THE LOWEST CUT

by Darcy Grabenstein

Most folks mispronounce Wilkes-Barre, PA.
While the town is actually pronounced like “berry”
it now is living up to its butchered version: “bar” 
(the Diamond City ain’t shining so bright right now…)

That’s because Luzerne County has barred
Low Cut Connie from performing at the town’s 
Rockin’ the River event for “political” reasons (wink, wink)

Methinks it’s due to his song, “Livin in the USA.”
It’s about deportations, making people disappear
and now Luzerne County has made him disappear (their loss)

The irony is that the band was banned, replaced
by Halfway to Hell, whose leader was convicted
of raping a teenager (sound familiar?)

The irony continues.
At Low Cut Connie concerts, frontman Adam Weiner
waxes poetic about love and diversity (oops, strike that word)

I’ll admit that cutting Low Cut Connie can’t be equated
with cutting Medicaid, free school lunches, and other “woke” programs
Yet it still cuts me to the core. (I am gutted)

We certainly are halfway to hell.

A marketing writer by profession, Darcy Grabenstein turns to poetry as a creative and cathartic outlet. The theme of social (in)justice runs through many of her poems, and she longs for the day where her page will finally be blank.

ROOMS OF HOPE

by Jeannie E. Roberts

—for Amelia Uzun and the Ukrainian Refugees

 

The greenery blooms 

holds truths 

lifts like hands 

seeks the light 

the prayer plant flowers 

as the cyclamen thrives 

they shelter in safety 

in the luster of peaceful living

A young girl blooms 

holds truths 

lifts her voice 

as if a prayer 

the bomb shelter lightens 

the gathering listens 

the room warms as one 

with a song from the film Frozen 

A concert hall blooms

holds truths 

a young girl lifts her voice 

where notes effloresce 

ascend in national anthem 

as if a prayer 

in the light 

she sings for the luster 

of peaceful living once again 

Jeannie E. Roberts has authored seven books, five poetry collections and two illustrated children's books. Her most recent collection As If Labyrinth - Pandemic Inspired Poems was released in 2021 by Kelsay Books. Her poems appear in Panoply, Sky Island Journal, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She’s an animal lover, a nature enthusiast, a Best of the Net award nominee, and a poetry editor of the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. 

Remembering Michael Nesmith(December 30, 1942 – December 10, 2021)

by Jeannie E. Roberts

The Monkees Farewell Tour with Michael Nesmith & Micky Dolenz

Sunday, November 14, 2021, The Greek Theatre, Los Angeles CA

It was 1967, the year deafening screams overpowered the St. Paul 

Auditorium as The Monkees performed for us and thousands 

of other teeny boppers. I was eleven and lucky enough to attend 

the concert with my older sister, Mary, and our neighbor friends, 

Linda and Lisa. I recall wearing a mod-style dress, a shapeless 

shift with vertical stripes in red and yellow. My purse matched 

and attached to a faux gold, chain-link handle. I felt hip 

in my tween-modernness as I waited to hear my favorite song 

“Daydream Believer.” Instead, an audience of shrieking girls 

made inaudible the four young men on stage. Even so, 

their goofy antics offered a visual component to the performance. 

Like their TV show, the band members wore capes 

as they leapt across the proscenium with youthful effervescence. 

After an hour or more of ear-piercing noise, 

our hearing wasn’t quite the same. Still, it was worth it. 

I liked Michael, the tall, introspective Monkee, the 12-string 

electric guitar player who wore a forest green wool hat 

with pompom. Hired for his vast musical talent, he was also a poet. 

To me, Michael Nesmith seemed kind, thoughtful, and authentic, 

in the end, qualities that really matter.

Jeannie E. Roberts lives in Wisconsin, where she writes, draws and paints, and often photographs her natural surroundings. She’s authored seven books, five poetry collections and two illustrated children's books. Her newest collection, As If Labyrinth - Pandemic Inspired Poems, was released by Kelsay Books in April of 2021. Her poems appear in Anti-Heroin Chic, Sky Island Journal, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She’s an animal lover, a nature enthusiast, a Best of the Net award nominee, and a poetry editor of the online literary magazine Halfway Down the Stairs. 

JUMP

 by T. R. Poulson

   for Eddie Van Halen

When I think of punches

I think of unrealized 

dreams and a concert, way back

in 1984, those numbers in lights against

the dark. We could only record

it in our minds. Eddie riffed like a machine

except no machine

could have held its own, punch

for punch, with him. Those songs from records

made even better with so many fans, really

getting into it, hands in the air, hands against

hands, girlfriends held up on the backs

of shoulders. Mom bought us tickets way back

in the seats, safe from those machine-

like fans on the Minidome turf—against

my will. I thought I’d taken my punches

by then, was ripe for real

lessons in love. For the record,

I was a kid, too young even to record

a first kiss or palm on the small of my back.

“I’ll Wait,” I sang, and willed it to be real,

always impatient with the machine

that was time. I believed love had no punches,

just a “Pretty Woman” winning against

mean girls, but what mean girls? Us against

them? Those riffs, both recorded

and live, erased all life’s punches

rendered us all, one of us. I want to go back,

to find a time machine

that will take me away from the real

of today, to the rose-colored real

of then. I want to fight against

the way we inflict pain like a machine

I want to stop and record

that first palm on my back.

This time, I would throw the right punches.

Roll with the punches, get 

to what’s real. I got my back 

against the record machine.

T. R. Poulson, a University of Nevada Alum and proud Wolf Pack fan, lives in San Mateo, California.  A previous contributor to The New Verse News, her work has also appeared in other journals, including Booth, Rattle, The Meadow, The Raintown Review, J Journal, Verdad, and Trajectory.

MOZART REQUIEM STREAMED IN A TIME OF COVID-19

by Anne Harding Woodworth

NOTE: This concert [of the Mozart Requiem] will be closed to the public; please do not attempt to visit the concert hall.
—Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, March 7, 2020


On this night of wrath and lacrymosa
the hall is hollow except for soloists,
chorus, orchestra and conductor, who,
at his back, feels eyes that aren’t there.

And at the end, when he turns to take a bow
before the crowd that has stayed away,
it’s as if he’s infected with the emptiness he sees.

The phantom audience, in its contagious silence,
offers no sound of shout or cough or applause,
no standing ovation for those who have just sung out
through an ether of airwaves to the undead.

Confutatis is understatement.

Against all advice, the conductor shakes hands
with the first violinist, who stands ready to leave
with her instrument that played flawlessly, while
the chorus begged eternal rest for whoever was not there.

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of a six books of poetry, with a seventh appearing late this year.  Of her four chapbooks, The Last Gun won the 2016 COG Poetry Award, and an excerpt from it was subsequently animated at www.cogzine.com/watch. Harding Woodworth is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, and of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst MA.

LSD AT T***P RALLY

by Nate Alaska

A bronze extraterrestrial preaches to an ocean
of oscillating flesh and bright red mesh

He is deep sea indigo, scab scarlet, moss green
Phoenician purple, and labia pink

Weeping faces shift expression beneath
ripples of power and contort themselves in concert

The orchestra of discarnate beings that shouldn’t be
issues forth gentle hymns of revolution

A secret of forbidden lust dribbles from
every observable orifice with peculiar viscosity

Chanting declarations of rage summons forth
a parade of creatures from their nightmares

Millions worship together in silence at an
altar of pain beyond language or feeling

Nate Alaska is an amateur poet, author, and a student of philosophy from Chicago's Southwest suburbs. When he isn't counting syllables toward sonnets, he enjoys coffee and wine, hiking, cooking vegetarian cuisine, and practices meditation.

BREAKING POINT

by David Chorlton

He was there to play, not to party. The night before the shooting, Mr. Paddock made two complaints to the hotel about noise coming from his downstairs neighbors: Albert Garzon, a restaurant owner visiting from San Diego, and his wife and friends. Mr. Garzon, who was staying in 31-135, directly beneath Mr. Paddock, said security guards knocked on his door around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday and asked him to turn down his music, country songs. When he asked where the complaint was coming from, pointing out that the nearest rooms on either side were far away, the security guard said, “It’s the guest above you.” —The New York Times, October 4, 2017

He was a quiet man, a man
who worked with numbers and amassed
more money than he had use for
so he spent some on guns
which made him feel bigger
than he was, but still quiet.
No known affiliations
to a cause or a religion
whose god ordered him to kill.
He liked to play against machines, to watch
the cards and count the winnings.
Otherwise, he kept
to himself.
He needed to sleep to concentrate next time
around.
      Suppose
it wasn’t the sense of a mission
that made him stack
his weapons in the room, suppose
he simply liked to carry them around
just in case
he ever needed them, you know,
for some spontaneous and banal reason
such as the noise
rising from the concert stage thirty-two floors down
and when it went on too, too
long, he smashed the window
and didn’t have to aim.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and late in 2017 The Bitter Oleander Press will publish Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.

DANGEROUS WOMEN

by Elizabeth S. Wolf

It was her first concert
out with friends. The gang of girls.
Besties since babies, they said.
They picked outfits and did their hair,
one high ponytail,  smoky eyes. They listened
to their parents lecture and promised
to follow the signs and obey the rules and
not take drinks from strangers and
oh my god mom, relax. It’s a concert.
Not a bar. Not a North-West Derby
brawl. Just a bunch of girls
dancing and screaming to their
favorite songs. It was Ariana Grande
live on stage: Manchester Arena
Manchester England
22 May 2017.

Three girls, who decided
at the last minute not to wear
kitten ears- three bold teens
walked into the concert as if
they owned the world.

One girl died on the floor,
shattered; the last thing she saw
bouquets of pink balloons
rising towards the ceiling.

The second girl bled from wounds
scattered about her body. She is
in hospital now, hooked up to tubes,
waiting on tests. For several hours
she asked so many questions, over
and over, but now she does not.
She answers the doctors queries,
shifts for the nurses hands: yes, her
ears are still ringing; yes, she still
smells burnt tubing. She sips water
and stares. Shell shock, they whisper.
Her ma and da take turns at her
bedside or tending the others
back home.

The third girl went home
uninjured. She spent a little
longer in the loo and got
separated from her friends.
She lost her voice
screaming for hours.
Now she won’t talk, doesn’t
eat, doesn’t drink. She lies
curled on her bed, clutching
the string from a pink
balloon. When she goes
to the bathroom, her mum
stands by the doorway, crooning
a lullaby. They call her
uninjured, because
she didn’t bleed
at the scene.

She lay in her bed while
day broke up night, again
and again. And on the third
day she called her mum.
Mum, she whispered, wide eyed,
after the bomb there was blood
on the walls, I got so scared.
I was alone! she said,
alone alone. But then
I saw a lady, almost like you,
and she stopped running to lift
up a little girl who had fell.
And the girl, she just hung
on, and I remembered to
look for the helpers.

That’s right, said her mum,
stroking her hair. Look for
the helpers.

And then I was running and screaming
and in the big room, in the hotel,
there was a lady, black as pitch, she
smelled like soap, said the girl. And
I was shaking and looking all around
and she came and held me. I
don’t even know who she is.

That was Amina, said her mum.
She works for the hotel, she
cleans the rooms. She left her own
country to flee the bombs and
find food.  Now she lives here.
And found you.

Mum, said the girl. I know what I want
to do now. I know.

What’s that? asked her mum.

I want to be a helper, said the
girl. And she got out of bed.


Author’s note: Characters and some incidents in this narrative are fictional although descriptions are based on news reports from Manchester.

Elizabeth S. Wolf writes because telling stories is how we make sense of our world, how we heal, and how we celebrate. She seeks that sliver of truth amidst the chattering monkey mind. Also, she sings loudly while driving. Elizabeth’s chapbook What I Learned: Poems is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in fall 2017.

FOR THE PLEASURES OF SERIOUSNESS

by David Chorlton

“But I think there's an appetite for seriousness. Seriousness is voluptuous, and very few people have allowed themselves the luxury of it. Seriousness is not Calvinistic, it's not a renunciation, it's the very opposite of that. Seriousness is the deepest pleasure we have. But now I see people allowing their lives to diminish, to become shallow, so they can't enjoy the deep wells of experience. Maybe it's always been this way, when the heart tends to shut down. If only the heart shut down and there were no repercussions, it would be O.K., but when the heart shuts down, the whole system goes into a kind of despair that is intolerable." —Leonard Cohen to Anjelica Huston in Interview, November 1992

Strange, how a voice
can stay beside a person
for forty years without
its owner ever
stepping forward to be
introduced. On a cold night
in Vienna the vinyl
sang “Suzanne” for company
in a small apartment
with no view except
onto a lonely courtyard
starlight could not reach.
“It’s four in the morning . . . “
and always was
even on the radio
AM show. “Howdy”
said the host in his best
Austrian-English before
pronouncing Le-on-ard Co-hen
to introduce a song
that matched the weather.
Years later, in an Arizona
mining town
entering retirement
a poet set the needle down
and “One by one the guests arrived”
across the desert hills.
Deeper now
and deepening, the timbre
ripened with experience
passing through years
stained by war until it
could “run no more
with that lawless crowd
while killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.”
Everybody knows
what he referred to
while few could say it
with such elegant simplicity.
Out walking, when
a song came uninvited
to mind, it told me “We are ugly
but we have the music.”
It could plead
for “the light in the land of plenty
to shine on the truth someday.”
Whiskey warm
and cured in decades
of cigarette smoke
the voice endured
with a smile depression
can’t erase. In my Secret Life
I smile too, but in recognition
more than humor.
A man in his mid-seventies
ran skipping onto stage
to perform the soundtrack
for many of our lives. He was
still reading our collective minds
while opening his own.
He left the stage
the time I saw him
after three hours with a thousand
people, addressing us
one by one.

David Chorlton first heard Leonard Cohen songs on Austrian radio when he lived in Vienna. Since moving to Phoenix in 1978 he has kept up with new releases in between excursions to enjoy Arizona's landscape and wildlife. His Selected Poems was published by FutureCycle Press in 2014.

REVIEW: FALL CONCERT 2010

by Robert Farmer

 

To the piano in his own sweet way
on the arm of the conductor,
while the packed-house crowd stood,
sang Happy Birthday through tears.
On his ninetieth, not just another gig.

He pulled us back to festivals
and the 50’s college stands,
our youth now gray throughout,
old ladies in dress circle
dancing again to Take Five.

His chops still simple, straight, lyrical,
no pyrotechnical improvisation.
Our age ordered silence on the solos
as we grazed back through lives
to sounds once lost,
now avengefully heralded
by today’s Downbeat recognition.

The Cleveland Symphony played backup,
then stood and cheered.

 
Robert Farmer is a retired professor of forest ecology who lives in Cleveland. He occasionally publishes poems in various journals, including New Verse News.

MAYBE SANDY IS ANOTHER NAME FOR KARMA

by Ngoma

some say they should have
named her karma
i'm not sure
if she was a conspiracy theory,
or an act of god
bible thumpers called her
a revelation
a halloween trick or treat
a politician's opportunity disguised as disaster
some claim it was punishment for sin
but churches were flooded too
steeples and oak trees in the wind
proof that global warming deniers can't ignore
we could say I told you so
and maybe this is a wake up call
as roller coaster rides are buried in the flood
and marathoners take up hotel space
while many victims have no food
or a place to lay their heads
bodies still being found
in flooded burnt out homes
with no escape by subways
filled with water like underground cesspools
as Jamie Curtis talks about survival kits on Jay Leno
and tells us to donate money to the Red Cross
yet to show up in Mount Vernon
with gas lines around the block
for gas stations that are empty
meanwhile the major news media
act as though disaster only happens in america
as the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba
are ignored by major media
and there is no FEMA to guarantee votes for Obama on election day
suddenly we see what it may be like to live in a 3rd world country
where lack of gas and electricity is an everyday experience
and half the world is a disaster area
waiting for a relief concert to raise funds
that would not be needed if the wealth was redistributed
and warnings of global warming had been heeded


Ngoma is a performance poet, multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter and paradigm shifter who for over 40 years has used culture as a tool to raise sociopolitical and spiritual consciousness through work that encourages critical thought. A former member of Amiri Baraka's Spirit House Movers and Players and of the Contemporary Freedom Song Duo, Serious Bizness, Ngoma weaves poetry and songs that raise contradictions and search for a just and peaceful world. Ngoma was the Prop Slam Winner of the 1997 National Poetry Slam Competition in Middletown, CT and has been published in African Voices Magazine, Long Shot Anthology, The Underwood Review, Signifyin' Harlem Review, Bum Rush The Page/Def Jam Anthology, Poems On The Road To Peace (Yale Press) and Let Loose On The World: Celebrating Amiri Baraka at 75. He was featured in the PBS Spoken Word Documentary "The Apro-Poets" with Allen Ginsberg. Ngoma has curated and hosted the poetry slam at the Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. Family Festival of Environmental and Social Justice (Yale University, New Haven, CT) since 1996. He was a selected participant in the Badilisha Poetry Xchange in Cape Town, South Africa in fall of 2009. In December of 2011 he was initiated as an Obatala Priest in Ibadan, Nigeria.