YOUR COUNTRIES ARE GOING TO HELL

by Diane Elayne Dees

Our country, on the other hand,

is a big slice of heaven, where 
 
a bag with different things in it
costs so much, we can’t afford

to buy clothes and medicine.
But things are bound to get better

because hundreds of penguins
have been hit with tariffs.

It will take time for us to see
the benefit of this, so our children

must have two dolls instead of 
thirty dolls, but no worries—

they won’t have to get 
vaccinated against anything,

and anyway, we’re all going to die.
Our children won’t be autistic

because their mothers, burning
with fever, won’t take Tylenol.

And—since they absorb everyting—
our children will rule the world 

once they are all saturated

in steak sauce. Having been spared 

the evil of windmills, they’ll be smart 

enough to bring down the plot to make

them all transgender. The bad news
is that there's no controlling 

the rampant spread of transgender mice
because the immigrants ate all the cats.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books), The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press), and I Can't Recall Exactly When I Died (Kelsay Books). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her author blog is Diane Elayne Dees: Poet and Writer-at-Large.

WE LOVE GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE

by Cecil Morris

Supreme Court seems ready to uphold ban on gender-affirming care for minors. —NPR, December 4, 2024

Here’s gender-affirming care in my hometown: 

We give our boys some guns—long guns like ARs 
and shotguns and semi-auto handguns—
which, at first, are really just pointer fingers
and sticks and trigger-controlled hose nozzles
and, really, anything vaguely phallic.

We give our girls baby dolls and plush toys
and encourage them to hug and comfort,
to placate and coo, and, later, aprons
and play kitchens with miniature pots and pans.

We give our boys hammers and nails (of course)
and drills and fucking big four-wheel drive trucks
and dump trucks and fire trucks with screaming sirens
and teach them privilege and damage control
and the righteousness of conquest and noise.

We give our girls sixty watts of light and need
and teach them the virtues of silence and grace
and a thousand and one ways to cook a chicken,
to make repairs, and to turn tears on and off.

We teach them all manifest destiny.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) will come out in 2025.  He and his partner, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

RADICALIZED

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Sunday, March 8, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.

RADICALIZED
by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: RCOG Globeal Network International Women’s Day Page

The main thing was, she
listened. A
cliché.

So we told her
everything: how we cared

how we couldn’t
stand

watching all the news, how sad we felt.

She said we’re right. We told her
more: little

slips like pretty dolls
with long loose hair

laid on their backs –

here: the teacher
who won’t look
at us

my mother’s glass of brandy
every night,
her soft red cheeks.

She said the answer and it was
the one we wanted.

On the big plane
looking down
at the dark world we held

our coats wrapped tight
as love

around our ribs. The future waited like a bear,
still asleep.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Hobart, decomP, The Tule Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others.

RADICALIZED

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: RCOG Globeal Network International Women’s Day Page

The main thing was, she
listened. A
cliché.

So we told her
everything: how we cared

how we couldn’t
stand

watching all the news, how sad we felt.

She said we’re right. We told her
more: little

slips like pretty dolls
with long loose hair

laid on their backs –

here: the teacher
who won’t look
at us

my mother’s glass of brandy
every night,
her soft red cheeks.

She said the answer and it was
the one we wanted.

On the big plane
looking down
at the dark world we held

our coats wrapped tight
as love

around our ribs. The future waited like a bear,
still asleep.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Hobart, decomP, The Tule Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others.

RAW STUFF

by Carolyn Gregory



Their guns become their dolls,
each with a girl's name on it
and carved tattoo
they caress and polish
like vintage cars

With summer on their hands
and nothing playing at the movies
after the slasher film goes
the way of its bloody machete,

they train on tin cans
popping off little soldiers
on a fence,
steady as she comes
before antlers and coyotes follow --
no time for sentiment

Back with their kill,
they puff up chests and strut
as they continue
making men out of raw stuff,
rifle in a backpack,
Glock in a leather pocket.


Carolyn Gregory's poems and essays on music have been published in American Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Bellowing Ark, Seattle Review, and Stylus. She was featured in For Lovers and Other Losses. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2011 and is a past recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award. Her book, Open Letters, was published by Windmill Editions in 2009 and her next, Facing the Music, in 2012. She has been working on a series about the history of guns in America for several years now.