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.

AFTER THE ELECTION

by Joan Mazza

“The Truth Dawns,” a painting at Fruitful Dark.

                I’ll never tell a lie. —Jimmy Carter, 1976.

And now the long trek back to sanity, without

a daily outrage or ten, without the avalanche of lies,

earthquakes of violations of the Hatch Act,

projecting corruption onto others. We’ll climb

back to believe in science based on evidence,

dismantle claims of conspiracies without basis.

We’ll embark on a clear plan to tackle a virus

that has tackled us, one that will kill another million

in the world before its spread slows. Let us return

to curiosity and real conversation without name-

calling, without mocking names and appearance,

without shaming skin shade and hairstyles. Let’s

educate ourselves about nuance and subtlety,

the fluidity of gender and identity, how temperament

and preferences change across our lives. Let us teach

our children how to manage complex emotions

and validate their experience of confusion. Let’s preach

honesty as a practical living strategy, more than a virtue.

Finally decent, we end the gaslighting and distortion,

the refusal to be transparent after the promise.

Let’s accept truth as not always pretty, but embrace

it as a guide toward what is real and tangible

as apples, tactile and heartening as someone

looking into your eyes and squeezing your hand,

comforting as a poem at a president’s inauguration.

Joan Mazza worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her work has appeared in Italian Americana, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia where she writes a poem every day and has been baking bread since before Covid19.

VALENTINE'S DAY REMIX

by Howie Good





I like distortion and dirt, I like reverb and delay,
I like spirals and turning objects and how forms look
when they move in three dimensions.

What interests me isn’t success,
but love, with its nimble and sinister tricks.

Drag it outside the window.
The next person adds onto it without knowing,
something that happens all the time,
a white pinnacle pricking just above the horizon.

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.

AGAINST THE NEED TO WRITE POEMS IN THE AGE OF T***P

by Alan Walowitz

Photo Illustration by Jackie Friedman | Images courtesy iStock, Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images via The Week

In poems the facts don’t seem to matter much
but these alt-facts just rip the poems right out of me—
the thought of madmen milling unvetted at our ports
to eat the still-beating hearts of our young
keeps me up long into the night, and sometimes gets so bad
I have to head downstairs for a late-night snack myself;
aliens hover at the polls ready to disguise themselves as the dead—
how can I make even a gesture toward a poem,
under these intolerable conditions.
Wordsworth knew it’s best to conjure up a lake lapping steady
and not fire up the hookah his friend had left as a house-gift,
though God know Coleridge has convinced me once or twice to try
and it’s worked nicely some dark and stormy nights
while waiting for an imagined visitor on business from Porlock.

Me, I prefer to know some things might be true—
the time on the clock should be approximately right,
then I can look outside and tell day from night,
though wrong from right has always been a tougher sell
in someone like me who likes to make stuff up.
But here they are the alt-facts lined up right outside my home
in pretty paper, ready to prop up whatever I might prefer to think—
a tsunami’s due that will make my property waterfront,
or a torrent of water slushed down any unsuspecting throat
will wash the truth right out of even the most innocent.
Whatever I feel, what joy, what many-splendored
wonders of this brave new world we’ve stepped into
across the threshold of the T***p-house mirror—
hell, there’s no longer reason to write a poem.

Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing. He’ll be reading at the Cornelia Street Café on Tuesday, March 7th at 6 pm.

HOW DECISIONS ARE MADE

by Martin Willitts Jr

Image source: The Craftinomicon

based on “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” Picasso, 1907, and Fox News

Gossip twists the truth, distorts the facts
into unrecognizable shapes
into five Picasso women in Avignon.

If a person says enough lies, exactly the same,
all the time, too many people
accept it as truth. But a lie is still a lie.

And like the distorted women, brutalized
beyond recognition, gossip is
an art form that changes what was.

Ruins are still ruins. The person destroyed
must shift through the rubble of their lives.
Somewhere, underneath, smolders the truth.


Martin Willitts Jr has been nominated for 6 Pushcart and 6 Best Of The Net awards. He has 5 full-length and 20 chapbooks of poetry, including the  2013 national contest winner, Searching For What Is Not There (Hiraeth Press). He has been in The New Verse News before.