BURN ME, I TELL THE TRUTH

by Amy Wolf 

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

Burn me, I tell the truth.

In the hardwood floor, pine cool green painted wall calm

Of the yoga studios of Seattle

A battle rages.

Some say, “I am having my sound baths. I am going to reiki circle

I will not talk about politics . I am on a FAST from news media.

I am taking care of my mental well being.

I am not letting THAT MAN take another thing from me.”

Some, in the self-same yoga studios, aware of their skin color to the point of pain,

Say, “I am engaging in mutual aid. I am marching on Saturday. I am standing

Between my neighbors and ICE.

We all have a responsibility. First they came for the immigrants

And trans people

And I know how that poem ends so I fucking did something.”

The two sides do not meet. They do not speak. Mostly because the self-care

Sound bath socially reclusive “my mental health” crowd will not speak.

Fingers in ears, loudly chanting La la la la la at need,

They watch the ICE cars go by.

They watch their neighbors lose jobs, and hormones, security, and housing.

But they are secure in their soymilk organic mudbath facepeels and they do not despair.

“My guru tells me self-care is the very best thing I can do for the planet,

So Monday I leave for Sedona,” they say.

While Vanessa travels to the prisons to teach yoga to inmates

And Jack packs sandwiches and handwarmers to hand out to the people in tents under

the freeway

And Martha learns how to advocate for the undocumented and takes a few into her

house, her huge house, and hides them.

Amy does little but express herself to all the people who could lock her up if they so

chose,

For disparaging the regime, for insisting on rights , not just hers but other peoples.

And in the yoga studios of Seattle, the battle rages on.

Mostly in silence

Because they leave, when we tell them that the world around them is their business

And we none of us have this luxury at this time.

These are the days we spoke of, when we asked, “why didn’t the ordinary people of

Germany stop them?”

If you ever wondered what you would have done then,

Ask yourself what you are doing now, and you will have your answer.

Writers, healers, poets, musicians, humans: take care of yourself

But like the buffalo, face into the storm

Running and hiding will not protect you.

Not this time.

We will remember, when it is over, who fought

And who did not.

You might not wish to face that chill reception.

Amy Wolf is an LMT and energy worker who resides in Seattle, WA, and is studying writing.

WOMAN, WAKING

by Sara Sarna

But Alito’s Italian stand-up routine came at the expense of millions of people’s lived realities in this country right now—many of whom will die because of his unpopular opinion. I personally don’t find it funny at all. —Laura Bassett, Jezebel, July 28, 2022

It was never a matter of balance. 

It was a poorly weighted pendulum  

that sent us scurrying 

between who we needed to be  

and who others needed. 

Sometimes we forgot 

how to choose ourselves, 

put off becoming, 

fell asleep to our value. 

Now you beat your drum 

in celebration of what you claim 

as victory, and it wakes us 

to your arrogance. 

This is one battle. 

We do not fear the war. 

Sara Sarna is a poet, actor and hiker in southeastern Wisconsin. Her work has been published in print and online, and been heard on stage and on the radio. Her chapbook Whispers from a Bench was published in 2019.

TWO POEMS

by Michael H. Brownstein

Image source: Odyssey

ONE MONTH AND WE ARE ALREADY EXHAUSTED

The eighteen wheeler tortoise stepped, jerked, fell back into place:
How can we do this day after day?
The Ozarks grow steeper, brush grass grayer, mice grow bolder inside our walls.
Some days you need to wear a helmet, fatigues.
Others, paper and pen well do, a tablet perhaps, a way to form context. .

Why not words to combat fallacy,
To write on a wall when there is no need for a wall,
Meditations to dissolve conflict?

In the battle of bullies and bullying leadership,
In the battle of superegos.
In the battle of grenade popping automatic weapon thinkers…
The semi reaches the top of the ridge,
Lowers its gears, slowly winds its way down to the hollow.


THE WALL IN QUESTION

A wall built on tumbleweed, spit, grasshopper larvae
Help us, people--help us understand—help us visualize--
I understand none of this. Is there a way I can know?
A wall built of bone marrow mortar and dog piss,
Violent thought and disconnection, the rapid fire
Of bullet cored brick. Help us understand where
This river enters the realm, where this river empties
Its blood to the valleys of snow, how the impact
Of dour men with raccoon hat hair suck away the core.

Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).

MOSUL

John Guzlowski's writing has appeared in Rattle, North American Review, Ontario Review, Nimrod, Salon.com, and many other journals and reviews.  Garrison Keillor read his poem "What My Father Believed" on The Writers Almanac. Guzlowski's 5th book of poems Echoes of Tattered Tongues was a highlighted book in this year's Publishers Weekly Poetry Month issue. 

KHALED AL-ASSAD

by W.F. Lantry

Photo: Khaled al-Asaad in 2002. Marc DEVILLE / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images via NBC News. 

Small birds, protected, flutter ceaselessly
in trees behind our house. Even the deer
serenely ravage gardens as they feed,
browsing their peaceful way from yard to yard.
Kingdom of thunderstorm and thistleseed,
each day leads to another without fear:
no rifle shots resound from our far shore.

But somewhere in a desert there were more
unjustified mortalities today.
Each life’s worth every other, but one man,
devoted, spent his days among the scarred
Palmyran ruins. He opposed a plan
to steal every relic, would not say
where what he’d found was hidden. After prayer

they hung his body in the central square.
As warning? Advertisement? To recruit
new followers? I hesitate to guess.
That mountainside is littered with the charred
relics of warfare: columns, motionless,
have seen such things for centuries, the fruit
of ruthless battles pursued endlessly.


W.F. Lantry’s poetry collections are The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line 2011), and a forthcoming collection The Book of Maps. Honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors' Poetry Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), and the Potomac Review and LaNelle Daniel Prizes. His work has appeared in Asian Cha, Gulf Coast and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He currently works in Washington, DC and is an associate fiction editor at JMWW.

THE WAR COMES HOME

by George Snedeker

Veterans Day Weekend 2014

Many came.
The preacher spoke.
Hearts were broken.
Mourners had nowhere to turn.

With money earned
and with bodies burned.
Someday they will learn
what there is to learn.

Families and friends came to the funeral.
The body was shipped home
with a flag draped over the box.

Tuition paid
for a college education.
He hoped to find a job.
That was his hope,
so many hopes,
all gone now.

Fallen on the battle field:
a post office was named for him,
as if that meant anything.


George Snedeker has published scholarly articles in the areas of social theory and Literary Criticism as well as short stories and poems. His poems have appeared in both literary magazines and sociology journals. His book The Politics of Critical Theory, published in 2004, received several positive reviews in scholarly journals. His satirical novel about college life The Cutting Edge was published under the pen name of David Lansky in 2013. He is the book review editor of the journal Socialism and Democracy and  has served on its editorial board since 1985.

THE FALL OF MOSUL

by George Held

Refugees flee the city of Mosul. The delicately balanced relations among the many communities were permanently shattered in 2003. Photograph: Str/AP. The Guardian, June 13, 2014.

Take it back, we left it,
We will not summon the troops
To fight again for it,
We will not countenance

Another long drawn out
Battle on your homeland,
The corpses, gutted and bloodied,
Strewn, like trash, on the ground.

Mosul is Assyrian, Kurd, Iraqi,
Turkmen, Shabak, Shi’ite, Sunni,
And the oil refinery earns more
Per hour than the marketplaces

For fruits of paradise, leather toolers,
Carpet merchants’ stalls
And sheep-herders’ pens
Combined do per year.

Mosul, you fell in 2003
And now ISIS (not
The Egyptian goddess
of magic and life),

initiates in the sacred order
of hatred and arch violence,
Have achieved the latest fall
Of Cheney and Bush,

Who on 3 May 2003
Declared from ship’s deck
“The Battle of Iraq is over,”
But that mission will never

Be accomplished despite
4,447 American dead,
32,000 wounded plus
Thousands with PTSD

And other extreme debilitations;
Plus one trillion dollars
(Think what this sum could mean
For schools, bridges, healthcare).

Now 68% of Americans
Polled feel no obligation

(<F obliger) to help Iraqis
After we destroyed their country:

No noblesse, no oblige;
No ligature (the “lig”
In “obligation”) tying us
To this desolated land.

Mosul, Baiji, Samarra—
All fall on the road to Baghdad.
(Where are Crosby and Hope
When we really need them?)

Where can we find any hope
In stopping the ISIS advance?
Will the fall of Mosul end
In the union of Syria and Iraq,

A wide swath from the Med
To Iran, the destabilization
Of the Middle East, a threat
To Turkey and Israel?

Where are the leaders
Who can reverse America’s
Knee-jerk reliance on military
Solutions to geopolitical problems?

Is the fall of Mosul a milestone
On the road to the fall
Of (God bless) the
United States of America?


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out soon from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

AGAINST WAR

Translated by Richard O'Connell from the Latin of Tibullus

What is the cause of war and grief that it imparts
but greed for gold, corrupting human hearts;
once long ago there was a golden age
without the curse of jealousy and rage.
Gods of my fathers, save me from the wild
blood lust of war; you knew me as a child
plain and simple, when the herdsman slept
In his low hovel and the faith was kept
by farmers coming to your tree-carved shrines
with thankful gifts of honey cakes and wines.
No battle bugles them, no scarred and torn up earth
but happy songs of harvest and unbridled mirth.
No sieges, rapes and pillage, loudly boasted of,
but lovers in close combat on the bed of love.
Here let me live in peace till I am crowned
with white hair and my offspring clustered round.
Let Peace, bright Peace shine down on our fair fields
blest with the abundance honest labor yields.




Richard O'Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg).

TEXAS TAMPON MASSACRE

by Laura Bernstein

 

Someone let the women out again.
They’re wearing bras as masks,
cut peepholes in padded cups. Spanx
suctioned to their heads. They shoot
super plus tampons out of applicators,
a whole sky of tampons lands
like thick icing on the layered Texas
Capitol building floors. Congressmen
hide behind suitcases, knees locked.
Can’t we work this out? they stutter.
But the women are ruthless,
keep shooting up, aim for the ceiling’s 
gold star. How the mighty men have fallen,
they’re all falling, tripping on strings
gasping for air as tampon shrapnel
blasts through men’s throats. Troops
of Cub Scout tourists shrivel behind
their den leader. This is why we don’t
let women lead, he urges the boys,
the boys nod, journal notes.
But there’s hope. A brave senator,
spackled in a fancy suit-loafer-tie combo
goes unnoticed behind a column. Drops
his trousers and starts loading up.
He prepares to defeat sperm-shaped cotton
with sperm-shaped sperm, will shoot
and shoot until all women are defeated.
He preps for battle. As he waits to dominate
and finish them off, his foot steps
on a bright pink wrapper—gives away
his location. He clenches his cock as the women
take note of his presence. They lunge
toward him, chant high-pitched screams,
thrust tampon boxes to his head. Drop
the gun, or we’ll bleed.

Laura Bernstein is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University, Camden. She lives in Bucks County, PA with her husband and daughter.