SHEEP-KILLING DOG

by Michelle DeRose

Texas AG Ken Paxton steps in to make a woman’s life hell. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Big hats welcome but not a Texas uterus
they won’t probe, tell you how
you can wear it in public,
a watched portal to the baby chute
they need it to be. I guess
to make future bullseyes? Because
there’s also not a barrel
they will look down, keep out
of campuses. In Texas
all depends on the tunnel. 
Barrels determine themselves but canals
are hyper-policed. At the end of every story
is a woman bleeding, empty, and an Attorney
General smug and whole as he always was.

Michelle DeRose hopes she can retire from teaching at the college level before she must relive a school shooting, and she is grateful she doesn't live in Texas. She teaches creative writing and African American, Irish, and world literature at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

THE LAST ELECTION

by George Held

“The worst case,” [Barton] Gellman writes [in The Atlantic], “is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him.” Merely by refusing to concede, Trump could keep the electoral result in doubt through the 79-day period between Election Day and the day the next president is to be inaugurated. Gellman's reporting shows that Republicans are already discussing plans to bypass the popular vote and directly appoint electors to the Electoral College. This could lead the country to a precipice: Two men could show up to be sworn in on Inauguration Day. “One of them,” Gellman writes, “would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.” —Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor, The Atlantic in today’s email to subscribers releasing the magazine’s November cover story.

 ...the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote... 

—Twelfth Amendment, U.S. Constitution

 

The sound of horse-drawn tumbrils

Echoes in DuPont Circle 

Punctuated by the chop of the guillotine 

As the heads of the opposition fall—

the chairs of the most strategic committees,

ranking members of others,

obstreperous heads of key organizations... 

 

The death of the most influential liberal

Justice and her replacement

By another grim rightist ideologue 

Have opened the sluice gates

Of reprisal and crimson revenge. 

 

The Orange Duce is often smiling

As good fortune shines upon him,

Death having opened a decisive seat

On the Supreme Court—never more supreme

Than when handing down death—and then

As prescribed by the Twelfth Amendment,

He receives another term in what will be

The last election, election for life.

 

So, set in motion by his hippo

Of a compliant attorney general,

Who gets the Orange Man’s code— 

No translator needed—his bizarre fantasy

Of a return to the terror of the sans culottes

Haunts official Washington and the entire country,

 

Like a corporeal rendition of the Four

Horsemen of the Apocalypse,

Every night at 5 on Fox TV, kicked off

By a pep rally and boastful remarks

By the Orange Man in Chief,

The tumbrils roll and the glistening blade falls

While, in the continuing pandemic,

The maskless base howls in visceral support.

 

 

A longtime contributor to The New Verse News, George Held plans to vote in 2020.

LAST BUS

by Margery Ross





I catch the last bus
out of downtown DC on April 4, 1968.
Fires loom and looters
have a field day at
D. J. Kaufman’s across
Pennsylvania Avenue from the DOJ
where I monitor urban riots
for the Attorney General. Now
it’s me in the midst of the melee
headed toward Georgetown
hoping to get home.

Fifty-two years, history repeats,
it’s one step forward, five back.
Police still kill with impunity,
cities burn, no end to toxic words
from a reality TV celeb—
good trouble trashed as anarchy.
When reading Ta-Nehisi Coates
five years ago I protested
exaggeration. No more.
Between the World and Me—
That last bus is leaving.


Margery Ross is an artist, poet and avid book listener trying to survive in Washington, D.C.

ON BARS

by DeWitt Henry

Source: Cagle

A.G. Bill Barr
should be disbarred
and/or spend time
behind bars or
drinking at them,
both earnest and glib.
doing biddings of
our worst President,
bar none.

For lack of Barack,
step up, be heard;
raise the bar of expectations.
Climb the barricades.
High jump, pole-jump:
clear the bar.
Cross the bar.

Nearly half of us
fear barbarian hordes,
beards and all (unless
us is them).  Seek to
bar the gate, build barriers.
Keep us over barrels, where
barrels are meant for
storing and protecting,
e.g. over Niagara;
or for shooting fish,
or empty ones for noise.

The BAR man sights down
his ungainly weapon
(though Browning Automatic Rifle
has nothing to do with “baros,”
Greek for weight).

Bars of gold, candy, or soap.
Bars of music and rank.
Barcode.  Bar-
gain.  Crow, salad,
barbell and barometer.
Stars and bars forever.

Barbed.  Barred.

Democracy amok.

DeWitt Henry’s most recent prose collection is Sweet Marjoram: Notes and Essays (MadHat, 2018).  A new collection, Endings and Beginnings: Family Essays, is scheduled for 2020 from MadHat.  Poems have appeared in Ibbetson Street, On the Seawall, Plume, Muddy River Poetry Review, Constellations, and Woven Tale Press.  Henry was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College.

SHE PERSISTS

by Cally Conan-Davies





Beyond my door is a stream I sit beside
and consider the lastingness of things
—rubber soles, for instance, and woollen socks,
a glass bottle, a foam cup, a knot of fishing line—
things that get caught up in the stream.

The hills sharpen the shriek of the owl
and one thought tears away
like a hound into the wind:
men must give a mind
to earth's own laws. I've seen

her body of fresh water
glaze the dark roots of her weedy banks,
her luxury of flowing downstream not locked in
to anything but pouring and falling down; her lowly law:
to round the shape of everything she meets.

She sings syllabically. She looks troubled.
She is and she isn't. Doing her cold work
she streams. She won't go quietly
because the quality of water is not just
locked in. It is fluidity and partner to the wind.

She is what comes from broken stones,
she won't be silent. She is water-talk
from a clouded mountain thrown down on her
and from the weight of this history
she can improvise a trickle in the dust.

She is last and thirst, her religion is open to life.
She puts her money on the ground and sees it gone.
She is the bend in the spear grass. She gives
her light to irises. She stands
in the poppies where a battlefield was.

By otter and crow, these are the faithful facts.
The stream flows even past the span of stone and heron.
She is the engine drinking in every moment,
clear, and charged, and overlapping,
and making things green where she passes

streaming . . .


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.