroom
they did not use the bathroom
 
"We were not ready," —Museum Worker.

3
3pm to 3am

We dance
honk horns
play music
 
kidnappers
hunt down our family members
throw them down on concrete
question the very workers
who clean their rooms
 
"A peaceful protest just very noisy," —Verita Topoke.

Author’s note: Each poem was found in the words of the news report hyperlinked to its title.

Melanie DuBose lives under camphor trees filled with parrots in Los Angeles (Highland Park). A graduate of the UCLA film school and an advocate for equity in arts education. Her prose and poetry have been published in many journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Kelp/the Wave, The Los Angeles Press, Nixes Mate Review,, and The New Verse News. She recently finished writing her first novel, People Who Love You.

A RETRO INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

by Ralph La Rosa

With a nod to Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us”

Group of Breaker boys. Location: Pittston, Pennsylvania. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1911 January. Source: Library of Congress

The POTUS claims a monarchy, his MAGA boon,

and gutting government, his twisted power

fires thousands, his threats make allies cower.

I don’t know, he says when plotting ruin;

don’t know that blazing August’s now in June;

don’t know about those fed by our endowers—

the sick and war-torn wilting faster than flowers.

I don’t know on trade’s a muddled tune:

He melts down, rages to even the score,

and dictates an Industrial creed outworn

that exploits children, the weak and struggling poor.

Not unionized, their workers’ rights are shorn.

Such crises and chaos democracies deplore

make the knowing world react with scorn.

Ralph La Rosa has published prose on major American writers, including Emerson and Thoreau, and has placed short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film scripts. These days, he mostly writes poetry, appearing on the Internet, in print journals and anthologies. His books include the chapbook Sonnet Stanzas and full-length Ghost Trees and My Miscellaneous Muse. He Loves The New Verse News!

ON THE JOB

by David Chorlton

AI-generated image by Canva for The New Verse News.

Late glow on the slopes, desert streaming
between the ridgeline
and the streets below, Friday afternoon,
T-shirts spotted with the stains
a day’s work leaves behind
                                                  and cashiers
at the supermarket scanning
what the weekend needs. Mourning doves
for restfulness, grackles for
opportunism and he who all day
wheels the carts
                               stacks another line to steer
back to the entranceway. So much
to be done: bread to bake and orders
to compile, restrooms to be cleaned
and a country to be run. A painter
splashed white is picking
up fruit,
              a man dressed in black
casually steps between coffee
and the cookie shelves with a sidearm strapped
conspicuously at his side. So much
to be done:
                    wash the floors, make
appointments, secure domestic peace
and spray the fruit to keep it fresh. Almost
Saturday, but there’s work
for the workers to do even when the sunlight
looks nervous. No rest
for the doctors, mechanics, plumbers
and all
           who believe that even
a rudderless ship reaches port in a storm.


David Chorlton lives in Phoenix close to a mountain preserve. He likes to keep track of the wildlife at the meeting of desert and the urban zone as well as the people at the nearby supermarket. His book Dreams the Stones Have was published last year by The Bitter Oleander Press.

DAYS OF ABSENCE

by Royal Rhodes

Trump’s promise of mass deportation throws undocumented Texans into fear, uncertainty. —Texas Public Radio, December 19, 2024

Was I asleep and missed the sudden Rapture

that took the nameless with familiar faces?

Where did they go, with all the little ones?

The guy who cut the hair of homeless Vets,

the smiling pizza boy, and couriers?

Our well-trimmed gardens are now overgrown.

Produce at the market costs much more—

no strawberries for even ready money.

And who will take our dogs for daily walks?

These days of absence seem so rude at best.

Are we supposed to give Grandma a bath?

She knew the helper more than she knows us.

Are they on retreat deep in the desert

in prayer and fasting from all food and water?

In church they took with us the bread and wine,

but sat apart or stood beside the door.

Have angels raised them up to Paradise?

Was it the Rapture or some plotted rupture?

Royal Rhodes is a poet whose poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including several times in The New Verse News.