NO WORDS FOR ESCAMBIA COUNTY

by Richard Fireman

It has come to this: Escambia County, Florida, schools have banned the dictionary. Five dictionaries are on the district’s list of more than 1,600 books banned pending investigation in December 2023, along with eight different encyclopedias, The Guinness Book of World Records, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not—all due to fears they violate the state’s new laws banning materials with “sexual conduct” from schools. —PEN America, January 9, 2024

If thine eye offend thee pluck it out
says the Bible, and we know 
the Florida governor is a righteous man, with principles
and not much thought. His laws
just made one county remove the dictionary
from library bookshelves. Now 
where do the children find their answers
except in the abundancy of misinformation?
Plenty of that to go around, no worry. 
You say the kids can ask their parents what the truth is
but they’re the ones who voted the fool into office 
so not much help there. It seems 
they’ll have to wait till they can vote 
if they can figure out how to do that
if there even is a vote by then
if there even is a world. 
But meantime they’ll just have to remain
in their literally meaningless limbo
and we have to wonder if it’s a coincidence
that the state’s initial is the grade its education deserves.

Richard Fireman, writing for over fifty years, has given readings at several libraries and Barnes & Noble, and has published over a hundred poems. In 2009 he contributed a chapter to the bibliotherapy book Writing Away the Demons. In September 2022 ten of his poems (five of which had previously been published) were featured in The Thursday Poets' Anthology: Dreams and Realities, along with those of eight of his fellow online writing circle members. His first poetry collection Constellations was published by Prolific Pulse Press in December 2022.

METAMOLOGY

by James Penha

Andertoons Word Cartoon #2815

NFT beats cheugy to be Collins Dictionary’s word of the year 

—The Guardian, November 24, 2021

Before these words become as cheugy 

as Regencycore or climate anxiety this 

pingdemic opens a metaversal auction—

open only to the double-vaxxed for crypto 

or cash—on an NFT of this poem penned 

in mī (that’s mī neopronoun just coined) 

hybrid working spaces hither and thither.

Author's Note: The top ten words of 2021 according to Collins: NFT, cheugy, climate anxiety, crypto, double-vaxxed, hybrid working, metaverse, neopronoun, pingdemic, Regencycore

James Penha edits The New Verse News. Twitter: @JamesPenha

WORD-WARS

by Joan Fenney

Pity all the words in the dictionary competing to be prominent
and relevant—the envy they must be feeling when one
of their own goes from relative obscurity to superstar-word status.
Others are trying to ride on the coattails of unprecedented—
trying to send that upstart down the slippery page—
uncharted thinks it has a chance, surreal is quietly confident,
apocalyptic knows it already had a presence in literature,
long before the now trending ‘unp…’ word flew off every
journalist’s tongue, one five-letter word is more than confident
it has already won the race, with or without corona,
virus is preparing to be written in bold, most likely in capitals
in dictionaries of the future, though that pesky pandemic
won’t give up without a fight.

Joan Fenney’s award-winning poems have been published in anthologies, newspapers, and journals throughout Australia. Joan has published three collections of poetry with Ginninderra Press including Marilyn Monroe by the Brooklyn Bridge and other Portraits, and she has edited two anthologies, Wild and Mountain Secrets, featuring the work of Australian poets. She is currently editing The Crow, a new quarterly journal for South Australian poets.

LOOK IT UP

by Howie Good





A list
of the 10 most frequently

looked up words
on Merriam-Webster.com
in the last 24 hours.

Love is No. 3.
No. 4 is irony.


Howie Good co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely, who does most of the real work.