DELUSION

by Jocelyn Ajami

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

In the libraries of distortion

eyes blur mites with dust

they scan empty racks 

like x-rays of aging spines

the shelves bend and tilt 

from the heft of books

once held with reverence

tossed out like easy trash 

In the libraries of distortion

mirrors line the walls 

from ceiling to floor, multiplying

a gleaming buzz

that binges on translucence—

Narcissus on steroids— 

In the libraries of distortion

there are no chairs, tables

or stools, only beds

that glitter, bearing pallid 

corpses, ensured 

a good read on life

Jocelyn Ajami is a painter, filmmaker and poet. She turned to writing poetry in 2014 as a way of connecting more intimately with issues of social conscience and cultural awareness. She has been published in various anthologies of prize winning poems and has been nominated for Pushcart and Touchstone awards.

READING THE NEWS

by Howie Good

We are all neighbors 

and what is poetry 
but a few simple words 
that somehow express
complicated things 
the towering piles of corpses 
in the Ukraine and Gaza 
and the movies

Howie Good's latest book Frowny Face (Redhawk Publishing, 2023) is a mix of his prose poems and handmade collages. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

RED BLOOD OF HUMANS

by George Salamon

Icarius (Diomedes Wounding Aphrodite When She Tries To Recover The Body Of Aeneas) by Arthur Heinrich Wilhelm Fitger via wikigallery.

"Israeli-Hamas war death toll nears 1,500..." CBS News, October 9, 2023

Red hot blood of old men,

red hot blood of toddlers,

red hot blood of grandmas,

red hot blood of soldiers,

red hot blood of musicians,

we spill you in Israel and we

spill you in Gaza, we spill you

in Ukraine and Russia while

they're counting the corpses

and wait until they reach the

numbers when the world's

institutions urge  an end

to bloodshed  and demand

return to the old status quo.

There's no elixir for bloodlust,

there's no drug to cure madness,

there's no vaccine to calm the

fever of death and destruction.

We never conquered humanity's

cruel face, its heart's hungry

gorge, the human form of its

terror.

We heard answers, but watched

as the messengers died on the

cross, by fire or by bullet, we are

left alone by and to ourselves.

Nothing is more terrifying in a

soul-less and bleeding world.

George Salamon was born in Vienna in 1934, as Communists and Fascists were shooting at each other in low-income housing areas. The Holocaust was a decade later, the Israeli-Arab wars of "annihilation" followed, then the bloody wars in Asia and Africa for wealth and economic "supremacy," and the endless Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed and terror for ownership of the "Holy Land." The carousel is still spinning.

POEM FOR A YEAR IN UKRAINE

by Shih-Min, Sun

 Ironing   stained glasses
   scruffy, growth of magnitude  soul   
         of every somber
     night  comes forth
     suspended on this land
                        flood of 
                                       living , gasping
                          corpses
 rise and walk : bend
            pick 
                                                                                                                              one shoe up
           fold : clothes / string / dirty nails   unbuckle
                    crusted toes with blood, frosted
                                                                                                                                            moon   black
                                                                                                                      eye of the city   inflamed
                     a year
                                                                                                                     with a year   icy mud   feathers plank
                                             perishable but closer   underneath
 
                                              *

                             When  
                                                                    forest call
                           on each step 
                                                              streaks
                                upon walls, walls 
              birds depart, river sink
                             to depth of the country, the land   all turn into: prayers and songs
 
                                                    the orchard 
                              of life
                      respirate   unceasing
                                                                                              glare   now: wide open

Shih-Min, Sun lives and writes in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work has appeared and will be presented in publications including, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, Dadakuku, Rural Fiction Magazine, Wordpeace and has been selected for Atlanta Review 2022 International Poetry Competition in Merit Award. She started writing while working abroad, inspired deeply by family, teachers, and friends. She loves writing as a way to interpret still life and scenes of bond through language. Visit her on Instagram: @aura_a_u_r_a

ANTIGONE IN MARIUPOL

by Bonnie Naradzay

Mariupol, Ukraine 17 April 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko

I searched the ruined city for my brother

to consecrate him with a proper burial.

Snow was still falling in the cold spring then.

I stopped at a body pockmarked with bullets;

the fingers on each hand had been bent backwards.

I came upon a corpse without a head. 

Do I know him?  Oh, they are all my brothers,  

in mass graves everywhere, shoved into ditches, 

dead in the midst of life from this unholy invasion.

Now I myself am buried—in tunnels below the city,   

refusing to surrender to the enemy king who said

not even a fly will be allowed to leave alive.  

Sentries are everywhere, barricading the doors. 

Where oh where is the civilized world?

Some day, perhaps, Sophocles will create a tragedy

for people to witness—and make sense of this.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry salons at a day shelter for homeless people and also at a retirement community, both in Washington DC. Poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, The American Journal of Poetry, and others. While in graduate school, she took a class that Robert Lowell taught: “The King James Bible as English Poetry.” In 2010 she was awarded the New Orleans MFA poetry prize: a month’s stay with Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary in her castle in Northern Italy. While there, she had tea with Mary, heard cuckoos calling during mating season, and hiked in the Dolomites.

KĀKOLŪKĪYAM

by Nicholas Katsanis

An Afghan soldier pops up from his tank to signal a U.S. warplane bombing Al Qaeda fighters in the White Mountains of Tora Bora in Afghanistan on Dec. 10, 2001.(David Guttenfelder / Associated Press via the Los Angeles Times)

The owls and the crows are at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Ill-defined by borders and perceived advantages

The owls are old and therefore wise

Or so they tell themselves to make-belief

Convince their childrens’ children of their superiority

Supremacy of poise and purpose, they persist

Until foibles morph into fact,

Poorly begotten truth whose tangled roots are lost—conveniently—in antiquity

The crows are young, confident, energetic

The skies’ embrace belong to them, they preach

For they are fast and nimble

Intimidating in their murder, or so they teach their children

Schooling them in the virtue of their virility, their singularity of purpose

The owls and crows are at war

Bickering over holes in trees

Despite the endless forest that surrounds them

Beak on beak and claw on claw

They decimate each other’s numbers

Each pointless victory and defeat

Treated by triumphalism and defiance in equal measure

The owls’ corpses are offered eternal absolution

The crows’ mangled bodies heavenly promise of peace and honey

Both declaring divine providence over the Final Rights

Both bereft of true wisdom

The owls and the crows were at war

Embroiled in bitter struggle for control of their dominion

Until the lightning in the forest burned

And the rain fell upon the smoldering stumps

And there was nothing left to war over

Author’s Note: Inspired by the Panchatantra collection of classic Indian fables, this adaptation examines the current/perpetual secular and religious tension in Afghanistan post-collapse.

Nicholas Katsanis is an author and poet of magical realism. You can find some of his micro fiction (50-word stories, stories in 100 words) as well upcoming pieces in Literary Stories and elsewhere (including magazines that do not have the word ‘Story’ in their titles). He lives and works in southern Florida. Follow him on Twitter @nicholaskatsan1

MYRMIDONS

by Ralph La Rosa

after and with Thoreau

"Hawk Eye" by Tom Tomorrow at The Nib

The main lesson from Afghanistan is that 

the ‘war on terror’ does not work 

—Mary Kaldor, The Guardian, August 24, 2021

Ants battled on my Walden woodpile,

Small reds against much larger blacks.

The wood was strewn with dying and dead:

Imperialist blacks and republican reds.

 

A red clamped on a black ant’s chest

Was shaken till a back leg broke.

I watched another red assault

The black ant’s back and gnaw his neck—

 

An Achilles avenging his Patroclus?

The black destroyed all the reds’ limbs,

Lopped off their heads and left with them.

Who won this internecine bellum?

 

Most warrior Myrmidons soon dead,

Ant squads claimed corpses, black and red.

 

 

Author’s Note: This poem attempts to be a microcosm of Thoreau’s discussion in Walden, Chapter 12: “Brute Neighbors.”

Like Thoreau, Ralph La Rosa finds little to commend ants inhumanity to ants.

A WREATH OF HAIKU

by Karan Kapoor

Children’s shoes and toys were placed in front of the former 7 after the remains of 215 children, some as young as 3, were found at the site this past week. Photo credit: Dennis Owen/Reuters via The New York Times, June 7, 2021.

a radar 

penetrates the ground:

215 little corpses

not corpses

remains—

skeletons and screams

unmarked—

all burial sites

are not graves

laughter of children 

at a school,

a concentration camp

an escape plan:

jump

from the highest balcony

riddle: a four-letter word

with six more letters:

indigenous

let's play a game

stick out your tongue—

pins and needles

bless the Lord

you who serve Him,

undoing His will

we are children of god

let us show you the light

six feet underground

Karan Kapoor is the author of a novelette Maya and the co-author of a novel The Dreaming Reality, both independently published. Long-listed for Toto Funds the Arts awards, his poems have appeared in The Indian Quarterly, G5A Imprint, Stride, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. He's currently working on his debut poetry collection. When not reading or writing, he is obsessing over classical music. Currently in his final semester of MA in Literary Art Creative Writing, he wants to continue to live a life devoted to music and literature.

FOR INDIA

by Janet Leahy

A mass cremation of victims who died due to Covid-19 is seen at a crematorium ground in New Delhi, India, April 22, 2021. (Reuters)

Smoke billows from the crematoriums,

the assembly line of corpses winds

through the streets of Mumbai

—once this was a route for the pearl trade.

The assembly line of corpses

taxies, trucks, bicycles,

—on the long ago route for the pearl trade.

Today the sky leaden with ash.

Taxies, trucks, bicycles

carry the dying, carry the dead

sky leaden with ash

tanks of oxygen spent.

They carry the dying, the dead

through the streets of Mumbai

tanks of oxygen spent

smoke billows from crematoriums.

Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. She works with writers in the greater Milwaukee— Waukesha area. Her poetry appears in Midwest Prairie Review, Halfway to the North Pole, Art in so Many Words,  The Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, and others. She has published two collections of poetry.

LONG LIVE THE LAST KING

by Mickey J. Corrigan

People are saying it’s the biggest

the greatest, the best crowd

this shithole has ever seen

sleek limos slide through, his face

at the bulletproof window 

mouth open, golf cap tight

on his oversize head

People are saying

the crowd's as big as Lincoln's

and everyone wept, even Jesus

the fans wild with joy

racecar thrilled to see him

to be seen by him

the man who would be king

People are not saying

he took an appalling strut

across the world stage

that ended in folly, farce

reflecting internal unrest

bubbling anger, belligerence

and distrust of everyone else

People aren't saying

he was a mad genius

skilled at detecting weakness

in a narrow human range

of emotions others feel

absent in his lurking bulk

under the ruby crown

the bloated expression

of abject fear

People aren't asking

why the devout followers

of this crazy cult

still willing to sicken 

maskless in the face

of scientific evidence, millions

of facts like corpses piling up

vowing to win at all costs

or die trying

 

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Novels include  Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). Kelsay Books recently published the poetry chapbook the disappearing self. Grandma Moses Press will publish the poetry chapbook Florida Man later this year. 

THE MEN IN BLOOD RED POWER TIES

by Howie Good

I have seen them corrupt water and air, spew contagion when they speak, block the light from windows with their empty bulk. I have seen them gather armies of the deluded and the stupid, place the law in the keeping of shit-stained hands, turn away smirking from the motherless, the helpless, the lost. I have seen them obscenely rub up against dictators and corpses, reserve for themselves the best or the most, erase the last trace of truth with acid, chisels, and a blowtorch. I have seen them make a crisis of every loving gesture, a crime of every beautiful thought.

Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

THRENODY BY THE PRESIDENT FOR THE VICTIMS OF COVID-19

BEGINNING WITH A LINE BY CZESLAW MILOSZ

by Ralph Culver

1

 

You whom I could not save,

can we make our peace? 

There were so many of you.

And one body

after all

is very like another. 

One life is like another,

in spite of  

what you want to believe.

The dead in any language

are still the dead.

It’s clear that I was confused,

lost in the cool, deep grave of my skull

as the heat of the day 

made corpses in the street

sit up and roll away from the sun.

Addled and jaded, peremptory, 

determined to dissociate 

your fate from my own—

that was my first test

and my first failing.

 

2

 

You whom I did not save,

can you forgive me? 

Of course, if it were up to you,

I have convinced myself

you would have made

the same choice.

It occurs to me,

not for the first time,

that our days here 

are spent entangled in fables,

making our excuses, one

after another—

that I have become 

so proficient,

so adept, 

at evading the truth

that I would pronounce myself blameless

for every death,

including my own.

 

3

 

You who would not be saved,

that army of one who bears my name,

I give you thanks

for ignoring the pleas of the others

and accepting

your own damnation

in exchange for what now passes for my life.

Ralph Culver is a past contributor to TheNewVerse.News. His most recent collection of poems is the chapbook So Be It (WolfGang Press, 2018). His new collection A Passible Man is forthcoming from MadHat Press. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont.