HUNTING SEASON

by Alessandra Foster

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

It starts around Thanksgiving, 

a feast of treats

focused on the corpse

of a large dead bird 

who's been gutted, re-filled, roasted.

No thanks there.

Meanwhile, fleet-footed deer

frantic and fearful,

run for dear life

across roads, across farms,

through woods,

without their normal caution,

sometimes tricked and tempted, 

stilled long enough to be killed

by a human with a gun.

Or a car with blinding lights.

So much beauty to be grateful for,

so much thriving diverse life to be part of, 

yet we offer up gratitude for the deaths

of fellow creatures who might, like us,

be thankful just to be alive.

 

Soon we segue to Peace on Earth,

greeting card words that aren't for real.

Not while our hearts and minds,

right here, right now, right at home, 

every day, every holiday,

accept violence and killing as normal, 

as celebration,

as having no season.

 

 

Author’s note: There are environments too harsh, and/or humans too poor, to sustain a non-violent diet. They may need to hunt or fish or farm a couple of domestic animals in order to survive. This poem is not for them.

Alessandra Foster - lifelong and long-lived reader and writer of poetry. Forty-three year vegan. Published: The New Verse News, Literary Veganism, Verse-Virtual, Moss Piglet, Rat's Ass Review.

OCTOBER 31

by Tricia Knoll

Photo by Nathaniel Kelly at Flickr.

Halloween scares her. That surprises me—

she is sixty, sexy and beautiful. Would make

a glamorous witch. Barbie’s mother. 

 

Perhaps it’s plastic skeletons two stories tall,

memories of falling in a puddle in a ballerina costume

on the way to a neighbor’s door, gauze ghosts

dangling from naked limbs, costume party

shootings. Zombie and Yorick skulls on leafy lawns. 

Or family feuds over dividing her dead 

father’s assets. Her brother’s cleaver. 

 

Or porches and lanterns doused in acrylic webs

and jack o’ lanterns whose smiles sag in mold.

TV images of fractured concrete in bombed out enclaves. 

Forty-two million tons of rubble, 36 cubic feet each ton, 

a grave takes 120 cubic feet. Flinch. The dead walk

starved, confused. Hamlet’s father’s ghost refuses

to speak. A revived corpse never asks

for a Kiss or Snickers. 

 

Maybe it’s money. Twelve billion

on starbursts, skittles, candy corn, and twix.

You could buy half an island with a fog bell

in San Francisco Bay. Climate chaos 

balloons the cost of chocolate. 

 

Days narrow. Clocks reset and whack rhythms.

Lively green folds into loam. We hear carols. 

Ads run for books of evangelical horror 

and Amish romance. Stuffed Santas 

line pharmacy shelves beside pumpkin

plastic pails of high fructose corn syrup.

Flimsy polyester dinosaur suits crawl

to landfills. Few believe in reasons

to wear masks. What am I to do? 

Write another starlight promise

poem? Light the bonfire? 

Hug her? Kiss her cheek?

Tricia Knoll has usually enjoyed the Halloween season, but not so much this year. Too much angst about election weirdness. She can't stop from thinking about all the money spent on the holiday and how much is needed in war zones. Her poetry is published in nine either full-length books or chapbooks with information at triciaknoll.com

UNDER

by Jenna Le

Political Art is a painting by Gull G

Under the politician's monument,
there was a grub twisting in the topsoil,
and a topsail from an ancient ship
folded nine times,
and a mole with pale human-like fingers
prodding a tree root,
and under this,
a chest seething with stolen coins,
and an aquifer dank with depleted water,
and a cave system beading on for miles
and miles, and a vein of gold ore,
and a cache of diamonds, and a hoard
of sapphires, and under this,
a corpse moaning the name of its child.

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011),  A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch. 

THE FALLEN WARRIOR OF JIHAD AND ZIONISM

by George Salamon

"To understand the Israel-Hamas war, you have to understand how we got here." —Vox, October 19, 2023

Historian Rashid Khalidi: Palestinians “Living Under Incredible Oppression, … It Had to Explode” —Democracy Now, October 9, 2023

“The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False.” —Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Atlantic,  October 27, 2023

His corpse lies all over town,

in all streets, all courtyards,

all rooms

drained out from his blood.

Air raid sirens yawn aloud

and roar, boom a

hollow scream

all over village or city.

A shimmer of light falls on

the corpse, bounces off his

glassy teeth and a smile

forms around his lips.

George Salamon talked years ago to a young Palestinian recently released from an Israeli prison for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. "I just want to have a life," he said.  I wonder if he is among the fallen now. Also years ago a "revisionist" Israeli historian said "there is sympathy for both sides." All sides have failed the "Holy Land," and it is now a Bloodland.

WHAT TO DO WITH MY DEAD BODY

by Lois Wickstrom

At his funeral, CJ looked as if he would sit up and laugh when he thought we had grieved enough. He wore his best suit and his best grin. But he never ate a bite of the food we brought. Nobody alive could have resisted that long. Nobody is that good at playing dead.

The casket, the rented hall. It’s all theater. Being dead doesn’t require props or an audience. When I’m dead I don’t want anybody to doubt it.

My mother was cremated, at the lowest priced place she could find in the yellow pages. My brother sprinkled her ashes beside one of her favorite mountain streams.

The smoke from cooking her dead body turned the air gray. I do not want my last act to be pollution.

At the green burial grounds, each corpse is wrapped in a shroud of cotton, and buried six feet under.

I like the idea of being eaten by worms. My corpse does not need a room of its own.

During the yellow fever, more than 10,000 bodies were piled up and buried together in what is now the parking lot where I worship. Being dead has not changed. Being buried means the same.

After embalming wears off, caskets corrode, and worms eat us, we will all become fertilizer.

Why wait?

As soon as I’m dead, throw my remains in the composter. Twirl the knob and spread my loam in the nearby woods. When all my organic parts have been consumed by new growth, layer new dead above me. And let them rot.

Lois is a former science teacher. She has written a series of science-based folktales, and turned some of them into plays. In each modernized tale, the protagonist achieves a better ending because of learning scientific principles. Lois likes to garden, ride her bike with her husband, cook, and she votes in every election.

THE CREMATION CRISIS

by Betsy Mars

A flyer for a campaign to dissuade Jews from cremation. Courtesy of Rabbi Elchonon Zohn accompanying “More and more Jews are choosing cremation. These rabbis aren’t happy about it,” Forward, January 5, 2023

An ash is an ash of course, of course,

unless it's derived from a Jewish corpse.

Then under law and tradition (Tradition!)

said corpse must be interred, of course.

 

We don't want to reminisce about history 

when we're enmeshed in a different kind 

of misery, and the associations 

with Nazi Germany might lead to regret 

and painful discourse. 

 

But in the end the worms have their way 

(first course) no matter our religion, 

and ashes to ashes, dust to dust, 

so why not hasten the process 

rather than wasting space for bones and stones 

(though most rabbis and scholars do 

not endorse this course, of course)?

 

The Bible does not tell us so, of a prohibition, 

so off we go, and we're all letting go 

of our divisions— or

at least the pundits tell us so—

and at least in this final decision, keeping up 

with the goyim, assimilation above 

the ground, not under ground, a shanda.

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, publisher, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her writing has appeared widely online and in numerous print anthologies. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee.  Her photos have been published in Rattle (as the Ekphrastic Challenge prompt), Redheaded Stepchild, and as a cover image for Spank the Carp. She works as a substitute teacher, and as a cat wrangler in her spare time. Her chapbooks and small press publications (Kingly Street Press) are available on Amazon. In addition to her chapbook collaboration with Alan Walowitz, she recently worked with artist Judith Christensen on an installation in San Diego which is part of an ongoing exploration of memory, identity, home, and family. 

BULLETS

by Andrena Zawinski

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School's 1200 building has been sealed since the massacre on February 14, 2018. On Thursday, jurors in the sentencing phase of the school shooter's trial walked through the undisturbed scene, where the blood of the victims still stains classroom floors. Bullet holes also mark the walls of the Parkland, Florida, school where Nikolas Cruz killed 14 students and three staff members. A lock of dark hair remains on a floor more than four years after the body of a victim was taken away. Valentine's Day gifts and cards are strewn about, as shards of glass crunched beneath of the feet of visitors. These are the unsettling notes from a group of reporters allowed to enter the building after jurors completed their walk-through to provide details to media outlets across the country, including CNN. —CNN, August 5, 2022

Bullets, 

their brassy caps 

glinting golden in the dark

ammo tray tucked under

a student study desk,

more bullets in a bandolier 

crisscrossing the chest, bullets

maneuvered across a screen

in slugs of anger and angst 

in bullet launchers, landmines 

of bullets, bullets of the slain 

in a shooting game.

Bullets,

their powder packed cartridges

of panic and fear, hollow points 

shattering identities, blasts 

sounding in sleep, bullets 

of grief from a spray hate. 

Bullets 

that silence at windows, on lawns, 

on street corners, in schoolrooms, 

supermarkets, factories, churches, 

all turned altars of flowers,

candles, placards, and prayers, 

while bullets 

fill bank accounts

of makers and regulators

dodging bullets whistling by,

shells jingling in pockets 

like loose change spent 

in puddles of blood.

Bullets, 

their full metal jackets 

dug from the corpse 

with its legacy of wounds, 

bullets that pierced the flesh, 

shattered the bone, riddled 

the heart and all the wild in it,

depositing dreams

to urns and coffins

buried in holes in the dirt,

screams smothered, 

breaths sealed.

Andrena Zawinski’s poetry has received accolades for lyricism, form, spirituality, and social concern. It has appeared in Artemis, Blue Collar Review, Progressive Magazine, Aeolian Harp, Rattle, Verse Daily, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. Her latest collection is Landings. She has two previous award winning books: Something About and Traveling in Reflected Light and a fourth collection, Born Under the Influence, forthcoming in 2022.

NO CONFIDENCE

by William Doreski

Boris Johnson returns inside 10 Downing Street after making his resignation speech on July 7. Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Because I found the ticket

for the cold-storage locker

on the outskirts of Frankfort,

I must reclaim the rumpled corpse

of the long-debauched hero

and somehow arrange to return it

to the nation he led until

his wingspan shrank and he fell.

 

The attendant speaks only German

and I speak only the crudest slang.

He unlocks the locker to allow

inspection of the earthly goods.

The familiar upturned face,

sallow professional smile,

arched gothic eyebrows grinning

and bruise-blue eyes unwinking,

opens its wired jaws to speak.

 

Everyone warned me that even

fifty years after death he’d claim

airtime to unleash his grievance,

a fiction he wrought in Parliament

as the members shook and groaned.

The chill in the locker numbs me.

I drop the lid before he mouths

a syllable of pious cant.

 

His blond shock and beer-stained suit

signaled a feckless charisma

that faded long before death.

No one wants him to recur

half a century after his prime.

The attendant sneers and offers

a snort of schnapps to calm me.

I accept despite the agony

of all those clashing “S” sounds.

 

Let the British consul handle

transport to Westminster Abbey

where a few curious old folks

may wish to fondle the corpse.

I step outside into Europe’s

painterly light and soak it in,

bracing political virginity

against history and brazen lies.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Dogs Don’t Care (2022).  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

WIFE OF IDLIB

by Steven Croft

Hammers echo now from the rebuilding of houses,

pounding at my heart as I carry tea to the patio, stare

down at the tiles you laid. Tear-filled eyes raise—

who moves through the terraced almond trees on the hill,

their clouds of white flowers? Alas, it is only today's dream.

If Allah allows, may you one day walk into this daily dream

of your return. You were no terrorist, only a man

who loved the warmth of the land, wheat and barley,

the green joy of lettuce. When the planes bombed the fields

you ran to the town square to tell the protesters. Then,

the security men knocked at the door, and I kneeled before God,

but they dragged you out while my heart stopped.

Now, I wait in bed for the creak of our door, a call, again,

from the kitchen that you are leaving for the fields, anything

to bring you back into existence. My soul is a leaden weight.

Our country is a corpse. How can hammers sound? How can hope

trouble us anymore? Let our dead hearts rot. Just let our loneliness,

like the bombs' fires, burn us away.

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY, 2021

by Howie Good

The SS officer rolled the corpse over, and the girl saw the face of her music teacher, with blood here and there. He had gone to fetch a ration of bread, and a loaf was sticking out of his coat. The girl drew closer. It looked like a serious piece of bread, and Jews had little to eat, soup that was mostly water with grass. Her instinct was to grab the bread and run. But she left it. She left it because she saw his face, with blood here and there.

&

When someone complains to me about trivial stuff, I’ll say, “Oh yeah, try going through life as a Howard.” In Judaism, at least as practiced by my parents, one is named in honor of a person who has died. I was named in honor of my mother’s father’s brother. I never met him. I’ve never even seen a picture of him. He died long before I was born and without leaving a trace—except for the 100-year-old man, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, arrested in Germany on 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder.

&

It’s spring in name but not in substance. The land, to my amazement, seems to constantly rearrange itself in wild new patterns of rage and decay. On the border, small brown children languish in lockups. On city streets, young black men in police chokeholds beg for breath. There is something I have to do. I don’t know how I will do it. I just know from the pressure of tears behind my eyes that it has to be done.

Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).

A MEAT-PACKER'S SUPPLICATION

by Caprice Garvin

One African American worker at a Koch [meat processing] facility that had been targeted by Ice, spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. He alleged that while Koch had recently begun taking workers’ temperatures before shifts, they had also withheld details of any workers who contracted the virus. He claimed the company was now handing out surgical masks, but had forced workers to use them over two or three shifts. “They ain’t offering nobody no disability, no unemployment, no time off,” the worker said. “I just keep my hands washed up, my face covered up, my whole body covered, and I pray to myself and hope I don’t catch it. The truth is there’s a chance that everybody in [here] will catch it.” —“‘We're modern slaves': How meat plant workers became the new frontline in Covid-19 war,” The Guardian, May 2, 2020

Never can I return to that unholy shape.
Hunched. Hands slipping beneath skin of lamb.
The corpse lies like wax in the ear.

Our hands are deep in the unhearing.
Fingers tread the crushed skull’s drowning place,
fingers sifting cartilage, organs snaking through.

We do not choose our own placement—tissue,
cells, molecules lain elbow to elbow on the conveyor belt.
The meat comes through our fingers.

These warehouse walls impersonate mountains.
They keep out the mountains and the voice calling down.
I would give my life for a vulture,

to see the arc of one tracing the arc of my eye,
to see that faintest movement at the edge.
To know there is something farther.

I know what it is to hear the last stream crackling ice.
A toe goes in. A knee.
A tongue soaked numb.

I am flexible as the neck of the vulture bending down.
I pick apart this body so that my son may know
his own body whole.

The skinned eyelids watch the blood drain
from floors as clean as obedience.
I will not feed my son my suicide.

Caprice Garvin, a native New Mexican, currently resides in New Jersey. She studied in the Writing Division at Columbia University, where she was awarded The Woolrich Award for Excellence in Writing, and in the Writing Division at Sarah Lawrence College where she earned an M.F.A. in fiction. Most recently her work appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry. 

A GIRL MUST BE BRAVER THAN WE EVER ASK OURSELVES TO BE

by Michael Brockley

by Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

I wasn’t surprised, just scared. Chaos hides wild cards in its holster. An heirloom is twice as valuable when broken. My hair covers my eyes as I lean into the reporter’s mic. Those saxophone solos I listened to, those mad songs with titles I no longer remember. C’est la vie. I always expected it would happen here. I can no longer tell where you begin and I drop out. I fled past the echo of gunshots. Past the corpse of my first boy friend. Before a detective outlined his body with chalk.  I used to write poems with line breaks but now I write broken poems. The time we wasted on love songs. Thoughts and prayers. Chaos slipped a joker into my purse as I smiled the way one does when monsters hold five aces. When I found the jester entangled in my last kleenex, I read on the card the vow Chaos always honors: “Let me introduce you to your bogeyman.” 

Michael Brockley is a semi-retired school psychologist who works in rural northeast Indiana. His poems have appeared in Flying Island, Third Wednesday, Gargoyle, Atticus Review and TheNewVerse.News. 

EMMETT TILL'S CORPSE TURNS SIXTY

by Philip C. Kolin

from Jet Magazine, September 15, 1955 via JetCityOrange.

Sixty years ago today
I started my life as a corpse,
the corpus indelicti of
America the Mournful.
I am sure you have caught me
on the tv, in newspapers,  or over the net.
Ten presidents since Generalissimo Ike
have taken my Jet photo
out of their Oval Office drawers
every time America has a nightmare
about whether black lives matter
and prayed  it would never come to this.
You may have caught me
in the  faces of black boys
whose smiles have turned to pus
because of police  clubs or stray
gangland bullets .
You could have seen  me, too,
in crowds demanding  justice
for Rodney King, Trayvon Martin
or Eric Garner. Did you hear me
in a  recent poetry slam on YouTube
protesting the death of a black man
or boy every 28 hours in a Second
Amendment America where violence
has gone through the roof?
You may have also  picked me out
weeping on CNN or Fox
when the Mother Emanuel Six
were laid to rest and
the state  flag came down
in South Carolina
and all the peckerwoods
could do about it  was whistle Dixie.
I plan to be at the Smithsonian
next year when they unveil my coffin.
Hope it does not debut on August 28th.
I am not sure America has enough tears left
for me and the ravages of Katrina.


Philip Kolin is the  University Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits  the  Southern Quarterly. He has published more than 40 books on Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, African American playwrights as well as  seven collections of poems. His most recent book  is Emmett Till in Different States: A Collection of Poems forthcoming in November from Third World Press.

A SQUARE IN RAQQA, SYRIA

by John Guzlowski

ISIL beheads civilians in the city of Al-Raqqa. --Syria Newsdesk

The corpse in the street
Is headless

Flies do their business
Sow their seeds

Nearby a man sells
Tea and cigarettes

There is no place
For irony


John Guzlowski’s writing has appeared in The Ontario Review, Atlanta Review, and Exquisite Corpse.  His poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.

HALF THE MERCY

by Tony Brown

Pope Francis confessed Thursday that he took the rosary cross of his late confessor from his casket and wears it to this day in a fabric pouch under his cassock. He said he did so telling the late priest, "Give me half your mercy." --ABC News, March 6, 2014

The Pope speaks

of how once he lifted a cross

from a corpse’s fingers,



left roses

in its place, and now

carries that theft
with him always

under his clothes.

Those innocent
severed roses still rot

in the dark of the tomb

where mercy is nowhere to be found
and there’s no redemption

or resurrection

to be had
as a crime is revealed,

no one is shocked, and once again

everything stays the same.


Tony Brown is a poet from Worcester, MA.  He works as a consultant and writer.

PICKING UP A HITCHHIKER IN MAY

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

"The burial of the dead is Humanity 101."
—Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet, NPR, May 6, 2013

It’s messy when they die
in winter, he says. The dirt
is too cold to work with then.
I tell him I will consider this
when I die. Just give me two-weeks’
notice, he says, quoting a joke,
and it occurs to me humor
must be an unwritten
prerequisite for a grave digger.
I ask him what he thinks
about the recent uproar in Boston,
no one wanting the bomber
buried in their own backyard.
Well, he says, I’ve always thought
we should have a special section
for the politicians. We could put
him here with them—in a place where
we let the dogs run.
In the space before I laugh,
I remember the story
the undertaker told about how
in the middle ages they considered
suicide the ultimate crime.
But since you can’t punish a dead man,
they took out their ire on his corpse
and buried it at a crossroads
to be trod on forever. He said,
“If we do not take care of dead humans,
we become less human ourselves.”
The man next to me says,
“You know, I give every person I bury
the gravedigger’s promise.”
We are almost to the cemetery gate.
“I say, I’m the last person who’s ever gonna
let you down, and the last one
who’ll ever throw dirt on you.”
He laughs a laugh so real
I can smell the earth thawing in it.


Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poetry has appeared in O Magazine, in back alleys, on A Prairie Home Companion and in her children’s lunch boxes. She is a parent educator for Parents as Teachers. Favorite one-word mantra: Adjust.