THE FEARED GENERATION

by Colin Dardis

Plans to tackle misogyny in schools could take up to 20 years to have an impact on society, the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, has said as she outlined measures to protect women and girls. Phillips spoke the day after the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) estimated that 2 million women were victims of violence perpetrated by men each year in an epidemic so serious it amounts to a “national emergency.” —The Guardian, July 25, 2024

Fear for a lost generation,

already losing itself

inside a national emergency,

the beartrap of masculinity 

lying in wait

on every fresh field.

But who needs teeth

or blade or object

when a fist is enough?

Hands closed by culture,

clenched by mistruth,

the lie of servitude.

Pray we can reform

the expectations

of millions:

divorce boy from incel,

girl from object,

violence from sex.

Colin Dardis is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently with the lakes (above/ground press, 2023) and What We Look Like in the Future (Red Wolf Editions, 2023). A neurodivergent poet, editor, and sound artist, his work has been published widely throughout Ireland, the UK and USA.

MYTHINFORMATION

by Philip Stern

written in serious wordplay

Now the emergingcy

is over,

caution and funding

are over.

 

Yesterday, one of our leaders went mything.

He said it was a hoax.

Then said

it would not blast.

 

Then sold equine and oquine

and proposed bleach

to the fringe bleacher seats

at his attent show.

 

He watched as

the wildfirus burned

ungoverned,

saw it sprinkle hot ashes

 

on refrigerated

covid wagons

circling hospitals

where breathless bodies stiffened.

 

Yet mythed messages still burn,

about dangers of masking

and vaccines that damnage DNA,

still cause national dysfusion.

 

So do we now just forget

that we gallowed

over one million deaths

to happen?

 

Philip Stern is 95, had a poem published in The Atlantic in 1957, wrote pop songs in the 60s, and started writing poetry again after retiring from college teaching.

REMNANTS

by Liz Ahl

“The U.S. national emergency to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic ended Monday as President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan congressional resolution to bring it to a close after three years — weeks before it was set to expire…” —NPR, April 11, 2023

                                                

 

Still, these tattered masking tape traces 

on the scuffed tile floors, hieroglyphs  

of our attempts to demarcate safe zones  

of coming and going through  

the narrow public vestibules. 

 

The box of “take one” surgical masks 

still perched on its pedestal at the entrance, 

offers only its lonely cardboard; empty, 

too, each strategically placed 

hand sanitizer dispenser, which exhales  

a sad, shallow breath when pressed. 

Some smudged plexiglass remains, 

having been more difficult to erect 

and therefore more bother to remove. 

 

Outside, the windswept tumbleweed 

of a facemask, its torn elastic bands 

flapping their tired fronds against 

the asphalt with the other winter trash. 

 

Refrigerator trucks rededicated 

to the chilled storage and transport  

of anything but the human deceased.  

Small town campus ice arena 

bearing the slightest scars of cot-legs 

and privacy screens, the strange dream 

of soldiers fading to fragments. 

 

A ghost of myself, figment out of phase, 

measures distances, haunts the far edges  

of what bustles and churns, a clamorous  

bullying desire for “normalcy” 

almost passing for “normalcy.” 

 

And of course, the counted dead, 

the dead uncounted. The brutal 

and insufficient arithmetic. The long  

and the short, the landmine damage 

lurking in bodies, biding time 

until the next innocent footstep. 

And of course, the virus, not cc-d  

on the report of its demotion 

from emergency to some other rank, 

still lingers on the perpetual threshold: 

overstayed guest or one just arriving? 

It’s hard to know any more, if we ever could, 

the coming from the going.  

Liz Ahl is the author of A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) and Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017). Recent publications include a poem about Buzz Aldrin in the anthology Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and poems in recent issues of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and Revolute. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.

ELECTION DAY

by Howie Good

We shout for help, but the music from a passing car is so loud our shouts are drowned out. I punch in the emergency number stored on my phone and after listening to interminable ringing get a fuzzy pre-recorded message: “All our representatives are resisting” – assisting? – “other customers at this time.” And people wonder why the Wampanoag, the tribe that taught the Pilgrims how to survive their first winter in Plymouth, still regret it 400 years later. I fear for my country. Bodies are lying here and there and walking through dark forests. 

Howie Good's latest poetry book is The Horses Were Beautiful (2022), available from Grey Book Press. Redhawk Publications is publishing his collection Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems later this year.

HOW TO HANDLE A LEAK

by Ann E. Wallace

My daughters and I live in a leaky 

old house. The three of us have 

learned how to handle a plumbing 

emergency, to spring into action, 

sop up the mess, cut the water lines,

track the source, mend the seams.

 

This is what women do.

We live in bodies that bleed,

are vulnerable, that give life 

but also betray, and we have 

passed down the fortitude 

to handle leaks and other messes. 

There is wisdom in our living, 

and we know how to act 

when a leak is sprung, exposing 

the ill intentions of those 

who do not live in our bodies, 

those who spout 

outrage at the egregious 

betrayal—as if they know 

what betrayal is—of being 

caught with the pipe cutters 

in their bloody hands.

 

As they sputter and point fingers, 

we—the women—are gathering 

our tools, our rage, and our ballots, 

like we have so many times before, 

ready to fight for our freedom.

Ann E. Wallace is a poet and essayist from Jersey City, New Jersey. Follow her on Twitter @annwlace409 or on Instagram @annwallacephd.com.

GLOBAL STRIKE!

by Katherine West

Geneva (AFP) – A man ended a 39-day-long hunger strike outside the Swiss parliament on Thursday, declaring "Victory!" after the MPs agreed to be briefed by scientists on the latest climate change research. Guillermo Fernandez, who says he has lost 20 kilos since launching his hunger strike on November 1 to push for Swiss MPs to take climate change seriously, ended his fast by gingerly eating a banana outside the parliament building. "Victory!!!!" he announced on Twitter… "Finally the parliament will be confronted with the truth!" His announcement came after the president of the lower house of parliament Irene Kalin, of the Green Party, announced that scientists had been invited to brief MPs on May 2, 2022 about the latest research from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). —France 24, December 9, 2021

I had a dream the millions woke from their dream.  

There was no violence, just numbers.  

Quietly, the millions put down their tools and shut down their computers.  

Quietly, the millions said, "No."  

Quietly, they said, "We want to live."  

Quietly, they marched.  

Quietly, they sang as they marched.  

Quietly, they stood.  

Quietly, they sat. 

Before the capitals of state and country.  

Quietly, they stayed.  

Singing love of forest and river. 

Of life for children and grandchildren.  

Until power returned to the ones who work.  

Until Earth was put first. 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She hs 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 Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. She is also an artist. 

REVIVAL

by Spatika

People protest against the Citizenship Amendment Bill—which allows Hindus from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to get citizenship and exclude Muslims from the same countries—in New Delhi on December 7, 2019. Javed Sultan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images via Vox, December 16, 2019

Are America’s Blacks and India’s Muslims politically comparable? This question has acquired a new salience with the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, underway for weeks in the US, covering several hundred cities. Comparisons have been drawn with the anti-CAA protests in India, lasting three months after mid-December, rebelling against the attempted demotion of India’s Muslims to secondary citizenship. The mainstream Black argument that Blacks have been treated as inferior Americans, with Whites as the putative owners of the nation, is not altogether distinct. —The Indian Express, July 6, 2020

After a gap of 5 months, anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests were once again back on the streets of Dibrugarh with hundreds of activists of the All Assam Students’ Union (Aasu) taking out a motorcycle rally. —The Times of India, August 4, 2020

I have loved Julius Caesar in stories
from my English friends.
I have despised Julius Caesar in words,
striking upon ages.
I live today in burning home astray, my mother
carries small paper notes in tattered folded hands,
saree sifts light through, the only windows left.
the men in uniform are
almost here, asking for signed papers.
I have none. I wish
they did not have pilots fly overhead in our screams, I wish
the skies did not rain upon our chalk graffiti, because
paint was for rich. I wish
our written word wasn’t flung behind bars
nobody to see, I wish
this had never begun.
Caesar lived through citizen’s strangled breaths.
but today I can hear him say,

“My countrymen never cried,
  for my death. Pilgrims, ragged urchins,
  rum-cupped lips did not bawl from inns,
  ivory clad nobles’ eyelids batted away at dry air,
  but even in those sleeping beneath crumbling columns,
  clothes carried not a
  single tear. there was
  no force, no sheer strength of circus led gladiator,
  no power of cavalier battalion, that brought
  forth water of the bodies that my countrymen wore.
  until
  someone spoke
  Antony, my noble aide, Antony
  the moonlight to remember when my rays
  no longer served people their warmth
  Molten silver, seeping shades of wrong
  and glory mingled in lava beds,
  thorn showers, Antony’s words,
  bitter water came streaming forth,
  chiseled edges, Antony’s words,
  cracks to a country’s soft minds,
  breaking
  stealthily through brittle floodgate woes.”

And thousands of years later, come such
  a time of dark pits laden with the bodies of
            my robed brethren.
  a time of words printed in white against white pages
            the children born with sight never see.
  a time of petty gains made from my father’s caps
            pieces of marble tablet remain, which is mosque, which is tomb?
  a time when nobody can say.
today is here because yesterday was deaf to the pleas
of a thousand years.
are Antonys only built for dictators?
today is here, because the day I had a home, those on
the other side would walk confidently past it.
for when I still found chalk to write,
the only hands that rose was to cover people's eyes.
and now
masks are here to silence us.
a viral emergency is the cloak everyone wears around me,
I was born here and I am to leave,
can tears of rage be washed with bottles of hand sanitizer?
I didn’t need arms to fight,
I needed you, I needed her, I needed many.

Spatika is a fourth year student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, pursuing an Integrated Master's in biology. She is an INSPIRE Fellowship recipient, interested in neurobiology and writing. She is also a contributor at Feminism in India, and Delhi Poetry Slam, and a senior editor of her institute magazine.

THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS

by T R Poulson

I wish all emergencies could take place like this:

a theater in the city, stage guns made of rubber

and metal to withstand so many drops and hits

in rehearsals, forgotten lines and flubbers.

The line: I am not throwing away my shot,

as the killer creeps in—Lord show me how

to say no to this—that flutter, why not

here among the songs? The heartbeat now

slows, the patron falls, as Aaron Burr’s pistol

pops. Dying is easy, young man, living

is harder. It plays out as in a crystal

ball. Gun! No prayers, thoughts, forgiving

this time. If only hearts could always feast

on rhymes, as the attack of living lurks, looms,

the gunman a mere actor, a ghost deceased

long ago. I want to be in the room 

where it happens, where everything is just

musical, where lights give me an eyeful,

where words spoken, though fiction, I trust,

and paper walls surround non-shooting rifles.

T R Poulson lives in San Carlos, California.  Her work has appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News, as well as in Rattle’s Poets Respond, Verdad, J Journal, and others.  She enjoys basketball, windsurfing, and going to plays, including a recent performance of Hamilton in San Francisco, which took place the day before the performance in which there was a false shooter alarm.

THE FATHER IN SUMMER PLAINETH FOR HIS SON

by Cally Conan-Davies






O western fire
Take this day back
Reverse the truck
Unburn the wreck.
The fire fighters
Of the forest service
Hell-bent to save us,
Rain down on them,
Drown every forest plant.
Then bring him home,
Because for every day to come
I can't.


Cally Conan-Davies hails from Tasmania. Her poems can be found in periodicals such as The Hudson Review, Subtropics, Poetry, Quadrant, The New Criterion, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southwest Review, The Dark Horse,  Harvard Review and various online journals.