THE PINOCCHIO EFFECT

by Steve Straight

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

It took a while for people to catch on.

 

One day the president’s press secretary

told a series of lies to reporters and the public

and went home that night to a punishing migraine.

It subsided in the morning,

but as soon as she spoke to the gaggle again

it returned in force 

until she could hardly think at all.

 

The Secretary of Defense,

punching the air as he rattled off

bomb totals and strike capabilities

and how much damage the warfighters could do,

suddenly dislocated his shoulder so badly

they couldn’t get it back in the socket

and he wailed in pain as if hit by an RPG.

 

And then the president,

rambling between lies and attacks,

projecting his fears and failures,

his usual spew,

felt the right side of his jaw go slack,

his words slurring in his mouth,

his arm and leg so weak

he could not grip the podium,

and his eyes rolled back into his head.

 

It turned out this was bigger

than people with great power,

as if some outside force

had come to earth, or was already here.

 

What seemed at first like accidents

started happening everywhere:

The playground bully tripped 

while chasing his prey

and broke his nose on the jungle gym.

Farmers who mistreated animals

were bitten by Lone Star ticks

and could no longer eat meat or cheeses

or even tend their animals.

For the person who stole the handicapped space,

three weeks on crutches. 

Cut off that mom and kids on the highway?

You’ll be limping home dragging a muffler.

And rapists? Well, you can imagine

what happened to them.

 

Making the connection was the tricky part

for humans, not used to such obvious signs, 

and they tried to swallow it

as mere coincidence.

 

Then one day, for various reasons,

two million people lost their voices,

five hundred thousand broke their hands

trying to strike someone, another million

came down with ailments and injuries

tied directly to their actions,

and soon it was all too much not to notice.

 

The outside power,

or whatever it was,

wasn’t kidding around.

 

Before you knew it, the crime rate went down,

landlords starting fixing their properties,

billionaires offered to pay their taxes,

and humans everywhere began inspecting

their actions for cruelty and meanness.

 

The so-called problem of evil

turned out to be one side

of an equation we could solve.

We just needed to be reminded.

Steve Straight’s books include Affirmation (Grayson Books, 2022), which won the 2023 William Meredith Award for Poetry, The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2012) and The Water Carrier (Curbstone, 2002). He was professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College, in Connecticut. 

MIRRORING OUR TIMES

by Lylanne Musselman

Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and visual artist. Her poetry has appeared in Pank, The Indianapolis Review, The New Verse News, and Tipton Poetry Journal, among many other literary journals and anthologies. A seven-time Pushcart nominee, she is the author of eight poetry collections and is currently working on another.

RESISTANCE

by Christine Piatek 

Nature in its resilience and beauty

flies in the face of evil

and tethers to us hope that change

is possible even when,

day by day,

by cruelty, careless words, sheer indifference,

change looks impossible.

This is resistance.

I choose nature. 

I choose the tethers it offers. 

I choose hope. 

I choose the possible.

Christine Piatek  is a retired public sector lawyer who enjoys writing in many forms, including poetry. She has  had poems published on Spillwords.com, in the Summer Fiction and Poetry edition of US 1 in various years, and in Volumes 69 and 70 of US 1 Worksheets. 

THE TIPPING POINT

by Jill Rachel Jacobs

(Ode to an Unseen Migrant During Perilous Times)

 

When evil comes a knocking, 

it may arrive with a vengeance, or 

incognito, like some 

Bible-thumping

good ol’ Joe, 

humping a flag.

 

("What we've got here is a failure to communicate")

When rage is sadness and 

sadness is rage, and it becomes

impossible to distinguish the two,

it’s not surprising we may recoil,

hidden in the shadows of the 

reality of what has become 

the new normal. 

 

("But I don’t want to go among mad people")

Like a cancer gone undetected, 

metastasized, 

cell by cell, 

dividing 

conquering,

licking wounds,

stealing secrets, 

tempted by madness,

trying to make sense of 

how we have now become 

that which we once loathed.

 

("Thank you, Sir, May I have another?")

 

When horror is contained, 

darkness has lifted, 

emerging from the underbelly,

dreams intact, 

still blinded by the 

innocence of children’s eyes, 

resting comfortably;

We wait.

 

("We have learned to see the world in gasps")

Unencumbered by reason,

justice now a luxury, 

in a world unrecognizable,

where compassion no longer prevails.

 

(How long? An hour, a year, a lifetime or two?)

 

When will we say when?

When prey becomes the predator,

When captors are held captive,

When cage doors are flung wide open.

Jill Rachel Jacobs is a New York based writer, poet whose poetry has been featured in numerous journals. Her features, commentaries, interviews have been published in The New York Times, Reuters, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, NPR’s Marketplace and Morning Edition.

DO NOT

by Devon Balwit

after Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Cartoon by Custodio.

Do not
 
check the box saying I agree when you haven’t
read the terms, nor put an I believe sign in the front
yard while the yardless are being hauled out the back,
nor assume threat ugly rather than urbane and slick,
nor think one must sloganize to fight (for a lone wag
can be sufficiently ironical to shake the dog),
wor forget the power of art to move unfettered
by a common style, nor worry you must do it better
even to begin, nor avert from sure embarrassment—
for nothing embarrasses more than the human predicament—
our minds in compostable bodies, seeking the light
in the brief blip between birth and night.
Do not obey evil in advance, die
before you’re dead, or—worst of all—refuse to try.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

MY HOUSE, YOUR HOUSE, AND THE PEOPLE’S HOUSE

by William Palmer

AI-generated graphic created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News.

Evil can be “defined most simply as the use of political power to destroy others for the purpose of defending or preserving the integrity of one’s sick self.”

M. Scott Peck, The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil  

 

 

At home I hear a muffled buzz

then press my ear to a wall—

it feels soft

enough to push

my finger through. 

 

I cut out a square

and find a mass

of larvae squirming

in the light, eating

the backing—

 

a replica of the Constitution.

 

I hire an exterminator.

 

Sorry, but you have an infestation.

See the sawdust—they’re gnawing 2-by-4s.

 

They’re even going after steel beams.

Look at the tiny shavings.

 

There is no guarantee we can eradicate

what’s happening.

 

Please do what you can, I say.

 

Each day I listen for the lies.

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in Ecotone, JAMA, On the Seawall, One Art, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

A TIDAL WAVE POEM

by Gil Hoy

in my dream, the strongman threw my pages 
of poems into a wastebasket and told me 
not to write another poem about democracy. 
no more poems about human rights 
and fundamental freedoms, free and fair 
elections, independent branches of government, 
freedom of expression and press, 
constitutional guarantees of civilian authority. 
no more poems about democratic principles 
that fashioned my poems, they, that turned chaos 
and madness into people power, would no longer 
have permission to enter my poems. so instead, 
I wrote a tidal wave poem about a tidal wave coming.
not an about-democracy or about-democratic principles 
type of poem, not a poem about diversity and inclusion, 
one man-one vote, international law, or equal justice 
under the law. no, this poem was about a tidal wave. 
a tidal wave so strong and so powerful, 
so potent and so heavy, it could destroy evil 
in its path. a tidal wave thousands of miles long 
propelled by the strength of the sun, 
the moon and the earth. a tidal wave so 
demanding so dominant that his eyes 
and his lungs looked drowned. 
a tidal wave that yelled
don't ever fuck with my country again. 
a tidal wave so powerful, so so heavy
and strong, that, yes, it deserves its own poem.


Gil Hoy is a Best of the Net nominated Tucson, Arizona poet and writer who is studying fiction and poetry at The Writers Studio in Tucson, Arizona and previously at Boston University. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Hoy is a semi-retired trial lawyer and a former four-term elected Brookline, MA Selectman. His poetry and fiction have previously appeared in Third Wednesday, Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Penmen Review,  Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Bewildering Stories, Literally Stories, The New Verse News and elsewhere.

RUSSIA, REMOVED

by Suzanne Morris

Source: Wikipedia

I am typewriting my version

of the recipe for Coulibiac.

This hearty main dish has

endured since the 17th century

and requires a long list

of ingredients that

I must divide by half

whenever I prepare it, for

it makes enough to feed

a family of Russian peasants

after a long day of laboring

in the fields.

A customized version at hand

will save time as I spread

a rectangle of dough with

salmon, rice, boiled egg slices

and sauce redolent of scallions and

mushrooms and tarragon

then top with another sheet of dough,

seal the edges, glaze with raw egg

and bake the plump mound

to golden brown perfection.

In a flood of sympathy for the

valiant people of Ukraine,

I feel I should omit the note on the

origins of Coulibiac.

Then I remember how it

saddened me when

Ukrainians stripped the

names of

19th century literary giants

such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

from street signs, parks,

and public squares:

 

Weren’t they overlooking the

deep sense of moral justice

that flowed from the pens of

these Russian novelists,

as warming to the

human heart

as a fire in the hearth

on a snowbound winter’s eve?

Who is to say they would not be

wielding their pens today

to tell the truth of

the evil being done

in their country’s name, and

warn of the dire consequences?

...the worm gnaws the cabbage,

but dies before he’s done...*

*Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2007.    

Suzanne Morris is a novelist and a poet.  Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies, and in journals including The New Verse News, The Texas Poetry Assignment, The Pine Cone Review, Stone Quarterly, and Emblazoned Soul Review. 

PRAYING FOR YOU, GOV

by Darrell Petska

Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska said Sunday that he will call a special session of his state's legislature to pass a total ban on abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this term. "Nebraska is a pro-life state. I believe life begins at conception, and those are babies too," Ricketts told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" when asked if he thought the state should require a young girl who was raped to carry the pregnancy to term. —CNN, May 15, 2022

Of course rape is evil,

but evil left to proliferate in a woman

tends to strike again and again in all its

suffocating helplessness, trauma, chronic

anxiety and nightmarish violation,

with all its attendant heartache.

Political one-upmanship and pietisms

that insist on allowing rape's evil to live on

by citing "directives" of god or bandying

emotionally fraught trigger words—

manipulating evil to sell one's agenda—

are beneath a purported man of god

and the yea-saying cadres of men sharing

narrow perceptions of a woman's uterus,

including its role in shaping cognitive

and emotional well-being and the drive

for self-determination—the latter a right

not reserved for men alone.

The shelf-life of your brand of religiosity

is short. We who espouse a more merciful,

compassionate religion pray that your efforts

to be both judge and executioner will fall

to the light, lest "Nebraska Nice" succumbs

to the politics clouding your heart and soul.

Darrell Petska lives and writes in Wisconsin, but part of his heart remains in his birth state of Nebraska.

PLANTING TIME IN UKRAINE

by Anne Harding Woodworth

A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war. Credit: Vitaly Timkiv/Associated Press via The New York Times, March 20, 2022

The fibers of the breadbasket are unraveling.

Metaphor is of no use in wartime.

 

Call the breadbasket what it is: fertile country

that supplies grains near and far,

 

threatened now, as arable fields lie unplowed,

despoiled by the Bear at planting time.

 

Metaphor is useless. The tractor with plow

(or seeder) attached should be chugging out

 

into the fields now and on into the end of April—

but won’t be.

 

Man or woman on a tractor—easy target for the Bear.

But that’s metaphor, too.

 

Call the Bear what he is: greedy and cruel creature.

And not all bears. This one is a singular carrier of evil,

 

who leads his cubs to do his bidding.

There’s little grain left for the families,

for the animals, and none to ship out to Egypt,

Indonesia, Morocco, Israel, Spain, Tunisia.

Tunisia, once called a breadbasket itself,

until it was swallowed up by desert.

Now do you see how metaphors

don’t always work?

The world is hungry and hungrier, as the Bear

destroys fecund fields. No seeds will open.

No grains will be harvested. The breadbasket

empty, crushed. War destroys metaphor.

 

Food! is the only word left.

Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry Trouble received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry.

FOR THE STANSTED 15

by Matt Broomfield

"The case of the 15 activists convicted last Monday of ‘intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome,’ an offence carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, over a non-violent protest which stopped a deportation flight from leaving Stansted airport should not only worry all those who care about the rights of those threatened with removal. It should alarm anyone who cares about the right to protest. The disproportionate charge will have a chilling effect. Amnesty has called this 'a crushing blow for human rights in the UK'; Liberty said it was a 'malicious attack' on the right to protest.” Photograph: Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Image —The Guardian, December 11, 2018

“Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, and so the R&D Blueprint explicitly seeks to enable cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown “Disease X” as far as possible.” —World Health Organisation


disease X represents

the flash-drives full of martyred friends
the murals whose eyes you can’t put out
the secret slideshows shown on bedsheets
to comrades hiding in the hills

disease X represents

the breath which we breathe on you
the knowledge we share

disease X represents

our refusal to answer the questions whose answering
is mandated by law, the referral to lawyers
who cannot be afforded, the good work of lawyers
regardless, the virulent brown goulash
served through iron cat-flaps in Styrofoam trays
to the rag-pickers, card-scammers and lesbian mothers
the good and bad migrants, the friendless and their friends
the guerrilla paramedics, organ-grinders and thieves
the class coalescing for want of a class

disease X represents

the willing foreclosure of futures
which do not end in grief, the return of the gaze
the huff of breath rich with pathogens unknown
the tracing of banned words in filth, the moue
the return of the paper unsigned

disease X represents

your refusal to believe we would choose to subsist on so little
your demented insistence on finding out why, as though
the way which you ask us is not itself a cause

disease X represents

the exorcism of the cop which you put in our heads
through the refusal to think ill of our friends, whom we love
through the refusal to mourn the death of those
dead only in the most trivial sense
through the banned touch of hands in the pockets
of concrete overcoats, the obvious erection
on the back of the dirt-bike
running memory cards through the demilitarised zone
the reckless proclamations of love through the encrypted app
sweet enough, we have to hope, to radicalise the judge

disease X represents

the explicit search for the necessary evil
the conscious acceptance of the status of a bomb

the incendiary touch of hands between friends
which brought down the plane from the sky

Matt Broomfield is a poet, activist and writer currently living and working in Rojava in solidarity with the socialist-feminist revolution there. His debut fiction pamphlet was published in 2018 by Dog Section Press, his poetry has been shared across London by Poetry On The Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year and can be found on Twitter at @hashtagbroom. 

THE CLOWN CAR

by Kyle Norwood

The clownishness of evil sometimes seems
To parody itself―buffoonish stare,
Garishly painted skin, foam-rubber hair―
Caricatures from circus-haunted dreams:

You’re in the stands and join in the applause;
Here comes the clown car, tiny as a toy,
While speakers blast Beethoven’s Ode to Joy,
But you don’t see how odd that is, because
You’re watching as the little car spits out
Clown after clown, burlesques of vim and pep,
With fake pink smile or red audacious pout.
One pounds a drum; the others dance in step
With flying feet in giant floppy boots.
Some moon the crowd, and some are even cruder,
Insulting us with boorish pantomime.
 (A choir sings Alle menschen werden brüder
Over the speakers, deafeningly loud.)
Looking around, you see that half the crowd            
Are dressed in frilly polka-dotted suits,                      
Hooting and stomping.  Clearly they approve.          
Meanwhile the clown car crew is on the move:  
Some run to block the exits; others climb  
Into the stands; two of them seek you out,
Surround you, grab you, lift you from your spot,
And drag you toward the ring of blinding light.
“Why me?” You cry.  “Why me?  What did I do?”
The folks in normal clothing turn their backs.
Last from the clown car steps a black-and-white-
Faced, bulging-muscled hulk, wielding an ax:
His hate-filled eyes are staring straight at you.

Kyle Norwood is the winner of the 2014 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His poems have also recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Devilfish Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Lake (U.K.), Light, Right Hand Pointing, and the anthology Poems for a Liminal Age. He lives in Los Angeles, where he earned a doctorate in English at UCLA.

ALEPPO

by George Salamon





Wretched Aleppo,
Bereaved by death
Who grants no audience
To human flesh
As humanity prepares
Another feast for death.
After Auschwitz it  was said
"No more poetry."
After Aleppo, I say
More poetry to instill
Reverence for flesh
Sacrificed for evil vapors and whims.

George Salamon grew up in Europe during the slaughter of World War Two and now, from his home in St. Louis MO, reads about and looks at pictures from man's latest crimes against humanity in Aleppo.

CRUEL AND UNUSUAL

by Gil Hoy



A divided Supreme Court on Monday turned aside claims by death-row inmates that a drug to be used in their executions would lead to an unconstitutional level of suffering, a narrow but unequivocal ruling that made clear that states have leeway in carrying out the death penalty. —Wshington Post, June 29, 2015

"I would ask ... a more basic question:whether the death penalty violates the Constitution."--Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent

Are some men
born evil,

and others
born good?

As some men
have brown eyes,

and others
have blue?

As some
are born weak,

and others
born strong?


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer, who first studied poetry at Boston University while receiving a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil started writing his own poetry last year. Since then, his poems have been published most recently in The Potomac, The New Verse News, The Antarctica Journal, Third Wednesday, and To Hold A Moment Still, Harbinger Asylum’s 2014 Holidays Anthology.

AND SPLINTER

by Mark Danowsky

Image source: CNN, September 22, 2014

Obama Says Airstrikes Go Beyond ISIS --NY Times, September 23, 2014

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

History is a lesson in repetition.
I know I’ve heard that said before.
Just like I’ve heard about us arming
and training rebel groups before.

Later, it almost goes without saying,
we will be forced to send more troops,
our troops, guns to combat guns
we sent the rebels we trained
since now they’re in charge
and causing us problems
because they will not give up
guns or beliefs
for our idea of democracy.

Look, we do what we have to
for others, in a well-known exchange
of autonomy, independence, hell
even free temptation
to be insular, given the dynamic
nature of our global community.

It’s an exponential market out there.
No one wants to be picked on
today, check out foreign policy
in Switzerland and France.
Most of us want greater good
in spite of mistakes made
and made again
in pursuit of good.

Evil cares little for mistakes
finding factious home
among the fractures
becoming legion
as we must in desperation
to eradicate this menace
by division.

Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The New Verse News.  His poem "5am Summer Storm"won Imitation Fruit’s “Animals and Their Human’s” Contest, in 2013. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently lives in a van down by the Susquehanna River. He works for a private detective agency and is assistant copy editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.