SAVE YOUR BREATH

by A J Dalton

 

 

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

They    put   tariff    words now
So   ll use 10% less
God help     hyperverbal
–they    probably end    homeless
 
Marketing    all visuals now
Cos   picture paints   1000
Or strange performance pieces
    actions speak louder,      say
 
Some took   vow    silence
There are fewer arguments truly
   , it   wasted breath
Yet   never hear ‘  love you!’
 
  fear     proposed tariff    space next
As immigration needs controlling
This poem   gone    too long though
And cost      flaming fortune!


A J Dalton is a UK-based writer. He’s published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy with Luna Press, the Dark Woods Rising and Green Man Ascendant poetry collections with Starship Sloane, and other bits and bobs. He lives with his monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra.

MY LITTLE TYRANT

by Sergio A. Ortiz

Image source: The Onion

And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

—Donald Trump

You stopped to desire what you looked at,

you stopped to invent what you looked at,

but you were never at a standstill. 

You understood the docks, the places
where salt is a blind lady seated on your soul,
where foam gnaws at the base of everything,
with its small teeth resembling
the quicksand of what is forgotten,
the sites where old anchors and barges
of oversize engines oxidize in droppings
of seagulls and pelicans, the small white tumults
where peace and movement intertwine
their nets in the old-fashion-way of the sea,
the landscapes that surrounded you
without you knowing how far from your imagination,
your most intimate arguments could travel.

There is a sky full of vessels that eyes contemplate
from below tears, from where your gaze runs out of breath.

An eternity that anyone could say,
is worn out by extreme use, fondled by the dead,
softened by the complaints of the sick,
an afternoon that is sinking like a boat
in a landscape that belongs to nobody else but you.

You understood most of this,
you distrusted your desire, but it was your saliva
that shone on the teeth of your desire,
you were the doughy dough someone chewed
the dough that ended up in your stomach.
It was your hand, the one with which you said goodbye.

That is why you hesitated in the middle of the night,
you heard the trees get lost in their branches,
you felt the wind halt, as if in search of something
between the folds of the curtain, you heard the dead
laugh in their holes imitating moles,
you will discover oblivion, let it walk into your bedroom
dressed as a butler to announce what is already served at the table.

Unintentionally you will dine with great appetite and at the end,
leaving the napkin on the table, you will praise the menu.

Sergio A. Ortiz is a gay Puerto Rican poet and the founding editor of Undertow Tanka Review. He is a two-time Pushcart nominee, a four-time Best of the Web nominee, and a 2016 Best of the Net nominee. His poems have been published in hundreds of journals and anthologies. He is currently working on his first full length collection of poems, Elephant Graveyard.

TERRORISM AND ITS MODES

by Austin Alexis

I compare it to a wintry night:
kale and other crops won't grow:
its land sits barren, dry.
It is defined by lies.
The bodies and shards it scatters
disintegrate in The New York Times.
Its causes it fails to justify
so its effects lack resonance.
By definition it is a cry
whose message, unheard, belies
what it wants to say.
Unpersuasive, it never asks why
its arguments don't make loud sounds
like shopping malls crashing to the ground.


Austin Alexis has published in or has work forthcoming in The Long Islander, Home Planet News, Paterson Literary Review, The New Verse News, The Ledge and other journals. His full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press). His chapbook is For Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada Press). He teaches composition and literature at a CUNY college in Brooklyn and lives in Manhattan, New York City.

BEWARE HEIRS PRESUMPTUOUS

by Gil Hoy

The Supreme Court might be about to blow a hole in Obamacare large enough to fit nearly 10 million people, a new analysis shows. The high court is scheduled to hear arguments this March in a lawsuit claiming President Barack Obama's administration does not have the legal authority to give tax credit subsidies to millions of people who have insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The argument is over a small bit of wording in the law, which says subsidies can go to people buying insurance on state-run marketplaces, but not to people buying on federally run ones. Since the federal government operates the exchanges in two-thirds of the states, a ruling for the plaintiffs would gut the Affordable Care Act. --Jeffrey Young, Huff Post Politics, January 9, 2015


Beware heirs presumptuous
of Greeks, holding gavels, wearing
flowing black robes, potent
mutant seed of Solon, democracy
turned on its head,  sitting beneath
Corinthian marble columns
despising POTUS--Obamacare--
servants of the tyrant,
bearing gifts for Plutus.

There, I’ve said my piece.


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.