AMERICA’S PRECIPICE

by Laura Boatner

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

It starts with one stone
      a chipping away, chiseling of sorts
      digging to China as my mother always         
      said                                        

In China it was pounded into sand
       and their people have known it
       for seven decades or so

Here, babbling brooks, once slick as silk
        have rough edges now etched
        into fifty pieces, maybe fifty-one

A carnival barker yelling;
        flushed face, eyebrows furrowed
        the color of honeydew, or more
        fluorescent than that
     
Stones and bricks in a road leading to Oz
        because this doesn’t feel quite real
        and the curtains are pulled back

Judges, legislators, 
           one at a time acquiescing 
           out of fear, reprisal
           is this really happening?
               to us of all people?
               right now?
               like we’re scarecrows or something?

In one-hundred days
               the rocks have become boulders
               on shoulders of complacency
 
David threw a rock at Goliath 
              hitting the target
              unlike we do at the strongman 

A mountain of stone
              penetrated upon and fissured
              and it’s on this precipice that 
              we now stand

Laura Boatner is a registered nurse by day and an aspiring writer by night.  She has been published in scholarly nursing journals, but finds it much more fun to write fiction.  She has been accepted into the MAPW program at Kennesaw State University in Fall 2025.  She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and her two rescue pups, Birdie and Pepper.

SUMMER WINDING DOWN, SALISBURY, 1666

by Sharon Olson

The king is always allowed to do as he wishes.
And so he chose our city, our neighborhood,
as a hiding place from the plague abound in London.
We who live here are weavers, our hands and feet
engage with our looms, the steady thwacking,
for shawls and lap rugs and the tightly woven arras
behind which the king is kept safe, wrapped in his silks.

The king never travels alone but brings his retinue,
his retainers, the men and ladies waiting on him,
jesters, hangers-on, crowds he thrives on
who gawk at the royal trappings, and yes,
the shiny bubble of pestilence has journeyed
here as well, so that each time we entered the church
we could hear the names being written in the parish book
of Salisbury, St. Edmunds, beginning in July:

Elizabeth Clark, of ye plague
Sarah dau of John Conduit, of ye plague
Martha Bartlett, widow, of ye plague
Elizabeth wife of John Conduit, of ye plague

until in September the buriall column in the ledger
overflowed, in Salisbury alone five hundred died.

The king has had his carnival, has come and gone.
Long live the king.


Editor's Note: “Many of the more affluent city members left London when the plague broke out, including King Charles II and his entourage who left the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Lawrence, to deal with the plague while the king and court retired to Salisbury; they possibly brought the plague with them in the process, as it broke out there after they arrived.  Once this happened, the king and court retired to Oxford to wait it all out.” —Today I Found Out


Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

MAY DAY REVERIE FOR A PLAGUE YEAR

by Steven Croft




Let us go madcap into the outside air physicians tint
with rolling globes like schools of fish that find the darkness
of our lungs, lodge and sting there, a cyanide of suffocation.
Let us go out, walk past every microbe merciless and seeking
like a crow's flat eye

To the Exchange Club Fairgrounds where the Dixieland
Carnival has parked in silent rows gathering the field's dust
for the last two months, unpack its trucks, let the carnies
fire up the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round, share our
cotton candy, hear the cries

Of the game booths' winners and losers, fun with probability
where stakes are low, but as night wears we'll remember
the risk we've taken, repack the carnival, carry a day's memory
of joy between our hands to the solitary wards of our homes,
our national hospital we fled briefly and against all advice.


Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He has recent poems in Willawaw Journal, Sky Island Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, and other places.

ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

by Mark Spicknall

The carny artist makes black scribbles,
laughing, a good game, a show.
He can do us in a minute,
the fastest ever, he says,
his lines a rusty sideshow ride
careening through funnel cake fog.
We are there somewhere,
points on a line we’ve fallen into,
rising, screaming, then falling
into a bell-shaped dead silence.

     He laughs and laughs.

Author’s note:  On the feeling that too often creeps in watching the daily White House coronavirus briefings.


Mark Spicknall is a manufacturing and business consultant, a sailor settled in the mountains, who writes to try to make sense of the tides, the climbs, storms and the stars.

BUILDING WALLS

by Megan Merchant

I have seen the most beautiful walls painted by children,
walls with crowds of hands shaped into doves and flowers
tall. I have seen the most beautiful walls sledged by exhausted
fathers who wear the stucco-dust home and lull their babies
into sleep with tales about how they gutted that great beast.
I have seen the most beautiful walls dressed for carnival, lined
with stars, and helmets in remembrance of our fallen. I have seen
the most beautiful walls drenched with ivy, an accord with nature,
water dripping into buckets down brick. I have heard the word
wall in a thousand clumsy ways, the buzz saw and hammer
being cleaned in the toolbox of his mouth, the easy-dirt of his words,
where we tunnel. I have seen the way men resurrect walls to keep
the light out, too afraid to meet the eyes of a woman directly. Because
he knows she has learned to see around the symbol, that it is not a greater
means of division, or a blockade, but a chance to climb, to see people
holding hands from a different perspective, high enough that their
bodies blur into one.

Megan Merchant is mostly forthcoming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press, 2016 Book of the Year), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017), four chapbooks, and a children’s book with Philomel Books.

VETERAN

by James Penha

The elephant is the soul of Thailand,
the beast that bowed to kings,
built their empires
from jungles, the warrior that bore armies
and the brunt of generals' attacks. The elephant
is the nation's sacred symbol, its
trademark, its commodity, temple-venerable
and night-market kitsch. Without wars to fight
in an age of drones
and caterpillars, the great one follows
Fagins of mahouts
around carnivals amidst city streets,
hobbled and humiliated,
homeless and hungry, trunk
down with its luck. Now cartoon heroes
in masks and dark glasses
are glorified
as one great gray soldier and another
fade away and die.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.