THE NEW CREED

by Indran Amirthanayagam

I will close the border

help heal our country

I will fix everything

This is what I read

on the billboards

of the Daily Message

from our first 

Great Leader, 

the Soul from Queens,

the Charlatan of 

the Deal and now 

my President

so help me Poetry

and help me God

Indran Amirthanayagam has just published Seer (Hanging Loose Press) and The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil).  He is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Mad Hat Press published his love song to Haiti: Powèt Nan Pò A (Poet of the Port). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is a collection of Indran's poems. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

TAX RETURNS LIKE TEA LEAVES

by Carol Parris Krauss

Tasseography. Interpreting patterns in tea leaves.

The inferior grade: dust, steeps in hot water. 

Read clockwise, check the patterns like pages. 

See what the future, the Year of the Water Rabbit,

holds for those that withhold, fail to. 

A charlatan reads.

For a charlatan. 

Carol Parris Krauss: Mother. Teacher. Poet.

FACEBOOK ENABLED A CROOK

by Kathleen Murphey

Facebook enabled a Crook, 

amplified his lies, 

enhanced his stance, 

bated Americans with hate, 

feed Republicans with greed, 

regressed our progress, 

seeded unrest and distrust. 

 

Facebook enabled a Crook, 

not aspiration but aberration, 

not with grace but disgrace, 

no constraint or restraint, 

all dire ire and hellfire, 

a wholesale diabolical fail, 

a criminal unethical snail. 

 

Facebook enabled a Crook, 

a hysterical, mercurial, tyrannical, 

a disdaining lamebrain, 

an inane, vain, scatterbrain, 

an American charlatan, 

a Ku Klux Klan journeyman, 

a Republican madman. 

 

Facebook enabled a Crook, 

a Promethean vulgarian, 

an unrestrained birdbrain, 

a rank, crank prank, 

a foulplay melee, 

a foray in disarray, 

an American pathway astray. 

 

Facebook enabled a Crook, 

a rampage of outrage, 

backstage plunderage, 

an idiot ideograph, 

a grafting personage, 

a forsaking snake, 

a blackjack egomaniac. 

 

Facebook enabled a Crook, 

a megalomaniac quack, 

a throwback battle ax, 

a death-dance petulance, 

a ranting, ignorant adulterant, 

a thunderclap mishap,  

a plump mugwumpy T***p. 

Editor’s Note: Full disclosure: We had decided to post this poem hours before, unaccountably, Facebook suspended our News Verse News Facebook page. Was it because we had previously criticized the network and its founder? Well, here we go again.

Kathleen Murphey is an associate professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia. She has been writing fiction lately, both poetry and short stories.