YOUR SEASON IN HELL IN AMERICA

by Mickey J. Corrigan

You've been waiting 
all along, yes 
for this, yes you
allowing for them
bent over two fold
in the fields
in the gardens, trucks
in their scarves, skin
dark eyes gleaming
in the bleak fog
of low-paid overwork
awaiting your notice
of them there, ripe
for a brutal harvest.

Just don't open the door

But you've drunk the liquor 
from a powerful still
and do not own
your own mind
your life a farce
a play you must 
take your role 
too seriously.

Just don't look at the news

You stopped short
of an investigation
into why, why who
in the muck, the mud
the bars, the camps
the courts, the planes
Get them out!
and to make the world 
stop twirling
to make the whirling 
stand still
you began again
to twist the facts
in your twirling, 
whirling mind
and its disorders.

Just walk down any street

You could see hell
arising around you
beatings, kidnappings
death on high seas
erasing all the brown
while you clung
to your bleached faith
to your so-called moralities 
floating there
like tainted water
or grain alcohol
in your oily brain pan.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan hides out in the lush ruins of South Florida. She writes pulp fiction, literary crime, and psychological thrillers. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and chapbooks. A collection of biographical poems on 20th century poets is in press with Clare Songbirds Publishing.

I AM NOT ALONE: THE DAY AFTER THE 2024 ELECTION

by Guillermo Filice Castro

José     our delivery man

drops off a package

José who of late 

has begun calling me 

by my given name

not the shortened version I usually offer 

to those who cannot roll their R’s

Oh what are you bringing me today? 

I ask José in a way befitting our 

developing chumminess 

jovial (I suppose)

workplace banter

José responds with a feisty What’s up Papi!

“I’m bringing the vote that made us win,” he adds.

Takes me a second or two to process that.

“Us?” I say as I sign for the soft pack. “Win?”

The reality I was keeping at bay 

swoops right back down

claws extended open beak 

letting out a hellish screech

the reality that filtered into my sleep

last night 

as if water through strata and monsters

as votes were being counted:

The sweaty

bald man  a cross 

between a comic book villain

and a Bond baddie

in whose servitude I seemed to be

genuflecting and smiling as I fanned

the villain’s ego with nodding approval

as he pulled me into his chest

squeezing out my breath

José     who the other day told me 

he had a daughter 

(I’m thinking of his daughter)

and once tried to serve 

in the military 

smiles and pops back 

into the freight elevator

Us? Who’s “us”? 

All I do is smile back, 

parcel in hand, 

doors closing.

Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Mixtape for a War and Agua, Fuego. His work appears in many journals, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and featured in The Best American Poetry 2023. Born and raised in Argentina, he lives with his husband in New Jersey.

BEAR WITH ME TODAY

by Linda Laderman

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Bear with me today 

because I’m thinking

about what’s in front

of us in this second, 

whatever, wherever 

you might be—bear 

with me. I’m almost

out of my mind. Feel

my chest, tight, like

elastic ready to snap.

Put down a metaphor

for brittle, body, break.

My body is taut. Rat 

a tat: a series of knocks 

at the door. Slam it shut.

Do you have a warrant?

I don’t do much sleeping.

My body weeps, pulled 

into the undertow. I’ve no

resistance to the rising

tide. Silt, salt, foam, wall.

Bear with me. I beg you,

you who believe, let your

god know this would be a

good time for it to lift up

its countenance among us.

Bear with me if I repeat my

fears—if my refusal to let go 

scares you. I want to know

why you wander door to door,

in pursuit of something you

imagine, but haven’t found. 

Do you hear? The rooms rife 

with past choices, old voices.

I don’t know how this ends. 

Bear with me. I’m searching for a conclusion.

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Action-Spectacle, SWWIM, Rise Up Review, and Rust & Moth. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know can be found online at Harbor Review. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University, in Ohio.

WD-40

by Jeff Burt

Craig Bennett

If only we had political strength WD-40, 

that you could spray a little on an MTG or MG 

and the braying, the screeching, the informing 

about its presence could be silenced by a squirt. 

The door would re-assume humility 

in being a utility again, no longer the portal 

which the candidates think they provide

into a yawning perfecting future, 

but simple wood, hinged and soundless,

meant once to be opened, and then kept shut.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California and has worked in administration of electronics and mental health care.

SOUND AND FURY FROM UVALDE

by Suzette Bishop

I hear it from a two hours’ drive north,

From just below the scenic Texas Hill Country,

The scream of first getting the news

Their loved one was gunned down

Merged into one long, piercing, repeating sound,

Before a storm barrels southward,

Hail starting up slowly,

Then shaking the cathedral ceiling,

Our windows,

Animals running for cover.

We’ve driven through the small town,

Stopped to get gas,

Know a couple people who went to the junior college

On barrel racing scholarships,

Heard the grandson of someone from work survived.

A heart-stopped moment in class once

With the popping sound down the hall,

Two students, a veteran and FBI agent, meeting my eyes,

The veteran immediately slamming the door shut.

He always sat next to the door,

One leg jiggling, ready to escape.

Do you know what to do if there’s a shooter?

The agent asked me, asked the class.

Everybody nodded. 

The lectern and desks our only hope

Of keeping that door closed since there is no lock,

And I’m not given the key,

I am forced to tell them.

That time, it was just some backfiring or mechanical sound,

And we got back to what we were supposed to be doing,

Our hearts re-starting,

Still, I see us rocking the lectern from its moorings,

Pulling up the tape covering the wires to the computer,

Pushing and dragging it to the door,

The wires sparking, desks piled around it,

Some of us smashing desks into windows.

In one scenario, we get this done before

The shooter appears at our classroom on the second floor,

In some scenarios, the students jump two stories down,

Breaking bones, cut by glass, but alive,

In another scenario, the shooter enters at our end of the building

And sprints up the stairs, bypassing the first floor;

The veteran, some of his classmates

Sitting near him, try to keep the shooter out

By leaning hard against the door, but can’t,

The agent pulls out his concealed gun and shoots most times.

In many scenarios, the lectern is too heavy,

Too stuck, to move,

The desks too flimsy and small,

Their tabletop hinges squeaking loudly,

Drawing attend, wasting precious time.

In a few scenarios, the shooter is one of my students,

Already in the classroom,

Like the one who lovingly wrote poems about his gun,

The one having a meltdown and yelling at me

During the final,

Another ranting so loudly, another instructor looked in on us,

The one writing about hurting a classmate,

The one who mailed me a threatening letter,

Whoever left a knife at the lectern.

With the sound of hail ringing like deadbolt locks,

I use the knife to cut the wires.

Suzette Bishop has published three poetry books and two chapbooks, including her most recent chapbook Jaguar’s Book of the Dead. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. In addition to teaching, she has given workshops for gifted children, senior citizens, writers on the US-Mexico border, at-risk youth, and for an afterschool arts program serving a rural Hispanic community. She lives with her husband and two cats.

THE DOOR

by Katherine West

"But it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station—including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day—to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.”  —Barack Obama, May 29, 2020

There is a door—
someone has left it open
just a little bit
so a band of light
runs along the floor
to where we stand in the dark
touches the feet
of the first in line

I can tell this makes them happy
even though their backs are to me
something about the relaxed
line of their shoulders
the ease of the way they turn their heads
this way
then that
confident
it won't be long now

The band of light
doesn't touch my feet—
I'm about halfway down the line
even if I stood on tiptoe
or craned my neck to one side
I couldn't get a good view
through the door

So I look at the line—
it starts out white with reflected light
then gets darker and darker
the further away it reaches
down the dim hall where we wait—
the first in line are clear cut
their collars
their buttons
outlined in light
but the ones behind me blur
into a single
black
unmoving
cloud

I wait for someone to step out of this cloud
to show me details
beautiful details
of finger and face
soft lips
the curve of forehead
I wait for the music
of speech
laughter
for an empty space
inside me
to fill

Then I feel it
a weight
in the space that is not empty
a weight that shifts
like a child
impatient to be born—
then it kicks
something bursts
and I see
hundreds of eyes meeting mine—
candles, stars, constellations...
we all move at the same time and the line
is broken


Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness, performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov, and teaches seasonal poetry workshops that revolve around "wilderness writing."  She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and TheNewVerse.News  which recently nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize.

LAST DAYS OF FREEDOM

by Mickey J. Corrigan

What about the women who think
they are shore birds in startled flight
over the unruffled sand, eggs nestled
in jagged rock crevices slap-fed
by the bathe and bash sea?

Don't blame the shoreline, comfortable
in the lap and suckle, the eating away
the sloping of high grass dunes
hillcrests ever flattened by time
and growth spurts of starlit cities.

What about the clotted clapboard graves
narrow streets, neighborhoods blissful
in their ignorance, their pancake morning
sameness, their white cream frosting
smothering rich cakes of desire?

Don't blame the strong men barging
onto the ark, boarding forcefully
pillage in their knife eyes, hammy fists
full of weaponry, double strapped bullets
draped across broad hairy chests.

What about the meat-and-potato talk
in the pubs and pastel living rooms
all our fears shrunk to shadows
blued under hot white moons
gibboning in a lurching black?

Don't blame the suck and slur of the tide
days trailing by, forgetting themselves
in the flutterkick to a shared illusion
spoon-fed to us in flying dreams

the windswept sky like a blue door
that will swing shut behind us.


Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Novels include  Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). Kelsay Books recently published the poetry chapbook the disappearing self. 

THIS IS NOT A SAFE HOUSE

by Ellen Austin-Li

I speak to my son through a wooden door, his bedroom a quarantine zone, Day 12. 

His brilliant smile hides behind a mask. I pine to hold him. I leave his favorite food by the door: Ramen with two eggs, yokes poked open with chopsticks. and a dollop of hot sesame oil, yellow cake with sweetened condensed milk (like NiNi makes), cinnamon tea with honey. One bathroom extends his bunker. I am too afraid to enter to clean. If this is Coronavirus, it’s too late for his brother and so for us all, as he showers there. Sooner or later we’ll all get it—a cavalier cloak covers my husband's fear. He is on the Crisis Airway Team at the hospital. Back in my burn-nurse days, I learned to be strict with gloves, scrubs, gowns, masks. We have broken technique. Don’t you answer the call to work, he said in a naked moment. If I don’t make it, someone has to be alive for the boys. We are broken. Day 12 and my husband finally agrees. We are not a safe house. I text my son about the bag of Cadbury Mini-Eggs I laid on the floor outside his door.

Ellen Austin-Li is an award-winning poet published in Artemis, Writers Tribe Review, The Maine Review, Mothers Always Write, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Masque & Spectacle, Green Briar Review, Panoply, and other places. Her first poetry chapbook Firefly was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Ellen is a student at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program at Pine Manor College. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

BELOVED

by Doug Bolling

North wind just off the sea
Heavy freighters out there now
Slowing toward a final turn
To harbor and rest against an
Unforgiving roil and smash of
Moon bent wave.

Rest I think rest.
What does it bring to we the
Toilers whether far out or
Crouching beside the door
Of a virus caught loved one.
No answer that holds, no
Roseate bloom out of the
Shadows of a dirt laden
Tomb.

We have buried two and soon
The third.
John in his artificial sleep
Barely visible through the
Frosted window, single
Portal between death
And life,
So narrow the difference.

Only a month ago I stood as
John the mariner of seas
Of thought in endless books
And beyond paused in a
New York street to embrace
A begging man in thin coat
And desperate mien.

I believe money passed
Between two sets of eyes
Locked in some version

Of eternity. I witnessed
Hugs and tears in those
Sudden moments and the
Brief silence that speaks
Of a more, more, some
Mystery perhaps outside
The rumble and screech
Of profit driven days.

Eternity or not an old man
Trapped in an unseeing
Wasteland holds his stance
Winter or spring and the best
Friend I will ever have waits
For his final breath below
Clang and clatter of a
Temporary grace.

Doug Bolling’s poems have appeared in Posit, Basalt, Blue Collar Review, Kestrel, The Missing Slate (with interview), and Writers Resist among others. He lives in the outlands of Chicago.

WHEN WE KNOW THE DANGER

by Brooke Herter James

when it means pushing
the bureau across the bare floor
to jam the door shut   hiding

behind the curtain    cowering
beneath the chair   between the legs
of someone bigger  stronger

when we know the scary
inside is worse than
the whatever out there

can we open the windows
and take off our masks
just long enough to scream?


Brooke Herter James is a poet and children’s book author living in Vermont.

THAT BEAUTIFUL OBJECT NEXT DOOR?

by D.B. Goman

When the world started to end
the other day there was still
a glass of water the soup on
the gas stove the bills delivered
to laptop the car to pick up
meds the warm lamp by a bed
for novels and monthly mags
the vents with cool air the plane
ticket to Tobago hot on fridge
the spin of dryer the stupid
tv talk-show hosts the friends
inside a phone happy to shoot
every thing made or about to be
     conceived

I also was a lover before now
before the imagination’s other
half grew strong clouds in eyes
before the virus killed all I knew
as love walking in nature wanting
more when my hand was held
and a river sang with us as trees
on guard let us laugh with birds
in nest and we took for granted
blossoms and I thought I knew
myself because we did try so
hard to know each other then
before I learned the world wasn't
ours and things stopped working

How long is long this simply goes
on with the fear of just beyond
the door I don’t know who’s next
door right now is there someone
next door I don’t hear a thing
I don’t speak anymore I don’t
dare the old dreams are there in
the shadows at upstairs window
across the yard I want it there
I don’t can’t want it so beautiful
a picture of arms knees hair
neck wrists ears thighs shoulder
blades unprocessed I can’t be
sure a chip in glass and whatever

isn’t there isn’t thinking this too

D.B. Goman continues to be upset that he wasn't born with real wings. And a stinger. For penance, many of his poems and essays have been published in a variety of journals including Ditch, Quarry, Eye Magazine, 2River View, Jones Av., Travel Mag, The Literary Bohemian, 2 Bridges Review. A collection of poems is forthcoming this autumn.

DUNGEONS FROM DRAGONS

by Dennis Etzel Jr.

Asmund wakes me up for another game
as the sun tries rising in another December
morning I try to rise he says he likes to wake up
in a little dark time not too early
looks out the window over our back
yard over our Kansas our country
waking up I’ve never woken up in such a dark time
these gradual small wake-ups to dungeon builders

as our resistance is set to dismantle walls Asmund asks
if this little dark time is okay for me to wake up in
I say yes let’s go downstairs with your brothers to sit
navigate the dungeon together keeping the dragons
from getting further ahead as we search for a secret door
for freedom I show my sons how to throw the dice

Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches English at Washburn University. He has an MFA from The University of Kansas, and an MA and Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Kansas State University. He has two chapbooks, The Sum of Two Mothers (ELJ Publications 2013) and My Graphic Novel (Kattywompus Press 2015), a poetic memoir My Secret Wars of 1984 (BlazeVOX 2015), and Fast-Food Sonnets (Coal City Review Press 2016). His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, and others. He is a TALK Scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council and leads poetry workshops in various Kansas spaces.

ERASURE

by Terry S. Johnson

from “Trump Turns Staid Process Into Spectacle as Aspirants Parade to His Door,”

The New York Times, 11/20/16

President-elect Donald Trump heads inside the clubhouse following his meeting with David McCormick, president of the management committee at Bridgewater Associates, at Trump International Golf Club in Bedminster Township, N.J. Drew Angerer/Getty Images via NPR, November 20, 2016

                                                                        Trump

                        inscrutable

                                                Spectacle                                            for

                                                                                    the world

                                       a pageant

                                                                        Teasing

           contenders

                        The Club’s      farmhouse

                                                         gushed

                                    former adversaries

 “phony”

                                                 Preference for older white men

                                                            military

                        No

public process

                                                 Discarded

                        election cycle

                                                                        Make

                        deals

                                                                                                Shape

                                                posture

                                                                       

                                                            Bursts

            of

                                                                                            disapproval

                                                                                    “ – nothing

funny at all.”

Terry S. Johnson explored careers as a newspaper advertising clerk, a library assistant and a professional harpsichordist before serving as a public school teacher for over twenty-five years. She earned her M.F.A. in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published in many anthologies and journals.  Her first book Coalescence was published in 2014 by WordTech and won an honorable mention award in the New England Book Festival.