The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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For the community of Winooski [Vermont], the week following Thanksgiving began with a disturbing absence: a second-grade student’s desk was empty. What followed was a rapid-fire sequence of press releases, emotional pleas, and contradictory reports that have left many Vermonters confused about how a seven-year-old boy went from a holiday road trip to a federal detention center in Texas. —Compass Vermont, December 7, 2025
Handmade of painted paper mâché, the figures of the old nativity scene rest in the tattered box I pick up at the church bazaar for $2. Baby Jesus. A goat. Two men with lambs on their shoulders. Mary. Joseph. Five wise men bearing gifts. Two identical angels hinting this might be a combination from two original sets. A blue angel who cannot stand up. A flimsy barn and dry grass. I leave it on the doorstep where my favorite children live, hoping someone might tell the children the story of outcasts, love and humble housing. How Christmas got its name. Even if they use pagan filters. A text arrives: their house doesn’t do nativity. It’s going to Goodwill. I ask for it back. The news: ICE pulled over a seven-year-old and his mother in Illinois. Originally from Ecuador, they live in the town just upriver from me. The child’s school was the first declared sanctuary school in Vermont. The mother and child are now in detention in Texas. The superintendent of schools works to raise money for legal aid, to help the father contact them. Inside me sounds like sanctuary, mercy, peace, star of hope and love reverberate like the striking of a distant temple bell.
Tricia Knoll's hometown of Williston, Vermont is the center of ICE's national data collection and the place scouring social media to find evidence of immigrants without citizenship. She is a poet currently writing in prose. Her chapbook The Unknown Daughter was recently a finalist in the New England Poetry Club chapbook contest.
Screenshot provided by the poet’s son from the video he recorded.
My son told me
he’d put on his vest and
hooked the phone into the chest pocket facing out,
pressed video, then strode across the narrow city street.
That was his spontaneous choice,
just home from his night shift,
after parking his car across from his apartment,
after seeing two masked figures accost a person on the sidewalk.
In his paramedic suit and bullet proof vest with the phone-on-video,
he told them his name and pointed to his photo badge.
He asked them to identify themselves,
looked at their badges—photo-less, flimsy,
“Those could be printed on Etsy,” he said, “How do I know who you are?”
They would not answer. But he got the name of the person they were taking,
who gave it to him freely.
My son yelled at the masked faces, “Take off your masks.
Show us who you are.”
And he yelled it again, venting his anger at their secrecy
at their silence
at their unjust power—
then it was over.
They had shoved the man into their unmarked car and were driving away.
My son told me
that’s when he let loose the language he’d wanted to spit in their faces.
He threw it at their backs, watching the car disappear,
then stood there on the sidewalk,
next to the door to the stairs leading to his apartment,
and called the police.
He waited for them to come so he could report the incident.
A paramedic, he would speak his truth,
“to serve human need, with respect for human dignity,”
and he would wonder what would happen
to the man he would never see again
whose name he would never forget
Judy Strang lives in the woods of Amherst County, VA, where she writes creative nonfiction, directs the Sourwood Forest artist residency program for the Pedlar River Institute, and works part time for the Harte Center for Teaching & Learning at Washington & Lee University (Lexington, VA). Her creative nonfiction, including What Holds Us Here: pieces from a place in the woods (Blackwell Press 2023), examines how humans understand (or not) their place within more-than-human nature.
He is showing us what to say, how to be, when they come for us: upright, measured in tone and gaze, Do you have a judicial warrant? You do not have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens. Show me your judicial warrant. These are the ways, the phrases, memorize them. I have memorized them, in the night when footage of the arrest—I am not obstructing anything I am standing here—replays in the basement of my heart, near where my diaphragm tucks up, presses down, basement where I store cups, snippets, grains of information, instructions for later. For when they come for us, soft body and cheek jammed against a pillow/wall, gloved hands breaking our backs.
Beth Cleary's essays and poems appear in Ninth Letter, The Maine Review, Artist & Influence, Fourth Genre, and other publications. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the main No Kings! march was upwards of 60,000 strong despite shock about assassinations, unknowns about an active shooter, and warnings to stay away.
Source: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee at Instagram
If I write we are going to the sea if I write shall be free if I write Palestine if I write protest or encampment or salaam my brother if I write Allah if I write genocide if I write bombing or Gaza or Hamas if I write Zionist if I write apartheid or war crimes if I write nearly 50,000dead or children are dying or ceasefire now these words may rise up from the text, flagged and marked by a force that gives no quarter to what it does not care to understand. The ink of my pen draws a target on my back on the back of my mother my father my wife my husband my daughter my son my sister my brother salaam my brother salaam salaam salaamsalaam
Adrienne Pilon is a writer, educator, and activist. Recent and forthcoming work appears inThe Tiger Moth Review; Room; Tendon Magazine and elsewhere.
The late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, seen here smiling during a 2021 court appearance, never lost his sense of optimism and joie de vivre behind bars, says Ilia Krasilshchik, a Russian journalist who exchanged letters with him in prison. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images via CBC).
If they’re told to feed you caviar tomorrow, they’ll feed you caviar.
If they’re told to strangle you in your cell, they’ll strangle you.
Trina Gaynon's poems recently appeared in Poetry East, Tomahawk Creek Review, and Clepsydra. More can be found in The Power of the Feminine I, Volume 1, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, other anthologies, numerous journals, and a chapbook An Alphabet of Romance from Finishing Line. She received an MFA in Creative Writing at University of San Francisco. A past volunteer for literacy programs in local libraries and WriteGirl in Los Angeles, she currently leads a group of poetry readers at the Senior Studies Institute in Portland.
a dark bonfire roared step by step down thou shalt not read here she was booked (o the irony) she the book her body still burns
Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.”
Howie Good is the author of more than two dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).
The boy was three and a half feet tall, his black wrists too small for handcuffs.
Author’s Note: My poem is written in the form of the 17-syllable American Sentence invented by Allen Ginsberg.
Erin Murphy’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Normal School, Field, North American Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her eighth book of poetry is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review.
Two days after he read this poem critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) before the Kern County Board of Supervisors in California, Jose Bello, a father, farm worker, and Bakersfield College student, was arrested by ICE. The ACLU sued. On July 29, 2019, PEN America filed a friend of the court brief urging a federal appeals court in California to immediately release Jose, arrested and detained for publicly reciting a poem. Visit facebook.com/FreeJoseBello for updates.
Snakes slither from deep crevasses
in harsh, gray dust.
The earth splits, shakes, and shakes again.
We lock children in cages,
tossed away like broken birds.
Is this our America?
Our skins shaded
by cloud forests, mountains, deserts.
We kneel in the dark,
seek light beyond clouds,
cry for our babies.
Dear America, what are you afraid of?
Hollow-eyed families abandoned on the streets,
old cans kicked down the road.
Our country in tatters,
our leaders hiss lies.
A poet arrested—
heed the oracle.
Take to the streets, America.
We are in battle for our souls.
Angie Minkin is a writer currently living in San Francisco, CA. A Poetry Editor with Vistas & Byways Review, her work appears or is forthcoming in that journal as well as The Pangolin Review, Oh Mama, Bach in the Afternoon, and These Fragile Lilacs. Angie is inspired by the political landscape, poetry of liberation, and the voice of the wise woman.
Couldn’t he have moved to Ecuador? Surrounded by parrots and monkeys, and colonial era churches? Instead, bearded, he was ushered
into a police van in London, and I pictured Sherlock Holmes standing off to one side, a grin on his pointy face, pipe in hand, uttering something cheeky.
How else to process this 9/11 man? This walking man-virus who somehow snatched the biggest governments on Earth
like a father might snatch his little son by the ear, dragging them to their perspective rooms.
White-haired wizard now, Assange protested his apprehension,
London traffic like a street scene in Thomas the Train;
because this time is…and was…a cave full of glittering fossils, mandibles of early hominids, skulls or skull fragments, roaring time signatures, blue birds oozing from fissures in the once-dark ceilings.
Ecuadorians said Assange's residence was no longer tenable. A tree, alabaster white,
growing in his room, the roots digging deep, reaching for the planetary pole, emailed enigmas, evil conspiracies,
a G-Man in Dealey Plaza, bullets screaming past, halting mid-air, like satellites approaching the black hole of history,
and there, Assange, naked, albino, crucified on a hill outside the city’s firewalls. I want to ask him what was the ultimate secret he was searching for? I want to stroll over the glassy Thames with him, like a heavenly correspondent
interviewing an implacable terrorist, the devil made flesh, a fiberoptic alien,
and just listen to the diatribe of his breathing,
and feast on what he sought, and probe as to what he’d embezzled from the pressing otherness of our voiceless governments.
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.
BOLIVAR, Ohio (AP) — Authorities in eastern Ohio say a grocery store employee has been charged with felony theft for helping herself to deli ham for years. Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Hale tells The Columbus Dispatch that an eight-year employee of regional grocery chain Giant Eagle was charged Friday with stealing food estimated by the store to be worth $9,200. The store’s loss prevention manager received a tip that an employee had been eating three to five slices of ham nearly every day over eight years. Authorities say she also sometimes ate salami. —AP via TV10, September 10, 2018
Bolivar (Ohio) rhymes with Oliver!
As in “Please Sir, I want some more.”
Not that she asked. None of us does.
It’s always worked: a pound of ham for you,
a slice for me. $9000 worth of meat
seems like a lot, but calculate the cost
of all the paperclips and pens and Post-It
pads you’ve carried home. Or think of
Government. It’s never just about the
ham. She kept parking in somebody’s
special spot, or got too many weekends
off, or got the ten-cent hourly raise, or stole
a man. Somebody told. Was it the one
who helps herself to bulk nut overweighs?
The one who picks off “spoiled” shrimp?
I’m sorry, we’re like you. How we pretend
to look the other way. How we keep score.
How we watch little things add up until
they’re big enough to use.
Sean Kelbley lives in southeastern Ohio, where he works as an elementary school counselor. His work appears in Crab Creek Review, and online at Poets Reading the News, Rise Up Review (2017 Best of the Net nomination), and Tuck Magazine. He does not endorse employee theft. He dislikes hypocrisy.
O Crying Nazi, cry all night long
because you’re a goddamn human being,
Crying Nazi, you weep like a mourning
mother at her son’s closed casket.
You weep like a goddamn lynching victim on his nickering horse.
You weep like a maniac suffering a nervous breakdown.
Crying Nazi, I don’t feel sorry for you.
Crying Nazi, are your parents proud of you?
Does your sister call you a creep?
Do you hate yourself, deep down in the coal mine shaft of your soul?
You’re embarrassing yourself, Crying Nazi.
Will you forgive yourself for your crybaby tears, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, will you ever cry again?
It can’t go well if you do.
Have you cried many times as an adult?
Did women think you’re too sensitive to straddle you?
I don’t understand you, Crying Nazi.
Does the sun ever shine on your glossy pate when you sin?
O Crying Nazi, how many people have you stabbed,
how many Mexicans have you tarred and feathered?
Have you ever prayed in a mosque or synagogue?
I saw you blubber on tv, Crying Nazi, and I’m not empathetic.
You’re a sissy.
Were you a good little boy playing Cowboys & Indians,
always the cowboy?
O Crying Nazi, are you a misogynist, too?
Or do you love all women as long
as they’re not black, brown, yellow, red, or Semites?
Will you ever fall in love with someone?
When you cry, Nazi, do your fellow Nazis
bristle that you’re such a pussy?
Crying Nazi, is acid in your tears?
Do you chew your bile at breakfast or supper?
Do you hate yourself, Crying Nazi?
Crying Nazi, did you study a lot of Hitler books?
Did you read them in lotus position on your easy chair?
Do you idolize Sheriff Joe and David Duke?
Could you ever be your own hero, Crying Nazi?
What shade of red is your blood, Crying Nazi?
Do you bathe yourself with your tears?
Has life been easy or hard for you?
Can you look into the eclipse and see the blackness
in your fellow Nazis?
Will you immolate yourself until your skin
barbecues into blackness?
When did you learn to hate, Crying Nazi?
Did a black boxer beat the hell out of you in the ring
and then brag about it?
Do you cry yourself to sleep in your cell at night?
I wonder if you regret your twenty minutes of infamy.
I wonder if God loves you, Crying Nazi.
Do you hang out with your Nazi buddies in chow hall?
O Crying Nazi, cry for the Charleston Nine.
Cry for Trayvon Martin.
Cry for Ferguson.
Cry for Buchenwald.
Cry for the martyred saints.
Most of all, cry for your fellow Nazis.
Stop crying for yourself, Crying Nazi.
Maybe you’ll meet a girl who loves you
because you’re bald.
Maybe she’ll love you because you’re cute.
Or maybe she’ll love you because you’re a Crying Nazi.
Then you can father crying Nazi babies.
Crying Nazi, you’re an oxymoron.
Do you get high, Crying Nazi?
Do you eat a lot of beef or are you a vegan?
I know you don’t eat nails, Crying Nazi.
They’d make you bawl, Crying Nazi.
Do you jack off in your cell at night, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, I feel your hateful pain.
How many guns do you own?
I saw you wearing your zebra outfit in jail the other day, Crying Nazi.
You looked sad as a fallen cake.
You looked sadder than a Syrian orphan.
Sadder than a basset hound who’s lost his best friend.
Sadder than a starving cat.
Sadder than a melting snowman.
You didn’t look proud, Crying Nazi.
Where was your Sieg Heil! when you needed it, Crying Nazi?
Will your hate buddies protect you against the Mexican Mafia?
The Black Brotherhood?
High prices in the commissary?
I’m sorry I judge you, Crying Nazi.
So, when you get out of jail, I’ll buy you a Heineken
and a one-way ticket to Death Valley,
throw in a Bible to read on your bus trip
and leave a two-dollar bill in it, Crying Nazi,
along with a little note reading Prove you’re a goddamn human being, Crying Nazi: Love yourself a little more, and maybe, just maybe you can love the rest of us, too, because we’re all goddamn human beings, Crying Nazi.
David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, Santa Clara Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Midnight Lane Boutique, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks, he’s the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. His latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree available from Flutter Press.
This was not his only arrest, is in the front row,
wondering when we will get back to
what matters: graded things, things with points.
Her anxiety manifests in demands for rubrics
and in her bouncing leg, her rolling eyes.
She does things right, has no mercy
for digression, for mistake.
She will go home tonight and listen
to her brother and her father fight,
each so disappointed in the other’s
imperfection.
Next to her sits if he hadn’t been doing anything wrong nothing would have happened to him,
fingering the cross she wears,
this Catholic girl who wants to be a nun
but likes a boy in class. It pains me
to watch her clumsy, unsuccessful bids.
The war inside her is constant
and unrelenting, but she has the naïve
trust in the world that so few
sixteen-year-old girls have anymore.
It’s hard not to envy her,
harder not to cringe against
the ways her knowledge may come.
Everybody knows not to talk back to a police officer no matter what
is headed for the military, and
I can feel him wondering
what he would do: chokehold or no chokehold, chokehold or no chokehold,
can feel the adrenaline jolting him
at the thought, graduation
only two months away
and everything so suddenly looming.
It’s sad, but I don’t see how that makes it OK to riot
keeps looking at his phone,
waiting for his girl to text him
from the math class three doors down,
waiting for her to tell him
where they can go later to fuck,
waiting for her to confirm that they will
again today, after practice, as they do
whenever they can, because they can
and because they are young
and because it is new
and all-consuming.
Maybe there’s a lot of racism in other places, but I just don’t see it here
has a hard time sitting in the desk
at six-foot-two, and wonders
how long he can lift
in the weight room after school
and still get his chores done before dark.
Meanwhile, just last year two people
in this class called me nigger
slides down in her chair,
trying to disappear out of this
conversation that is focused on her
without being focused on her,
as so many conversations have been
and stop asking me if I live on the rez
remains silent as always,
pulls the hood of his sweatshirt
further down his forehead,
turns his music
up.
LouAnn Shepard Muhm is a poet and teacher from northern Minnesota. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and she was a finalist for the Creekwalker Poetry Prize and the Late Blooms Postcard Series. Muhm is a two-time recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in Poetry and has been awarded scholarships from the Key West Literary Seminar, Vermont Studio Center, and Sierra Nevada College. Her chapbook Dear Immovable was published in 2006 by Pudding House Press, and her full-length poetry collection Breaking the Glass (Loonfeather Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Midwest Book Award in Poetry. Muhm holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Sierra Nevada College, and was recently granted an 18-month Artist's Fellowship by the Region 2 Arts Council of Minnesota.
The Swedish authorities have filed criminal charges against a Syrian man who is suspected of having participated in the mass killing of captured Syrian soldiers in 2012. The police arrested the man, Haisam Omar Sakhanh, on Friday, in the town of Karlskoga, Sweden, and charged him with a crime against international law. —NY Times, March 14, 2016
It is a late-winter day, chilly,
so the nine standing men wear a jacket
or a vest, and seven, two with masks,
point AK-47s at their targets
on the ground in front of them: seven
young men, torsos stripped bare, five
with their foreheads pressed to the ground—
two with hands bound behind their back,
three with hands restrained below the waist,
and two with hands free, one of whom rests
his forehead on a bare right arm, while
the other, at the extreme right, lies legs
spread, his chin on his left fist, his eyebrows
and nose visible for his last picture.
We can only guess at their last thoughts
and prayers, but each one knows
that any second a bullet will crash
into the back of his skull, and he will be dead.
The standing man at the extreme right
holds a pistol and looks down the rocky field,
maybe for a signal to begin shooting.
He will soon start the execution, firing
the first shot into his helpless victim.
The other armed men follow suit; all the bare-
backed men are now dead, and maybe so
are some of the rebels. Life is violent,
brutish and short for men at war, especially
a civil war, and usually it is better
to be a man with a Kalashnikov than one
stripped, prone, and waiting . . .
George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Muddy River Books, Bleak Splendor.
Hiding in a hoodie
like some small-time drug
dealer the Big Pharmy CEO
is marched to his booking
between two large deputies
as he proclaims his innocence
of the Ponzi scam he used
while running his nearly
bankrupt hedge fund with
no auditor and not much
cash left in the bank as
he funneled dough from his
company on the edge of
going under to hide his
duplicitous inability to
find the right investments
for his fund even with
illegal Insider info it seems
from the evidence noted
that this most eligible bachelor
of the year is perhaps the
phony loser of the year
and the major drug dealer
of our double-dealing time
Howard Winn’s fiction and poetry, has been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), Galway Review (Ireland), Antigonish Review. He has been recommended for the Pushcart Poetry Award three times. His B. A. is from Vassar College. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University His doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNY as Professor of English.
The following is a found poem created by the Editor of TheNewVerse.News from the words of Sandra Bland (according to a HuffPost transcript prepared by Ryan Grim with Matt Ramos and Dhyana Taylor from the dash cam video) as spoken to Texas state trooper Brian Encinia and, later, a female officer, after Encinia stopped Sandra Bland's car on July 10. Sandra Bland was later found dead in a Waller County, Texas jail cell.
Sandra Bland
Got here just
today.
I’m
waiting
on you. This
is your job.
I'm
waiting
on you. What
do you want
me to do?
I am.
I really am.
I feel
like it’s crap what
I’m
getting a ticket for.
I was
getting out of your way.
You were speeding up,
tailing me,
so I move over and you stop me.
So yeah,
I am
a little irritated., but
that doesn’t stop you
from giving me
a ticket.
You asked me
what was wrong,
now I told you.
So now
I'm
done,
yeah.
I'm
in my car.
Why do I have to
put out my cigarette?"
I don't have to step
out of my car. Why
am I . . . No, you
don't have the right. No, you
don't have the right. You
don’t have the right. No, you
don’t have the right
to do this.
I refuse
to talk to you other than
to identify myself.
I am
getting removed
for failure to signal?
And I'm
calling my lawyer.
OK,
you're going to
yank me
out of the car?
OK,
alright. Let’s do this.
Don't touch me!
Don't touch me.
Don't touch me!
I’m
not under arrest.
You
don't have the right
to take me
out of the car
I'm
under arrest?
For what?
For what?
For what?
Why
am I
being
apprehended? You’re trying
to give me a ticket
for failure . . .
Why
am I
being
apprehended? You just
opened my—
So you're threatening
to drag me out
of my own car?
And then . . .
Wow.
Wow.
For a failure to signal?
You're doing all this
for a failure to signal?
Right. Yeah,
let's take this to court.
Let’s
do this.
For a failure to signal? Yup,
for a failure to signal!
I'm
not on the phone.
I have a right
to record. This
is my property.
Sir?
for a fucking failure to signal.
My
goodness.
Y’all are interesting.
Very interesting.
You feelin’
good about yourself?
You feelin’
good about yourself?
For a failure to signal,
you feel real
good about yourself
don’t you?
you feel
good about yourself
don’t you?
Why
am I
being arrested?
Why
can’t you . . .
Why
am I
being arrested?
Why
don’t you tell me
that part?
Why
will you not tell me
w h a t ‘ s g o i n g on ?
I’m
not complying
‘cause you just pulled me
out of my car.
Are you
fucking
kidding me? This
is some bull . . .
'Cause you know this
straight bullshit. And you're
full of shit. Full of straight shit.
That's all y’all are
is some straight scared cops.
South Carolina
got y’all bitch asses
scared. That’s
all it is.
Fucking scared of a female.
I was trying
to sign
the fucking ticket -- whatever.
Are you fucking
serious? Oh
I can’t wait
'til we go to court.
O o h
I
can’t wait.
I
cannot wait
'til we go to court.
I can’t wait.
Oh I can’t wait!
You want me
to sit down now?
Or
are you going to throw me to the floor?
That would make you feel better
about yourself?
Nah that would make you feel better
about yourself.
That would make you feel real good wouldn't it?
Pussy ass.
Fucking pussy.
For a failure to signal
you’re doing all of this.
In little ass
Praire View,
Texas.
My God they must have ...
I’m getting a --
for what? For what?
I’m getting a warning
for what? For what!?
Well you just pointed me
over there! Get
your mind right.
O o h
I swear
on my life,
y'all are some
pussies. A pussy-ass
cop,
for a fucking signal you’re
gonna take me to jail.
For a fucking ticket. What
a pussy. What
a pussy. You’re about
to break my fucking wrist!
I’m
standing
still!
You keep moving
me, goddammit.
Don't touch me.
Fucking pussy --
for a traffic ticket.
You asked me
what was wrong!
Do I feel
like I have anything
on me? This a fucking maxi dress.
This a maxi dress.
Fucking assholes. You’re
about to break my wrist. Can you
stop? You’re about to fucking
break my wrist! Stop!!!
For a fucking traffic ticket,
you are such a pussy.
You are
such a pussy.
For a traffic signal!
Don’t it make you feel
real good
don’t it? A female
for a traffic ticket.
Don’t it make you feel
good Officer Encinia? You're
a real man now.
I got
epilepsy, you motherfucker.
Good?
Good?
Make you feel real
good for a female. Y'all
strong, y'all real
strong.
I
can’t go
anywhere with
your fucking
knee
in my
back,
duh!
Whatever, whatever.
If I could, I can't.
I can't even
fucking feel my arms.
Goddamn.
I can't . . .
You just
slammed my head into
the ground and you
do not even care ...
I can't
even hear.
He slammed my
fucking head
into the ground.
What
the hell.
All of this for a traffic signal.
I swear to God.
All of this for a traffic signal.
Thank you for recording!
Thank you! For a traffic signal --
slam me
into the ground and
everything!
Everything!
I hope
y'all
feel good
And No
you didn't.
You didn't see
everything
leading
up
to
it . . .
A Russian court has convicted poet and teacher Alexander Byvshev of ‘inciting enmity’ and sentenced him to 300 hours of community service, confiscated his computer and prohibited him from working as a school teacher for two years. His ‘crime’ – the poem ‘To Ukrainian Patriots’ in which he expresses his opposition to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and suggests Ukrainians should ensure that not one inch of Crimea is handed “to Putin’s chekists”. —Human Rights in Ukraine (KHPG), July 14, 2015
The storefront windows dim with filth and soot.
Cyrillic, signs hold sway and hang above
the wooden-blocks paving the streets in rot.
In nineteen-twenty-one the husband's shot –
The committee puts its strangle-hold on nearly
everything the others wrote, and thought.
Damp fire-wood and famine, typhus rages
in darkened spaces – their words, to memory,
then burned. An apartment bare, but for the language,
whispered in the cold rail cars which pass
beneath the towers. Outside a prison's gate,
in the crowd she waits to see her son, for hours.
Here, a crimson-history is wrought:
"Can you describe this?" She said, "I can." She thought.
Author’s note: Alexander Byvshev’s situation is reminiscent of the plight of other Russian poets, including Anna Achmatova, (whom the poem is about) in post-revolutionary Russia, when Achmatova's work was officially stifled, though it continued to circulate in secret (samizdat), her work hidden passed and read in the gulags. With the conviction of Alexander Byvshev it seems that Russia is returning to the practice of censoring and persecuting its writers for their political views.
Tracey Gratch lives in Quincy, MA with her husband and their four children. Her poems have appeared in publications including Mezzo Cammin, The Literary Bohemian, The Flea, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine, The New Verse News and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Her poem, "Strong Woman" is included in the American College of Physicians, On Being A Doctor, Volume 4.
Head, hands and feet stuck out
Between two wooden boats.
The face, the extremities smeared
With honey for insects, stinging wasps,
Flies. Force fed so that he lives
In the torment of worms and maggots
Eating him from the inside out. A death
Reserved for traitors.
A cordon drawn. He needs to hide.
They’d walked from the blast
Satisfied. Now it’s gone wrong.
His brother’s body beneath wheels.
Bleeding, he crawls under the tarp
Of a white boat in someone’s yard.
All day, silent, Trapped in torment
eating him from the inside out.
Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize. Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.
