NO JOKES

by Peter Witt

Tee shirt detail

The White House Correspondents' Association announced Saturday that its annual dinner will not feature comedian Amber Ruffin, nearly two months after it announced her as its selection. In fact, this year's show won't have any comedic performances at all. —ABC News, March 30, 2025

There’ll be no humor at this year’s
White House Correspondents Dinner,
no jokes to remind the trumpster that 
sometimes he seems more buffoonish
than presidential, no attempts to rib 
the VP for discovering
that Greenland is f’ing cold, 
 
no jokes about butt letting the editor
of the Atlantic into a war plan call
while he sat astonished in a Safeway
parking lot,
 
no jokes about the hint of musk
in the white house, and efforts
to unplug Tesla sales, and no hint
that the president has spent
more money on golfing weekends
than the dogers have saved
through their court contested dismissals. 
 
There’ll be no jokes about Jan 6th
invaders getting pardons, or 
failed efforts to settle the wars
in Gaza and Ukraine on the promised
first day in office, or how Canada
has scored a hat trick as the
president can’t remember
if today he raised or lowered tariffs.
 
The newspeople will gather, eat
drink their cocktails, eat their shrimp,
talk about who will be banned
from next week’s press conference,
listen while the master of ceremonies
talks longingly about freedom of the press,
as the crowd whispers what the jokes
might have been if their leadership
hadn’t cowed to the jokester in chief
who is still out there somewhere 
on the 18th green.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

A BANANA, A WANNABE OLIGARCH, AND A CONCEPT WALK INTO A BAR

by Tom Lagasse

A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat the banana from a $6.2m (£4.9m) artwork he bought last week. Justin Sun outbid six others to claim Maurizio Cattelan's infamous 2019 work Comedian - a banana duct-taped to a wall - at Sotheby's auction house in New York. He ate the fruit during a news conference in Hong Kong where he used the moment to draw parallels between the artwork and cryptocurrency. The banana is regularly replaced before exhibitions, with Mr Sun buying the right to display the installation along with a guide on how to replace the fruit. —BBC, November 29, 2024

The banana would have eventually rotted
like all organic things do.  He untaped it, 
unpeeled it and ate it because he owned it.  
Of course, the banana and tape were symbols 
for the concept behind the work of art, 
the way crypto is a concept for money.  
He could have stopped on his way to the auction 
and purchased one at the bodega for half a dollar 
and not six point two mil. With the excess, 
he could have fed a school district or a senior 
center.  He probably could have purchased 
a banana plantation and eaten one every day 
for life. It was never about hunger, the way
a cigar is not always a cigar. The idea was bought 
on behalf of capitalism, its ravenous appetite 
for eating everything in its path and repackaging it, 
before selling it to a hungry public and convincing them 
there is no climate crisis; Ukraine caused its own 
invasion; or the insurrection never was an attempt 
to overthrow democracy. It is no joke   
an oligarch in-waiting ate the banana from “Comedian.” 
For the wealthy, the hoi polloi is always the butt   
of the joke. The laughter comes at our expense. 

Tom Lagasse’s poetry has appeared in Orenaug Mountain Poetry Journal, The Silver Birch Press poetry series, Freshwater Literary Journal, The Eunoia Review, and in numerous anthologies. He was a 2024 Artist in Residence at the Edwin Way Teale House at Trail Wood. He lives in Bristol, CT. 

MY BODY DOESN’T BELONG TO ME

by Linda Laderman

The Alabama Supreme Court [pictured above in Night Country] has ruled that frozen embryos created and stored for in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children under a state law allowing parents to sue for wrongful death of their minor children… The 8-1 majority of the court found that it was a long-established precedent that "unborn children" are "children" for the purpose of the 1872 wrongful death law at issue in the case. It said that any doubt about that was removed by a 2018 amendment to the state's constitution, which declared that it was "the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children." —Reuters, February 23, 2024

I tell my husband that my body doesn’t belong to me.
Does it belong to me then, he says. He thinks he’s hilarious,
 
a comedian. That’s what he calls me when I say something 
he finds absurd or annoying. So I say, are you a comedian?
 
Then he asks me to explain. If your body doesn’t belong 
to you, who does it belong to? All sorts of entities, I say.
 
He thinks I’m overreacting after we watched the episode 
of True Detective Night Country, where we (spoiler alert)
 
find out that the frozen male bodies were not murdered
by a demon, but by a group of indigenous women who
 
were rightly pissed that their friend Annie K was brutally
beaten to death after she discovered a truth hidden from her
 
by her lover. I say, good for those women. Those men deserved
to be put out in the cold  How many times have women put
 
their hands on truth’s hot stove, in spite of its capacity to burn,
and ended up paying for it with everything that meant anything?
 
I ask, did you read the ruling from Alabama’s Supreme Court?
and wave my phone with the breaking news in front of his face.
 
Look, I say, Alabama is the spawn of Dobbs. This is not an episode on HBO.
Well, he says, what are you going to do, throw a bunch of naked law-
 
makers into sub-zero temperatures and leave them to freeze to death?
Only if I have the means and opportunity, I say. You are a comedian, he says.

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet. Her work can be found in many journals, including SWWIM, One Art, The Scapegoat Review, and Mom Egg Review. She is the 2023 recipient of Harbor Review Jewish Women’s Prize and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

THE MAN AND THE IRONIC LUNG

by Ron Riekki

It’s your coffin now —Sharon Olds, from “Satan Says” 

 

My brother says there is nothing funnier than Steven Crowder 

having a collapsed lung, and I tell him I would never use 

the word “funnier” with Steven Crowder, that only “misery” 

works with that guy, how he supposedly re-created George 

Floyd’s murder by having a guy dressed as a cop lightly 

kneel on his neck and how my brother said he’d like to kneel 

on Crowder’s neck for real, & then a few months later & he has 

a collapsed lung, how fitting, how perfectly fitting, this feeling 

that God is listening, how a thirty-four-year-old doesn’t have 

a collapsed lung from nothing, how divine that intervention is, 

the irony of all the hate that came out of Rush Limbaugh’s lungs, 

how it makes sense that he’d go that way, how words can be 

cancerous, how hate speech affects the lungs, the throat, the heart. 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

ON THE DEATH OF GARY SHANDLING

by Jim Gustafson

                         
   With thanks to Mikhail Iossel.

One by one, Mikhail says,
they are leaving through the door
permanently left ajar.
The party goes on without them.
Conversations and feigned laughter
roll into the hall. Ice cubes toll
the glasses. I will have one more.

They are not old.  Some younger
than I have left. The funny ones
see jokes that I just walk by.
They have left their drinks
on the table. Small napkins soak
the sweat. Carrying laughter,
they vanish down the stairs,
through the doors, out
onto the dark lamp avenue.

Others will follow. The songs
will replay. People will ask
did we hear that a while ago,
or is a while ago now?
The music is never forgotten.

Along the damp streets, heel taps
echo against the brownstones.
The funny ones hear and wonder
if they are alone. They stop and listen
then go on, thinking, have you heard
the one about the guy who was alone
and heard footsteps?

Jim Gustafson holds a Master of Divinity from Garrett Theological Seminary at Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Tampa. His chapbook, Driving Home, was published by Aldrich Press in 2013. He teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University and Florida Southwestern State College. His work has most recently appeared in Prick of the Spindle and The Tishman Review. Jim lives in Fort Myers, Florida where he reads, writes, and pulls weeds.

THE COMEDIAN LIED

by Howard Winn

Steve Rannazzisi, during a panel for the “The League” in August, apologized on Tuesday for fabricating a story about escaping from the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.Credit NY Times, September 16, 2015

I was in the building when the first plane

crashed but escaped before the second

fireballed into offices and the hallways

down the many stairs fleeing from the

stock brokers’ cubicles as if escaping

the devils suddenly released upon

the Big Apple in a story told over and

over again even though I knew it was

all a lie of self-aggrandizement so

often I began to believe the falsehood

myself as if creating a forged memory

could make it into the truth although

now caught out in this counterfeit

story I will humbly acknowledge 

my dishonest story and beg forgiveness

so that I may continue my lucrative

career in endorsing well-paying products

and pointless services where truth

can be so inconvenient in the market place.

Howard Winn’s fiction and poetry, has been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), The Long Story,  Cold Mountain Review, Antigonish Review, New Verse News, Chaffin Review, Thin Air Literary Journal, and Whirlwind. His B. A. is from Vassar College. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNY as Professor of English.