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.

TRICK OR TREAT

by Gil Hoy

Corporations are no longer
inanimate sterile things.

They’re now breathing fleshy
with blood money flowing
through wheels levers pistons
rhythmically turning
deep sea blue to ghoul red

anointing black robed
Victor Frankensteins
to keep Fiends well nourished
and magically cause Creatures
to rise from the dead
with their wild incantations.

While Monsters use up
all free speech that is uttered
mere mortals can't buy a word
just a consonant here and again
found in a graveyard.

Some Adams of Victor’s Labors
think (?) contraception
against religion (!), then
Wretches trump people (!?)
as The Modern Prometheus

dissects ghostly law
like a science school project
held together by webs
taken out by morticians
with the afternoon’s trash.

With all mad scientists
the Vile Insects may elect
the black sky’s the limitless.
In the meantime

have mercy
on the poor corporation
yellow lips watery eyes
shriveled face
resist the temptation
to be a bigot.

Gil Hoy studied poetry at Boston University, and started writing his own poetry in February of this year. Since then, Gil’s poems have been published in Soul Fountain, The New Verse News, The Story Teller Magazine, the Clark Street Review, Eye On Life Magazine, and Stepping Stones Magazine.