PRACTICING FOR THE BIGLY DEBATE

by Wayne Scheer

No one ever saw a debate like this.

They tell me seven billion people

will watch me,

maybe more.

So I have to prepare bigly.

First, I’ll mispronounce her name.

Ka-MAL-a, 

Then I’ll call her 

Kamrade.

She’ll try to laugh 

And I’ll remind people how only low IQ people

laugh like that. 

I never laugh.

I smirk, sometimes I sneer.  Mostly, I grimace.

That’s manly.

She opens her mouth when she laughs.

That’s a girlie thing.  

My father once hit me in the mouth for laughing.

I hate people who are happy.

I have more money.  Money makes a person happy.

My father taught me that, too.  

Ka-MAL-a doesn’t have as much money as I have,

so her laugh is a lie.

It has to be.

My father said.

And stop feeding me all those facts and statistises.

No one wants to hear that.

My rating will drop with my followers if I spout facts.

They want red meat, not kale salad.

Do you know how much red meat has gone up

since Komrade Ka-MAL-a and Obama have been in power?

Neither do I.

But people tell me it tripled, quadrupled.

People have to feed their children sawdust 

because they can’t afford

prime rib for their babies.  I hear that all the time.

I teethed on filet mignon and lobster,

(this was pre McDonald’s) 

but children today suck on little plastic thingies.

It’s all Obama’s fault.  And Hillary’s.

Lock them up! Lock them up?

What’s that?  I’m going to debate Kamala Harris, not Obama or Hillary.

Since when?

Oh, that’s right, Ka-MAL-a.  

I get them mixed up.  Ka-MAL-a. O-BAM-a. Frederick Douglass.

Ka-Mal-a? Isn’t she the one who sat in the front of the bus

when she isn’t even black?

What? Why should keep that to myself?

You don’t know anything about ratings.  

It’s time to let me be me.

I’m President of the World and a black belt in Karate.

I trained as a Navy Seal, you know.

They say I was the best recruit they ever saw.

I would have gone to Vietnam and stopped that war in one day,

but my father had bone spurs... 

Wayne Scheer lives with his wife in Atlanta. After twenty-five years of teaching writing and literature in college, he is trying to follow his own advice and write. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his stories have appeared in such varied publications as The Christian Science Monitor, Sex and Laughter, The Pedestal, Flash Me Magazine, Cezanne’s Carrot, The Binnacle and The Better Drink.

DEBATE PANTOUM

by Dion O’Reilly

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News

Nothing's quite right—
ziggurats are toppling, the president’s stuttering, 
the courts are rigged, and it's too damn hot.
Buckle up baby... this shit's happening

—ziggurats, toppling. The president stuttering, 
millennials hating him ‘cause he won't stop a war.
Buckle up baby...this shit's happening. 
—a war that’s been raging for a million years.

Millennials hate him ‘cause he won't stop the war,
they can't buy a house, and they're paying back loans,
—this war’s been raging for a million years,
but now it’s thumb-tapped on our own little phones.

We can't buy a house, we’re paying back loans.
The problem’s too big to even begin,
thank god we can thumb-tap our own little phones.
There are just two choices, and they both look grim,

like problems too big to even begin—
The courts are rigged, and it's too damn hot.
There are just two choices and they both look grim.
Whom to vote for? Nothing feels right. 

Dion O'Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize; Ghost Dogs, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award; and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

ON THE DEBATE STAGE

by Anna Evans

via The Washington Post

He states (quite earnestly, for what it’s worth)
that Dems want babies murdered after birth.

The question on the Capitol disorder
he answers, “On Jan 6 we’d a great border.”

Opioid crisis? Claims the demagogue,
“We solved it when we purchased the best dog”

then boasts, although the stakes are very high,
about how far he makes a golf ball fly

and adds another lie that’s as bizarre:
no European drives an American car.

Yet somehow, all we’re saying the next day
is that the other guy is not okay.

Anna M. Evans is the lone Democrat on her five person Township Council. Her poems are widely published and she teaches poetry at West Windsor Art Center and English at Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection States of Grace is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in the fall of 2024.

DEBATABLE HAIKU

by Patricia Carragon

Cartoon by Phil Hands

old white men debate

commentaries escalate 

flags fly upside down

Patricia Carragon is the curator/editor-in-chief of Brownstone Poets, Brooklyn, NY and the author of Angel Fire (Alien Buddha Press), Meowku (Poets Wear Prada), The Cupcake Chronicles (Poets Wear Prada), and Innocence (Finishing Line Press). All available on Amazon.

THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE OF 2024

by Cecil Morris

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

In the other room the Presidents debate

or speak in sound bites, trade accusations,

paint themselves in camouflage of words

and I can’t listen, sickened by them both,

these two awful ghosts of elections past,

one a self-aggrandizing victim stew,

one the merest shadow of glory gone.

I hear myself and my sister in single digits:

I know you are but what am I, I am rubber

you are glue, bounces off me sticks to you.

This format guaranteed failure. It makes

my heart shrivel, my stomach ache and cry.

Have we learned nothing? I think of my kid’s

guinea pig Harry on his squeaking wheel.

He learned the sound of the vegetable bin

being opened and knew it was time to scream

for cilantro, for parsley, for something

that fed him. I think of Peggy Lee’s voice,

weary, worn, singing “Is that all there is?”

and wonder if we can save ourselves

from self destruction, from bombast and hate,

if we can learn to recognize what’s best

for us, for our children, and work for that.

I want to request asylum without

having to wait for years in a crowded line

in a country foreign to my dreams.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and elsewhere. He and his patient partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the cool Oregon coast and California’s relatively dry Central Valley.

BLIZZARD OF OZ ‘23

by Scott C. Kaestner

Frostbitten existential mood swings

my fingers can’t feel my toes

numb 

        frozen

try to twist, try to wiggle free

nothing. My mind is a mine field

explosive blue diamond 

in snow drift icicle sky

and damn it gets so cold

when an angry sun scorches

everything in sight. The world is

upside down, reason I know

do you hear the shit coming out

of peoples mouths? The aliens

no doubt are bored with us and

have moved onto planets with

                intelligent

                                 life

something religion and politics

and 24 hour news cycles

eliminated from Earth

quite some

         time 

                ago

so here I am, here we are

freezer burnt waiting for the end

or a new beginning or at least

some warm socks to apocalypse in.

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, writer, dad, husband, and an invisible man in plain sight. Google “Scott Kaestner Poetry” to peruse his musings and maybe even buy a book.

INEVITABLE

by Christina Cowling

We are the vaxed, un-vaxed,

the masked, un-masked,

believers or deniers of conspiracy.

Like minded in the measure of our perseverance,

our impatience peaks, declines,

and though we point a shaming finger at each other,

our tongues sharpened like swords divide us,

given no choice, inevitably we ride 

the same pandemic wave together.

Christina Cowling is the published author of short stories and poetry. Her love for writing began at six-years of age. Presently a retired senior, she continues to write and resides in Peterborough, Ontario with her husband.

DÓNDE ESTÁ MI MADRE

by Roger Aplon

 

A child weeps & her cries reverberate throughout the dingy warehouses,

makeshift barracks & swarming

extraction camps, it

 

ricochets across the desolate plains of west Texas & southern California &

southern Arizona & the mesas

of New Mexico.

 

A child weeps & his tears threaten to drown the tongue-tied Christians, Jews

& Muslims, they dampen dinner tables

in Portland, Maine &

 

Poughkeepsie, New York & St. Louis, Missouri & across the Rockies &

across the sea to Honolulu. Children weep &

parents weep &

 

a once-proud people cringes in the wake of what it has allowed & what it

has wrought & what it is to be

dishonored.

 

Between bouts of fear & trembling these kids are heard to ask ¿ Dónde está mi madre?

          —¿Dónde está mi padre?—

¿ Dónde estoy?

 

‘Where Am I?’ rings off-key like a cracked bell—like a symbolic “liberty”

bell, cracked but still resonant, reminiscent

of what has been lost but might still be.

 

Roger Aplon has published thirteen books: one of prose poems & short fiction: Intimacies;  twelve of poetry, including the recently published: Mustering What’s Left—Selected & New Poems—1976 – 2017 from Unsolicited Press. He lives in Beacon, N Y & publishes the poetry magazine: “Waymark – Voices of the Valley.”

ST. PETER'S PENCE

Edmund Conti is as old as the hills and older than the candidates.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE?

by Joan Mazza

If you were raised by and/or married to an abuser,

I know you are suffering tonight. I see you. I feel you.

We are going to rise up and take the mf down.

      —Pam Houston, public Facebook post, Sept. 29, 2020

Didn’t watch, didn’t listen. I went to bed early,

held on to the clarity earned by a day of writing,

reading, an online poetry class. I drank a lot

of water, pondered what I’ll eat for my next meal,

folded clean sheets, made notes for poems. I wasn’t

online during the chaos and shouting, refuse to expose

myself to a bully’s tactics of distraction and lies—

dominance devices with attacks on the other’s

character that show the lack of dignity and inability

to reason. In the morning, I watch one clip before

I’m fully awake, read Facebook full of horror

at this clown of hokum who signals to racists, white

supremacists, and the Proud Boys to be ready to foment

a civil war. Sometimes it takes only one morsel of food

to know it’s poison. Sometimes one sentence makes you

back away and lock the doors of your heart and head. 

In peace and security, ten days ago I voted.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist and psychotherapist, and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her poetry appears in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The MacGuffin, and The Nation. She lives and isolates in rural central Virginia.

CALLING IT

by Thomas R. Smith

Just to see and hear him on a screen

hurts the soul.  Stench of abuse.

The Abyss hijacks the microphone,

no muting the rant the psychotic

can’t switch off in his head.

The assault on truth is physical:

the viewer’s knees tremble, breath comes

up short.  Lies fly out of the mouth

in black streams.  They are his children:

father of lies, lord of the flies.

Damaged horror child exposed.

The networks call it a “debate.”

Burroughs called it “naked lunch.”

Yeats called it “rough beast.”  I call it

“rape in an abandoned  house.”

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collection is The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press).

OUR BODY POLITIC

by Vera Kewes Salter

The praying mantis turns its head 
to destroy soft-bodied insects 
with its armored limbs

 

and giant ants use their  

mandibles to sever 

the mantis' narrow neck.

 

We sawed the limb 

of the flowering cherry to protect 

ourselves before the storm.

 

Now the wounded branch seeps

amber onto the blond wood

and green shoots grow.

 

There is a walnut tree that casts an even

shade and bears heavy lime-green fruit

but excretes toxic juglone that poisons 

 

all growth on the ground 

around and causes a permanent 

blight even after it is felled..

 

Will our wounds 

succumb to poison

or can green shoots grow?

Vera Kewes Salter lives and writes in New Rochelle New York.

GOODBYE, CHARON

 by David Spicer

Charon, no converted souls await you on this side 

of the river. Guided by your two ugly thugs,

Klaus the Klansman and Hector the Hell’s Angel,

you frighten the depressed night with amber hair,

its illicit brilliance shining for your devoted

minions with the dull transience of a caution light.

Charon, no new naive souls clamor for you on this

river side. Your boat collects water every time you                      

row down its waves, long ago bereft of their blue,

now shadowed by our despair. We hear your entreaties,

Charon, but your words are empty as our dead skies.

We see your eyes shine with the chaos of conflict,

but we tire of them: no more limber sycamores

bloom in the daytime. We know when the darkness

appears that you are here, your loud presence deaf

to our ears at this late date. Each of us dies, Charon,

but, if we see our end near, we want a fresh ferryman     

to steer us to our side of the stormy river that rises:

Your speeches are lies, you have cheated the taxman,

we do not need your worthless coins to hide our eyes.

Soon morning will wake and we shall demand you

depart our banks, leave with your henchmen, and veer

near the poison side of this river, where your fate awaits:

your reckoning, your trials that you have forever evaded.

David Spicer has published poems in The American Poetry Review, CircleStreet, Gargoyle, Moria, Oyster River Pages, Ploughshares, Remington Review, Santa Clara Review, The Sheepshead Review, Steam Ticket, Synaeresis, Third Wednesday, The New Verse News, Yellow Mama, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart twice, he is author of six chapbooks and four full-length collections, the latest two being American Maniac (Hekate Publishing) and Confessional (Cyberwit.net). His fifth, Mad Sestina King, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.

YOU HEAR LAUREL; I HEAR YANNY

by Melissa Balmain

 


Just yesterday you were my twin:
Together we breathed out and in,
Our souls entwined since time began—it's
Sad we're now on separate planets.


Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

PARSING A BATTLE CRY

by Scot Ehrhardt

She was warned. She was given an explanation. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. —Senator Mitch McConnell

Image source: Sharrock’s Blog

Virginia Woolf may have
momentarily occupied
your mouth,
Senator McConnell:
succinct declaratives
abuting an ornate
curleque of
nevertheless
—even the word alone,
a wild breath,
a skip step in an otherwise
ordinary gait—but it was more
than a whimsical lilt,
Miss Woolf layered in you
tricolon and parataxis,
asyndeton and omission
of the auxiliary verb
on the third of the triple.
You are a cautionary tale
of the danger
in cadence,
and when the granular
whisper of persisted
dissipated in the
velvet and mahogany,
the women knew,
the tattoo artists and
journalists knew, and Miss Woolf
did something so extraordinarily
unlike her
that elbow-patched
professors everywhere
had to google
what she looked like
when she smiled.

Scot Ehrhardt is a teacher and writer in Baltimore, MD. He writes poetry at an alarmingly slow rate, so it rarely appears in TheNewVerse.News. His first book One of Us Is Real is available through Smashwords, Inc.

HOW WE ARGUE NOW

by  Michael Mark

When my wife does something I don’t like
I tell her I'm building a wall
from the dining room through the kitchen,
splitting our bed—
that it’s going to be the best wall ever
and she's going to pay for it.
She tells me she's going to throw me out in the cold
without a coat.
When she asks how was my day at work,
I say I told my boss I want to punch her right in the face,
and you?
She says her boss was mean to her
and he looked like he was bleeding from his eyes,
bleeding from everywhere.
When we compare paychecks she calls me a total loser.
I say I have more friends than her on Facebook
and that’s like a poll proving I am a better person.
She tells me I’m sloppy and by picking up after me
she is making our disgusting awful home great again.
When I see our credit card bill—how much
she spends on heat and water, I say she is stupid
and makes terrible, stupid, horrible, the worst deals.
When the grass needs mowing, she says
I’m the lawn establishment and I get nothing done.
I say I haven’t seen our marriage certificate -
I don’t believe we are married and I’m sending her
back to her parents.
She says that my hands are small.
I say for saying I have small hands I will shoot her
with bullets dipped in pig’s blood.
She says she could shoot me dead in our driveway
and our friends and family would still love her
and vote her world’s greatest, friend, mom,
daughter, even daughter-in-law.
I sulk about the small hands comment.
She slides over to my side of the bed.
We broker a deal because we are flexible.


Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gargoyle Magazine, The New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Prelude Magazine, Poet Lore, Rattle, Spillway, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry and other nice places. His poetry has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net.

FACT CHECK

by Dorothy Baird

generosity suffocates
under the weight of incivility
the tongue bludgeons
with fudged facts and loud voice
slips like reality from smiling lips
snippets of sound bites
recast a person’s words
gives the crow’s croak
to the nightingale
the cloak of honesty
does not conceal intent
nor does it disguise
the will to mislead
fraudulent films damage
before they’re found out
editorials emerge as rants
headline news stories
turn print yellow
truth sacrificed
to emotions unrestrained


Dorothy Baird has taught writing and literature in both high school and college. After frequent relocations took her family zig-zagging across this country, she considers herself a corporate tramp. Now happily settled in Chapel Hill, NC, she is busy with poetry.

THE DOLTS' NEXT DEBATE

by Ralph La Rosa

Image source: DonkeyHotey

Don’t ask about earth science
Don’t ask about the poor
Don’t ask about one’s conscience
Such thinking is a chore.

Don’t ask about The Street
Don’t ask about the schools
Don’t ask about deceit
Such issues break our rules.

Do ask if we like kittens
Do ask about the wife
Do ask if we like mittens
Such questions about life.

Do ask if we hate taxes
Do ask if we pray daily
Do ask if we love crises
Such issues never foil us because we always behave like totally deranged assholes

—stupidly.

Ralph La Rosa lives in southern California where he daydreams and writes.

A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS

by Edmund Conti

A school of fishytalkers.
A pride of manes.
A host of tax-cutting angles.
A passel of brats.
A pod of spiels.
A Parnassus of asses.
A crash of egos.
A peep of politicians.
A drift of attention.
A tidings of mudpies.
An unkindness of ravers.
A knot of yes-men.
A sounder of whiners.
A clowder of candidates.
A mustering of stories.
A barren of mules.
A murmuration of startling proposals.
A pencil of one-liners.
A set of bushes.
A squat of daubers.
A poverty of ideas.
A neverthriving of number jugglers.
A cluster of gripes.
A blare of trumpets.
A piddle of puppies.
A wince of viewers.


Edmund Conti gets venereal with a pittance of poets.

I HEAR AMERICA'S MEDIA SINGING

by George Salamon

"Hillary Clinton Wins Big in Vegas," The New Yorker 

. . . and more than 10,800 other articles on Google

Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abby,
Queen Hillary at the Wynn Casino in Vegas.
Victoria held the Scepter with Cross in her right hand
And the one with Dove in her left.
Hillary stepped from behind her lectern on the podium.
Her hands were empty but her smile dazzling.

No Archbishop knelt before her.
Yet the words of Homage came quickly
From the Peers and Peeresses of Punditry,
Singing "This is the Day which Hillary hath made."
They pronounced our democracy's benediction:
Hillary had won the debate!


George Salamon, who writes from St. Louis MO, has noticed that the Republican and Democratic debates are starting to affect his nervous system. This, however, is not a cry for help.