POEM FOR MY MIDDLE FINGER

by Susan Vespoli

with a nod to Catherine Pierce’s protest poems

“Fuck Authority” by Dan Colen, 2006, Oil on found painting

In protest I watch eight cops 

unload from their SUV, then strut

past me, a small granny with teal luggage 

waiting at the airport for a ride. 

In protest I say Beefcake. 

Fitted khaki pants and black polo 

shirts decaled with the word Police. 

Guns strapped to each man’s thigh 

with dark bands. In protest I say garter belts. 

In protest I say (in my head) I know 

what you did to my son. I saw the body 

cam. In protest, I glare. Puffed out chests 

and cocky swagger. In protest I say 

Mr. America patrol. I say rooster 

and remember the one that attacked 

my granddaughter at the peacock park. 

We thought it was a soft striped hen 

with a red mohawk until it high-kicked

its claws into her scalp. Blood spurted 

as she shrieked. In protest I say pull it in, 

dudes. Fold those football-player-sized egos

into cloth napkins at a memorial service. 

In protest I say humble. I say karma. I say

apologize. I want to scream, you don’t scare me, 

but remember my other kid saying, watch out, Mom. 

You’re gonna get yourself in trouble. In protest 

I say fuck Superman. I say fuck cultural authority. 

I bow down to sky, birds, dogs, poems, and peace.

Susan Vespoli lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she continues to write toward finding some sort of justice for her son, Adam Vespoli, who was shot and killed by police on March 12, 2022.

BINGE-WATCHING

by Daniel Romo

For Tyre

 

 

While viewing the reality show in which contestants

make knives from piles of metal, I think of the latest

 

group of police officers posing as contestants on their

own reality show where they compete by beating and

 

hammering out their victims, not to create an edge

sharp enough to slice through water bottles and sugar

 

cane, but to see which cop can deliver a kill shot of

their own. At the end of round one, the blades are

 

presented to the judges and whoever created the blade

that needs the most correction is eliminated, while in

 

round one, the cop on the scene that shows the most

acts of compassion is gone. In round two, handles are

 

added for grasping and the creator of the knife that

hurts the hand while being wielded is sent home and

 

in round two, the man in blue who tries to grip his

colleague into submission after repeated body blows

 

to the victim is asked not to return to the division.

The final round consists of the forgers returning

 

home to replicate a sword or ax or other weapon used

in battle by an extinct civilization. Upon returning to

 

the stage and after being tested and evaluated to see

who made the most accurate and devastatingly brutal

 

replica, the winner is selected and awarded $10,000,

while the winning police officer is determined by who

 

gets the most media coverage and who abused their

authority in the worst way all while finding the most

 

innocent man to kill.

Daniel Romo's latest book is Bum Knees and Grieving Sunsets (Flowersong Press 2023)

THE WATER COOLER

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley

Blood stains and a small section of police tape show the scene where multiple people were injured following an overnight shooting at the Dior Bar & Lounge in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, Jan. 22, 2023. Credit: Michael Johnson/AP

Gather round the water cooler

For the latest on the latest mass shooting

How many dead, how many critical

 

Let’s put our heads together and get the facts

Where the wounded hid, how many rounds

What the cops did and didn’t do

 

The victims have our thoughts and prayers

They have our attention

We are talking about it, talking and talking

 

Until talk turns to the next one

 

 

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island, and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and has had many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured several of her poems during the past year, including “How to Silence a Woman,” and “If I have loved you,” both of which won “Moon Prizes.” Melanie grew up in Vermont wandering the woods and fields and has never stopped wandering.  She leads nature and history field trips for Smithsonian Associates, the US Botanic Garden, the Nature Conservancy, Politics & Prose Bookstore, and many other organizations in the Washington, DC area.

(NONFICTION) THE SÁMI WORD FOR ‘HELP’ IS VEAHKKI! AND I YELL IT IN MY DREAMS TONIGHT, AND ALWAYS

FOR SACHEEN LITTLEFEATHER AND MISKOPWAAGANIKWE

by Ron Riekki

Above: Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, known as Áillohaš in the Northern Sámi language (23 March 1943–26 November 2001), was a Finnish Sámi writer, musician and artist.

“I am not saving my life for the future” 

—Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, Trekways of the Wind 

 

Tomorrow I go in front of a board 

to speak on the allegations that I 

was “speaking of native issues too 

frequently in class.”  When I heard 

 

these allegations, no, this allegation, 

no, this pissing-on-a-bonfire, I had 

the revelation of being had.  I had, 

yes, in class, spoke of indigenous 

 

issues, not realizing it’s a crime, 

but I am guilty of being native, of 

being Sámi, of being Karjalaiset, 

of being of a background where I 

 

hear, here, “I’ve never heard of 

that.”  The that falling flat.  And 

it’s a board of seven people.  And 

it makes me think of the time in 

 

Berkeley, where I was walking 

down the street and saw a black 

man, around 70 years old, peace- 

fully being drunk, on a bench, 

 

buzzed, yes, eyes red, yes, and 

leaving the world alone, then 

a police car drove up and an 

officer asked the man some- 

 

thing and he said something 

and another cop car pulled up 

and another cop got out and 

another cop car pulled up and 

 

more police got out and then 

a van pulled up, a cop van, 

a SWAT team reaction for 

this septuagenarian swept up 

 

so quickly into the back of 

the swallowing vehicles, all 

painted black, as if to mock, 

as if to mask them in night 

 

where the body was taken 

and I stood there and realized 

how there is the centrality of 

overreaction, of SWAT-style 

 

action movie hyperbole where, 

in the end, there is the pairing 

of kissing the woman while 

killing the man who didn’t 

 

matter, the man who was 

reduced to villain and a woman 

seduced by cliché and audiences 

in the dark, snoring.  And a First 

 

Nation playwright in Montreal 

told me that Hollywood cinema 

is all about conflict, that they 

love conflict, because colonialism 

 

is hearted in conflict, but native 

playwriting and screenwriting and 

story is about community, not con- 

flict, not the incarceration of their 

 

films, but instead about connection, 

and he said that there was a reading 

where afterwards a white man 

raised his hand and said he’d have 

 

to be honest and he said the play 

was boring, and behind him was 

a group of Anishinaabe who were 

all in tears, their sleeves filled 

 

with tears, and this man was 

bored.  And tomorrow I don’t know 

if I am getting kicked out of college 

or if I’m getting killed out of college 

 

or if I’m getting left in decorticate 

position, funeraled, how I was told 

that I was not only speaking too 

much about native issues, but I was 

 

being too “aggressive” with how I 

was talking about native issues and 

an elder, Red Pipe Woman, on 

the phone told me, “Oh, let me get this 

 

straight: a native person is being 

told they are ‘aggressive.’  They’re 

telling you that you’re being ‘savage’ 

by speaking of native issues.”  And 

 

our laughter was as normal as all 

the tall clouds above, and our laughter 

was sky-deep, and our laughter was tears, 

and the grey clouds were coming and 

 

I love walking in the rain and I walked 

home and I wondered if tomorrow 

they were going to try to destroy me 

and tomorrow I am going to find out. 

 

And tomorrow I am going to find out. 

And I will live even if they kill me. 

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

COON CAT TUESDAY

by Jan Steckel

Nick Anderson

Sunny sweats on her stoop,

says she’s seen raccoons and cats

mating in her backyard. They’ve bred

a tribe of unholy hell beasts,

coon cats, who haunt the bushes.

She also says we shouldn’t call the cops

if her ex violates the restraining order again.

She doesn’t know whose blood

stains the street today,

the woman gunned down in front

of Carlos’s taco truck. Helicopters

roar overhead, caution tape and wagons

cut off our exit from the block for hours

as officers snap photos, pick up shell casings.

People carry out chairs to sit and watch.

The children are all walleyed and gabbling:

¡Pistolas! ¡Policía! ¡Ambulancia!

Everyone has Covid, except those out

dodging bullets. In Texas, someone shot up

a school again, but that seems far away.

Jan Steckel’s book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California, USA.

A POEM IN FAVOR OF REMAINING PURPOSEFUL IN DARK TIMES

by Alan Walowitz

It’s late here, afternoon, and for all I know

the solstice might have come and gone.

Another of these sodden days

keeps me in my sleep-clothes—Gatkes,

my mother might say, a little Yiddish

meant to make things light

and shame me into the fray we’ve made

of forced boredom and too much sleep.

 

Not much happening before Christmas,

the true-believers at the mall, avoiding one another

as if they want to remain alive.

Still, here they are in droves

to address our national debt

and resuscitate mankind’s collective desire;

the National Guard poised to calm the streets

so I won’t have to worry the neighbor’s rage:

my leaves blown carelessly on his lawn again;

the cops have promised not to kill anymore.

Why not walk aimlessly around

masked and dazed by the beauty of the Christmas lights?

Underutilized, my own daughter says of me,

though it’s not how I was raised.

 

The moon was part of us once

before it was hoisted and fastened above

and later assigned to werewolves and love--

though we know we’re done with that.

But now the moon, risen low in the sky,

and twice as bright comes into its own --

holding out against any wobble,

any sudden tilt of the earth.

The Sun, that old Palooka,

means to cook us alive and swallow us whole.

Still, the moon remains, attached to the tides,  

and even in times like these,

determined to do its little job, 

whether or not it’s to any avail.

 

Meanwhile, let's not forget to attend to ours.  

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. 

SHOOTER

by Stan Pisle

@Walt_Handelsman

Shooter 

Reported in Florida…

Forget how many times. 

An involuntary pulse throbbing 

in the dark, in the light,

Our schools, our arenas, our malls, courts, playgrounds, homes. 

 

A shooter took the life four cops in Oakland, 

five in Dallas, 

two in New York, 

26 people at a Sutherland Springs Church 

Nine in Charleston

58 in Las Vegas

—with 851 shot. 

Eight hundred and fifty-one people shot by one man. 

The numbers grow too much for a poem.

Stop 

Telling us life stories of the dead.

Window dressing over crackles of bullets.

Building fences between shooters and the shot.

NPRing, obits of people murdered for mercantile. 

Attempting animal warmth on cold dead bodies piled up.

Dividing and parsing the pile, determining which shot member counts. 

 

Show

Bullet riddled heads.

Emmette Till open coffin the funerals.

Zoom in where the casing entered under the nose, ejecting the soul.

Fuck that, assault rifle hollow points facture on contact.

Nothing’s left, only pulverized.

Narrate the blood cone spurting across theaters, schools, country music festivals.

Interview the bump stocked woman baren from five shells raping her womb. 

Collect the pools of bone and hamburger from the 100,000 shot each year.

Let gravity channel it to the twits and fat bros of Fox.

To the manufacturer of the hollow points 

Let them wipe up the fragments flowing in a bath the rest of us are forced to take.  

Stan Pisle is a Berkeley California poet. His work as appeared in the Arroyo Magazine, on KQED San Francisco, The Ravens Perch, and The New Verse News. 

THE GUNS THAT MADE SOME

by Ralph La Rosa

Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People. —NRA Bumper Sticker

 

To kids, the guns in TV’s shows

with cowboys killing Indians

say Play guns beat the red man’s bows.

 

First real shots from cool Red Ryders,

let children’s tiny BBs

kill small birds and sting bike riders.

 

Real guns, 12 gauge and 22,

teach white militias skills,

help killers know what they can do.

 

Guns urge cops on urban beats

to kill with high-tech specials

that threaten US states and streets.

 

Like wild-west six-guns of renown,

some guns make reasoned kills,

but impulse kills both black and brown.

Ralph La Rosa owned several of the guns mentioned until he became a teacher and writer.

WEIGHT

by Judith Terzi

Emmett Louis Till was kidnapped, lynched and brutally murdered at age 14 on August 28, 1955.

"Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor."—John Lewis, New York Times, July 30, 2020

Emmett Till shot dead at fourteen. Two men go free.
George Floyd suffocated at forty-six. By a brutal knee.

          George ran out of breath. Suffocated at age forty-six.
          They sank Emmett, strapped him to a cotton gin fan.

No gun to sink George. No river, no machine, no tree.
Simeon Wright saw the men point the gun at Emmett.

          Saw the men point the gun, pull his cousin from bed.
          His words weightless against the two men's. No video

then. The world saw the cop's knee press into George.
Saw three more cops. Over eight minutes of complicity.

          Four cops. Eight ears sealed shut for over eight minutes.
          Sixty-five years gone by since Emmett lost his breath.

Three months passed since George no longer breathes.
Emmett Till shot dead at fourteen. Two men go free.


Author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay), as well as of five chapbooks, including Casbah and If You Spot Your Brother Floating By (Kattywompus), Judith Terzi's poems have received Pushcart and Best of the Web and Net nominations and have been read on Radio 3 of the BBC. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and taught high school French for many years as well as English and French at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

THE FLAMINGO CUP

by Jenny Doughty

The last time I cried was when I heard my daughter try and explain events on the TV to her three year old. There were protest marches, she started to say but Katie interrupted, What’s a protest march? My daughter hesitated. Katie flourished a cup picturing a pink flamingo. She’d liberated it from her baby sister earlier. Was it over a flamingo cup? The strain hit me of a week spent watching a black man die under a white cop’s knee, hearing I can’t breathe, seeing blood flow from baton blows, people gasp and choke from tear gas or bruised by rubber bullets. Baby girl, yes, it was all about a flamingo cup. It was about some people wanting all the flamingo cups and others having to use their cupped hands. It was about some people whose flamingo cups overflowed with the juiciest juice while others drank lead-tainted water from faucets. It was about cops stopping black people who had flamingo cups because they might have stolen them from white people. It was about people with the biggest and best flamingo cups taking them from others who were left, like your baby sister, crying on the floor. Sometimes it was about stopping somebody else from taking your flamingo cup when they already had their own but wanted more. It was about caring about that flamingo cup so much that you no longer cared about the person holding it, even if that person was left with only cupped hands to drink from or crying on the floor or crushed under a knee, not breathing.

Jenny Doughty is a former English teacher and Education Adviser to Penguin UK.  Originally British, she has lived in Maine since 2002. Her poems have appeared in The Aurorean, Pulse online review, Naugatuck River Review, Four Way Review, and several anthologies. She is currently President of the Maine Poets Society. Her first book of poems Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber was published by Moon Pie Press in 2017.

WE REAL COPS

by Deirdre Fagan

The two vigilantes in their pickup chase Ahmaud Arbery whom they eventually kill.

After Gwendolyn Brooks

THE VIGILANTES.

TWO IN A PICKUP.

We real cops. We
Pop pops. We

Shoot straight. We
Leak lead. We

Trim thin. We
Spin sin. He

Die soon. We
Gain fame.

Deirdre Fagan is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing in the English, Literature, and World Languages Department at Ferris State University. Fagan is the author of a chapbook of poetry Have Love published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic essays on poetry, memoir, and pedagogy are available in various creative and academic print and online journals and collections.

C0LDER (S0NNET 0) AND C0LDER, BERKELEY

by Ron Riekki

“Arrests made as hundreds protest Ann Coulter speech” 

—Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2019

Walking to the grocery store, I turn a corner to see
dozens of cops in riot gear, them loading vans
with weapons, the militarization of the police
where I see more of them in this minute—as I walk
nervously through their bulletproof everything—
than I had seen in a decade of small-town life,
but this is the time of riots and gear, of fire and fear,
and I remember walking to the same store just after
the last riot where the ground held footprints in blood
where I could see the exact path where someone had run
for their life, and my neighbor told me, "I bet today
was the hottest day it’s ever been here,” and there’s
a streetlight gone, the post yanked out of the ground.


Ron Riekki’s most recent book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

I AM: THE ARREST OF SANDRA BLAND

The following is a found poem created by the Editor of TheNewVerse.News from the words of Sandra Bland (according to a HuffPost transcript prepared by Ryan Grim with Matt Ramos and Dhyana Taylor from the dash cam video) as spoken to Texas state trooper Brian Encinia and, later, a female officer, after Encinia stopped Sandra Bland's car on July 10. Sandra Bland was later found dead in a Waller County, Texas jail cell.

Sandra Bland

Got here just
today.
I’m
waiting
on you. This
is your job.
                             I'm
                             waiting
                             on you. What
do you want
me to do?
I am.
                             I really am.
I feel
like it’s crap what
I’m
getting a ticket for.
I was
getting out of your way.
You were speeding up,
tailing me,
so I move over and you stop me.
So yeah,
I am
a little irritated., but
that doesn’t stop you
from giving me
a ticket.
You asked me
what was wrong,
now I told you.
So now
                 I'm
                                  done,
                                                     yeah.
I'm

in my car.
Why do I have to
put out my cigarette?"
I don't have to step
out of my car. Why
am I . . .  No, you

don't have the right. No, you
                                                  don't have the right. You
                                                                                             don’t have the right. No, you
                                                  don’t have the right
to do this.

I refuse

to talk to you other than
to identify myself.

I am

getting removed
for failure to signal?

And I'm

calling my lawyer.
OK,
you're going to
yank me
out of the car?
OK,
alright. Let’s do this.
Don't touch me!
                             Don't touch me.
                                                          Don't touch me!
I’m

not under arrest.
You
                                                 don't have the right
to take me
out of the car

I'm

under arrest?
For what?
                For what?
                                For what?
                                                 Why
am I

being
apprehended? You’re trying
to give me a ticket
for failure . . .

                      Why

am I

being
apprehended? You just
opened my—

So you're threatening
to drag me out
of my own car?
And then . . .

Wow.
        Wow.

                                  For a failure to signal?
You're doing all this
                                  for a failure to signal?

Right. Yeah,
let's take this to court.
Let’s
do this.
                                  For a failure to signal? Yup,
                                  for a failure to signal!

I'm

not on the phone.
I have a right
to record. This
is my property.

Sir?

for a fucking failure to signal.
My
goodness.
Y’all are interesting.
                                    Very interesting.
You feelin’
good about yourself?
                                  You feelin’
                                  good about yourself?
                                                                     For a failure to signal,
you feel real
good about yourself
don’t you?
                                  you feel
                                  good about yourself
                                  don’t you?

Why

am I

being arrested?

Why
can’t you . . .

                                  Why

                                   am I

                                   being arrested?

Why
don’t you tell me
that part?

Why
will you not tell me
w     h     a     t     ‘     s           g     o     i     n     g          on     ?

I’m
not complying
‘cause you just pulled me
out of my car.
Are you
fucking
kidding me? This
is some bull . . .
'Cause you know this
straight bullshit. And you're
full of shit.                 Full of straight shit.
That's all y’all are
is some straight scared cops.
South Carolina
got y’all bitch asses
scared. That’s
all it is.
Fucking scared          of a female.
I was trying
to sign
the fucking ticket --   whatever.
Are you fucking
serious? Oh
I can’t wait
'til we go to court.
O     o     h
I
can’t wait.
I
cannot wait
'til we go to court.
                                     I can’t wait.
                                                               Oh I can’t wait!
You want me
to sit down now?
Or
are you going to throw me to the floor?

That would make you feel better
about yourself?
                                                              Nah that would make you feel better
                                                              about yourself.

That would make you feel real good wouldn't it?

Pussy ass.
                  Fucking pussy.
                                                              For a failure to signal
                                                              you’re doing all of this.
In little ass
Praire View,
Texas.
My God they must have ...

I’m getting a --
for what?           For what?
I’m getting a warning
for what?           For what!?
Well you just pointed me
over there! Get
your mind right.

O      o      h
I swear
on my life,
y'all are some
pussies. A pussy-ass
cop,
for a fucking signal you’re
gonna take me to jail.
                                                     For a fucking ticket. What
                                                     a pussy. What
                                                     a pussy. You’re about
to break my fucking wrist!

I’m
standing
still!

You keep moving
me, goddammit.

Don't touch me.
                                                      Fucking pussy  --
                                                                                                     for a traffic ticket.
You asked me
what was wrong!
Do I feel
like I have anything
on me?                                          This a fucking maxi dress.
                                                                                                     This a maxi dress.
                                                      Fucking assholes. You’re
about to break my wrist. Can you
stop? You’re about to fucking
break my wrist! Stop!!!          
                                                      For a fucking traffic ticket,
                                                                                                      you are such a pussy.
You are
such a pussy.
For                                                 a traffic signal!
Don’t it make you feel
real good
don’t it? A female
                                                      for a traffic ticket.
Don’t it make you feel
good Officer Encinia? You're
a real man now.

I got
epilepsy, you motherfucker.

Good?

Good?

Make you feel real
good for a female. Y'all
strong, y'all real
strong.

I
can’t go
anywhere with
your fucking
knee
in my
back,
           duh!

Whatever,                           whatever.

If I could,                            I can't.

                                            I can't even
                                                                                      fucking feel my arms.

Goddamn.
                                            I can't . . .

You just
slammed my head into
       the ground and you
                                      do not even care ...

                                             I can't
                                                                                     even                                              hear.

He slammed my
fucking head
into the ground.

What
the hell.
All of this                               for a traffic signal.
I swear to God.
All of this                               for a traffic signal.

Thank you for recording!
Thank you!                            For a traffic signal --
slam me
into the ground and
everything!
                                                Everything!
I hope
y'all
feel good

And No
you didn't.
                                                 You didn't see
everything
leading
up
to
it . . .

You
don't
have
to.

THE FISH WAS BORN ON FRIDAY

by Clara B. Jones

Prospect Park tunnel by TurnoftheSue

I am Mexican, but my immigration status is none of your business. I am no rapist or murderer, but Donald Trump has my ticket. It was easy to cross the border at El Alberto. Even the patrol looked the other way. I hitched rides to Newark where my cousin, César, picked me up. He worked in a fancy restaurant in Brooklyn, washing dishes and, sometimes, peeling spuds. His best friend was an Irish guy nicknamed, The Fish, by his father because he was born on Friday. From the beginning, The Fish treated me like shit and told César I was only good for taking bags from the South Bronx to Harlem, the closer to 42nd Street the better. I didn't mind carrying cocaine, but one day the pack was heavier than usual, and I figured it must be a piece. The Fish fooled me; but, not for long. I called César and told him to meet me in the Prospect Park tunnel ahora mismo, and he showed up an hour later with The Fish at his side. When I pulled out the gun, The Fish yelled, “Stupid Spic!”, and lunged at my chest. It happened so fast, I didn't know what to do. But, as I was running away from the cops, I could see they left César's cap in the street.


Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Asheville, NC. As a woman of color, she writes about social relations and the moral dimensions of power. Erbacce, CHEST, Ofi Literary Magazine, Transnational, PANK, and 34th Parallel are among the venues her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in, and she is the author of the weblog, Ferguson and Other Poems About Race: A Chapbook (2015). In the 1970s, Clara studied with Adrienne Rich and, more recently, with the poets Meghan Sterling and Eric Steineger.

WHO CAN BREATHE

by George Held

            “I can’t breathe.”
                        Repeated last words of Eric Garner, police victim


Like Fate’s arbiters,
Cops crush the breath
of those they oppress,
let the rich breathe easy;

Hawaiians couldn’t
smell the breath
of standoffish whites,
ha‘oles

(men without breath),
distrusting those whose
withheld breath might stink of
treachery.

If you are rich
or white and can breathe
easy these days,
you should shun

city streets, TV news,
and poems that can
take your breath
away.


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.