DON’T MAKE ME REPEAT MYSELF

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya

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

I dreamt DT was my high school government teacher. Definitely him. Had the waddle in the walk, wore the oversized blue suit (not in the cool David Byrne way), that weird long tie. He’d lecture us, shout at us, breathe like a dragon, then sit sniveling behind his desk. Feeling sorry for himself, I guess. He’d get all red in the face, jump up and down or stamp his feet, and his combover would flap. It was too scary to be funny. The grades he gave totally depended on how much you sucked up to him. I knew I needed to pass this class to graduate high school so my other three degrees would count. I was afraid of what he might do to me, but one day I just lost it. Shouted back. Shouted even louder. Spoke truth to blowhard. You’re wrong! Just plain wrong! About everything. Everything you do is wrong. The only true thing you ever said was that you’d date your daughter. Everyone decent hates you. You are a bad bad boy. People looked at me like I was crazy, fighting him, but I felt like I could finally get some air.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired psychologist, former German Lit major, and restaurant reviewer, has spent much time on both sides of the doctor-patient relationship. She is widely published. Collections include Burrowing Song, Eggs Satori, and Kafka’s Cat(Kattywompus Press), The Book of Knots and Their Untying (Kelsay Books), and, The Beautiful Leaves and Eve the Inventor (Bamboo Dart Press). She co-curates Fourth Saturdays, a long-running poetry series in Claremont, California.

THE BLOOD HAS STAINED OUR STREETS SOMETHING BAD

by DeWitt Clinton


Something is out there, and we’re all just a bit
Terrified of what’s going to happen next, but
What in the heck can we do about something
That we can’t even see when it’s coming about
To slash and twist us about so turning us into
Just about everything we’ve never ever wanted
To be, or even not be, and it’s just awful the way
Some of us know that it’s pretty hard to stop
What we don’t want, or grab at what we do
By crying out loud, or even whispering, but
Some suggest we find all our sleeping masks
And look around in the kitchen for kitchen knives
And run outside in the dark which is darker
Than we’ve ever known, but now we’re slashing
And stabbing and hoping one of those we
Think we’re gutting will be what’s started us
All into the panic we’re in, even on such a
Cold night in the smack dab middle of March
And we don’t want to make too much of it
But we do go out in the morning to see if any
Can find any blood splatters, anything that
Might let us know we’ve once again shaken
The cry baby who keeps us all up late at night,
Twittering and tweeting scaring the whatever
Out of us, but now we can rest a bit until the
Next blowhard makes a mess of something
Out there, which is really here, where we are.

Poems of DeWitt Clinton have appeared recently in Santa Fe Literary Review, Ekphrastic Review, Diaphanous Press, Meta/Phor(e)Play, and The Arabesques Review.  A new book collection of poems On a Lake by a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters will be published in 2018 by Is A Rose Press, (Jerusalem) and a second book collection At the End of the War will be published by Kelsay Books (Hemet, Calif.) in the fall of 2018. He lives in Shorewood, Wisconsin.

BIG WINDS

by Neil Shepard

by grobles63

Johnson, Vermont

Big winds in the back pasture this morning.
Must have blown in from that dark bluster
in Ohio where the orange-haired dystopian
shouted himself red: a nation broken,
and only himself with enough narcissistic
moxie to fix it. What would be the fix? Short,
as always, on specifics. But the fix, so
far, fixates on anyone who crosses him.
In short, big winds blow from the little mind
of a schoolyard bully, a bull who charges
every flagging patch of red. And half
the nation’s ready to blow in his blowhard
direction. They’re small children who want
a power-daddy to fix what’s broke.
And the big winds in the back pasture
presage afternoon thunderstorms and
a dome of hot air crushing down on us
that feels like the beginning of intolerable
conditions. A whole summer and autumn
of unbearable heat, which will roast the air
to record highs. If there’s a weather god
today, he’s a strongman. All those grass-heads
below are dried-out, hollow, blown in one
direction: his. The one turkey wading
through them is the steadiest creature in the field,
flattening the unthinking reeds, feeding as it needs,
and popping out onto lawn, finally, like a reality
TV star to shake off its crown of fluff and seed,
and now I see he’s no turkey, he’s a red-faced turkey
vulture, perfect for the clean-up work to come.

Neil Shepard’s sixth and seventh books of poetry came out in 2015: Hominid Up (Salmon Poetry, Ireland) and Vermont Exit Ramps II (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in many places, among them Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), as well as in Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, and Southern Review. Shepard taught for many years at Johnson State College in Vermont and edited for a quarter-century the Green Mountains Review.