GIRLY BOY

by Jean Voneman Mikhail 

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

My little boy blue, 

as a child you wore 

girl-pink, not the browns 

of circus bears and puppies. 

Not the beiges of office walls. 

Who cares about colors now?

Wear what you like. 

As a girl child, my boy snakes hung 

down in braids past my fingertips.

They had a sweaty life all their own. 

They flicked ribbon tongues at me,

struck me on the back when I ran 

away, so I cut them off one day.

I stored them in a box of magic tricks,

decorated the lid with sequins, 

like moon disks sparkling in the light.

Who would see them in a dark closet? 

I eventually got my girl groove back. 

I liked the boys, their hawk heads, 

hooded. They blinked in astonishment

that I had actually caught up to them.

Eventually, I grew my braids back,

gave up the girl I used to love. 

I opened my legs to the bedposts. 

I had you on my favorite night of all.

You were born blue and little. 

I think of you now as a girly boy. 

A ghost of a boy-girl in a mirror.

Don’t rub off your eyeshadows

with the back of your hand,  

with your desert skin, so dry and soft. 

Your eyes are the valleys you’ve left 

behind in the rearview mirror, 

where the hills float away. 

The morning moves you, 

slides a mountain aside, as you 

drive through, around the twists 

and turns of your desires. 

The mountains widen, deepen 

their despair then disappear, 

the further into this self-love thing you go. 

Jean Voneman Mikhail has published in One Art: a Journal of Poetry, Sheila Na Gig Online, The New Verse News, The Northern Appalachian Review, and other journals and anthologies. She was recently nominated for “best of the net” by Eucalyptus Lit. 

LIKE MERCURY

by Rachel R. Baum

A memorial for Shayma Roman, 17, who was killed in front of her grandmother’s house in Brooklyn. Credit: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York Times, December 27, 2022

Guns are now the No. 1 cause of deaths among American children and teens, ahead of car crashes, other injuries and congenital disease. —The New York Times, December 15, 2022

measure guns, like AR-15s, in linear feet,

or add up the dead, war’s body count

 

more guns for everyone, more bullets,

more spent shells, more active shooter drills

 

more school playgrounds empty of play

blinds closed, lights off, how many will fit

 

in a supply closet, behind its door, they turn 

and bump, constellations in a night sky

 

stars hiding in quiet deep black holes

listening for hallway footsteps in space

 

no light will pierce their sealed vacuum, 

like Mercury, another moonless messenger

 

without wings on their backpacks

they orbit in locked classrooms

 

holding their teacher’s hand, no talking,

only texting their mothers goodbye.

 

Rachel R. Baum is the editor of Funeral and Memorial Service Readings Poems and Tributes (McFarland, 1999) and the author of the long-running blog Bark: Confessions of a Dog Trainer. Her poems have appeared in Poetica Review, Raven’s Perch, OneArt, Crosswinds, and others. She chairs the committee that will select the first Poet Laureate of Saratoga Springs.

IT ISN'T EASY BEING FAMOUS THESE DAYS

by Michael Cantor

I wonder how it feels to be inned;                              

named as a closet straight, extinct, passé,

who never played the games you seemed to play.

What if some sleaze-bag-tabloid-bag-of-wind

rescinds all notions that you’ve ever sinned,

and hints and winks and rumors all convey

the message from Manhattan to L.A.

that you’re sober, steady, disciplined.

And if the vicious rumors multiply –

no drugs, no drinks, no series of affairs –

if out is in, and in is forced to lie,

and nothing quite makes sense, and no cares  

about you, just about how you appear,

what impact would this have on your career?

What impact could this have on your career?

You’ve worked so hard to make yourself seem twisted –

the haggard pouts and all night flings, two-fisted

slugs of drugs and booze, a constant sneer –

your photos and your tweets helped engineer

a life whose self-indulgences were listed

as evidence that you, indeed, existed,

if only on the tube, out there, somewhere.

But now it seems exposed as parody:

or so the critics claim – and they should know –

your singer-dancer-fashionista show

is dead as dead can be on Junk TV,

for in a world that dines on out and in,

being inned means you can never win.

Michael Cantor’s full-length collection, Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012), was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry.  A chapbook, The Performer, was published in 2007; his work has appeared in The Dark Horse, Measure, Raintown Review, SCR, Chimaera, The Flea, and he has won the New England Poetry Club Gretchen Warren and Erika Mumford prizes.  A native New Yorker, he has lived and worked in Japan, Latin America and Europe, and presently divides his time between hurricane-threatened Plum Island, MA, and drought-threatened Santa Fe, NM. 

HIS NAME

by Andrea Marcusa

Image source: Mansfield News Journal

The most pointless thing of all was how he wasn’t allowed to have his name stitched on his school knapsack – strangers can steal a child that way.  So were those vaccinations against diphtheria, meningitis, polio and the morning vitamin he hated – a chewable pink bear.  Or that car seat he was made to sit in on rides to school, even though most of his friends no longer had to use one, so futile. But there was something about his name – he’d taught himself to write it all by himself when he was two. Wanted everyone to use his full name. Not a nickname, not a shortened version. A good strong one for a boy.  Greek, after an apostle, after a king, and his grandfather in Alaska.  But that morning in the classroom with them all scattered around--there was no way to tell--no trace of it anywhere on him. But inside the neck of his too big, long-sleeved striped jersey, a strange, gloved hand peeled back the collar where he was found limp and face down, and that’s when they spotted it -- in black markered script. Dear child, in those first minutes, even your name was gone, displaced by the one on a hand-me-down from your brother, now a fourth grader in a classroom on the other end of the school, where he was crouched trembling, hiding in the closet.

Andrea Marcusa's  work has appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Ontario Review, The Antigonish Review, Copper Nickel, NewSouth, and other publications. Her work appeared in the essay collection, In the Fullness of Time (Simon and Schuster). She was a finalist in the Ontario Review’s 2007 fiction competition and winner of the Antigonish Review 2008 Fiction competition. She divides her time between literary writing and working in the areas of health care and sustainable agriculture.  She lives in New York City with her husband, two sons and pet cockatiel, Turko.