NOT TELLING IT SLANT

by Margit Berman

AI graphic by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

This poem went to the protest.

This poem went to the protest and was arrested.

It did nothing wrong.

Just stood and told the truth.

This poem has listened all day long to lies.

This poem's own mother called it evil right to its face

and it is not evil

even though sometimes it wishes it was.

This poem heard lies about zines

and the reflecting pool

and whether anyone needed a ride.

This poem is not evil

and always stands and tells the truth

and—tell the truth—that it why you hate it,

isn't it?

That is why they hanged this detained poem

without a trial

from the gallows

in the trees

until the protest signs

slipped from its hands and fell,

until the words convulsed,

ceased

in its broken neck.

Margit Berman is a writer, psychologist, artistic director of Jackson Street Arts in St. Paul, MN, and faculty at the University of Saint Thomas and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Her poetry has been published in If Poetry Magazine, The Quarry at Split This Rock, Foreign Policy in Focus, on the Mississippi Valley Poetry Walk, and in the anthology, Try to Have Your Writing Make Sense, among others. She has won poetry contests including at the Poetry Free for All, Garrison Keillor’s Green Light at the End of the Dock Poetry Festival, and from the League of Minnesota Poets.

EVERY LITTLE BIT: A HAIBUN

by Miriam Weinstein

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

My assignment—oranges and limes—As much or as little as you’re able to bring—the emailed instructions specified. Food and supplies collected for people afraid to leave their homes during the ICE invasion of Minnesota. Operation Metro Surge. Thousands of uniformed, masked agents carrying weapons—now a common sight on the streets of my city. Agents of fear acting erratically. Lying in face of facts. Spreading terror and chaos across my State—land of ten thousand lakes, surging rivers, roaring waterfalls. In the church parking lot, volunteers load carts—boxes of diapers, canned goods, packaged products and produce. A middle-aged man wheels a cart to the side of my car. I pull out two large reusable bags, empty contents. Five, six pound bags of oranges, five, three pound bags of limes. Small offering considering—68, 400 people, rounded and roughed up, interrogated, arrested. In the name of searching for illegal, criminal aliens, citizens and legal residents—seized—two Americans murdered by ICE agents. Their real agenda—to breed uncertainly, fear, and chaos. Every little bit counts my friend tells me. I’m desperate today to believe in something. Has the produce I dropped off  reached its destinations? During this unfathomable crisis, is someone, somewhere being nourished?

Dusk display—turkey vulture 

soars, swoops down. Curved beak 

grasps carcass, carries rat skyward.

Miriam Weinstein completed a two year apprenticeship program at the Loft Literary Center in 2013. She has two chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press: Twenty Ways of Looking and How to Thread a Needle. Her poems are in several anthologies and journals including A 21st Century Plague, Rocked by the Waters, Poems of Hope and Reassurance, The Heart of All That Is, Survivor Lit, The New Verse News, Plum Tree Tavern, Vita Brevis Press, St. Paul Almanac, and American Jewish World. Her manuscript Here. Between. Beyond. was a finalist for the Concrete Wolf Press Louis Award. Miriam Weinstein is an avid birdwatcher and environmentalist. She lives in Minneapolis, MN.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

by Scott McConnaha

He must've felt proud

seeing his sons become

the thank you he longed

to give a country that made

good on its promise

to realize his dream

of something better,

of peace, of

love.

 

He must've felt duped

as the pretend defenders

beat him from behind

masks revealing rage

against a world that refuses

to bend under

their godless

hate.

Scott McConnaha is a former teacher, editor, and healthcare system administrator. He and his wife, Colleen, live in Plymouth, Wisconsin. They have four children and two grandchildren. Scott has master’s degrees in English and theology and an MBA.

ON THE ARREST OF A DOMESTIC ROCK DOVE

by Matthew King

A pigeon that was captured eight months back near a port after being suspected to be a Chinese spy, is released at a vet hospital in Mumbai, India, Tuesday, Jan.30, 2024. Police had found two rings tied to its legs, carrying words that looked like Chinese. Police suspected it was involved in espionage and took it in. Eventually, it turned out the pigeon was an open-water racing bird from Taiwan that had escaped and made its way to India. With police permission, the bird was transferred to the Bombay Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose doctors set it free on Tuesday. (Anshuman Poyrekar/Hindustan Times via AP via ABC News, February 1, 2024) 

It’s said, when Noah’s ark had run aground

but water stretched far as the human eye

could see, he sent a dove out as a spy.

Her first sortie betrayed for miles around

no evidence of anything undrowned,

but with another week for things to dry,

and Earth to soak in hues of sun and sky,

she brought a sprig of leafy green she found.

The world may end, depending on a word.

We all know, if not why, a dove is meant

to signal peace, so let’s rename the bird

and think, if we would like, it might be sent

to fight for land or money or religion:

that’s no dove, it’s just a dirty pigeon.

Author's note: A Taiwanese racing pigeon, which had been detained in India for eight months on suspicion of being a Chinese spy, was released last week. (In 2020 Indian authorities arrested a suspected Pakistani spy pigeon.) "Pigeon" is another name for domesticated rock doves, and the idea of a spying dove, for me, recalls the bird Noah sent from the ark to see if there was anything alive in the world. The image of the dove returning with an olive branch is of course a widely recognized peace symbol, used for instance in the logo of the annual UN-sponsored International Day of Peace. In light of so much going on in the world, including struggles over naming things and what follows from our naming of them, it is darkly fitting that a dove by another name would be mistaken for a hostile agent.

Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville", where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry.

SAVING PAUL RUSESABAGINA

by Elane Gutterman

Paul Rusesabagina at his cell at the Remera Metropolitan Police Station, Kigali, Rwanda on September 3, 2020. Rusesabagina, arrested early this week to face terror, murder, and arson charges, says he is choosing his defence team to prove his innocence. Following his arrest, Mr Rusesabagina, whose heroic actions during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi inspired the Hollywood movie Hotel Rwanda, was paraded before the media by Rwandan authorities on Monday. His deeds are also captured in the 1998 book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families by American journalist and author Philip Gourevitch. It remains unclear how he ended up on Rwandan soil, where had not set foot in almost 20 years. Authorities said he was arrested on an international warrant, and with the cooperation of other countries. He is accused of founding and sponsoring an armed rebellion that claimed multiple attacks on Rwandan territory, leading to deaths and destruction of property. While living in Belgium and the US with his family, he formed the Rwandan Movement for Democratic Change (MRCD) in 2018, an opposition party with a military wing—the National Liberation Front (FLN)—that has claimed responsibility for a spate of attacks in Rwanda, from its base in eastern DRC. He has also been a fierce critic of President Paul Kagame since the early 2000s, often accusing his government of undermining human rights. —The East African, September 3, 2020

This is why I say that the individual’s most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency —Paul Rusesabagina with Tom Zoellner, An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography


Transported to the land of a thousand hills
at the Hotel des Mille Collines,
the Hotel Rwanda of that harrowing film,
we cheered for the manager,
Paul Rusesabagina, who managed to save
more than twelve hundred Hutus and Tutsis,
after they fled the killing streets
during the Never Again days
when neighbors hunted down neighbors
as spies and inyenzi cockroaches.

Years later, I swam in the hotel pool
where refugees once drank the water.
I ate in the hotel café where penniless
refugees once came for free meals.
I rode the City’s gardened main thoroughfares,
I went to its clinics, restaurants
and galleries. My eyes saw a facade
of peace and prosperity in this land
of a thousand hills.

Yet the hills stood without freedom
and the ruling strongman ruthlessly silenced
his critics. Even before the film,
Rusesabagina had to leave his country to champion change,
living as a citizen of Belgium, then a resident of Texas.
And this week the strongman netted
new prey, that hero kidnapped, taken from Dubai
to Rwanda, to face trumped up charges as a terrorist.

Now, I too feel immersed in the sea of lies
created by our wannabe strongman.
How can Rusesabagina be saved --
yes, he who managed to save so many.

Elane Gutterman is a health researcher who has studied breast cancer treatment in Rwanda and other East African countries. She is a trustee and the literary chair at the West Windsor Arts Center. Her poems have been published in Kelsey Review, Patterson Literary Review, U.S.1 Summer Fiction, and TheNewVerse.News.