THE CLIMATE SCIENTIST

by Ash M. Corvo

AI graphic by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

My morality is not pretty
Not gartered in roses or smelling like honey
It is iron and snapping teeth
Demanding and loud and spitting on money

And I'll be honest: I hate gilded pulpits and podiums
From where I should beseech gods or powers that be, giving tithe
My authority is nameless in the bitter autumn wind
I know spring blossoms follow the scythe

Look at me and judge: my nobility isn't an eagle, soaring
Even the vulture must eat
Head naked and bent over what is rotten
Clear-eyed, swallowing mouthfuls of pungent meat

They all argue, pen or sword? What does it matter?
I have written words for so long, there is a season for each
A time to inscribe law, a time to rend flesh
And a time for discretion to teach

So yes, my morality is hideous
I endeavor for factual hands to mold it
It does not promise flowery hymns, nor to caress the ear
And we have precious little time for bullshit

Ash M. Corvo is a novelist of dark adult fantasy and science fiction. She writes for readers who want stories to break them—and piece them back together. Her novels confront impossible moral dilemmas, conflicting loyalties, and the gruesome aspects of human nature we prefer not to examine too closely. She holds a Ph.D. in biology, and has seen firsthand the effects of humankind on the natural world.

SOMETHING ABOUT NERO

by Lois Marie Harrod

Dave Whamond, Canada, PoliticalCartoons.com

Though writing poetry
often seems like fiddling
while Rome burns,

perhaps we should remember
violins were not invented
until the 15th century,

long after the Great Twiddler died.
Neither pencils or pens then,
nor ballpoints and computers

on which we’ve been fiddling
since confined long term
to our virtual prisons.

In fact  (it’s nice to have a fact)
if Nero played on anything at all,
it was on a cithara—

though Tacitus claims
Nero did not scrape the strings,
but warbled The Sack of Troy

in his best operatic voice
while Rome burned faster
than California.

Tacitus offers no eye-witnesses
to confirm his story, just as now
no known epics attest

how many times or in what situation
Nero referred to his legions as losers.
It is has been corroborated though

that this Nastiest of Emperors
used the land cleared by his fire
to build a Golden Palace

with surrounding Pleasure Gardens—
and that perhaps is worth noting
in a poem or two of toppled monuments.

Lois Marie Harrod’s latest collection Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and at The College of New Jersey.

WHEN TWO'S A CROWD

by David Thoreen

Cartoon by Kuper

A fool and his facemask are soon parted.
Gather ye toilet paper while ye may.

The early bird gets the hand sanitizer.
What’s good for the goose is social distancing.

The road to Hell is paved with delayed interventions.
Give Mike Pence his due.

A rose garden is a rose garden is a rose garden.
Give me liberty, or give me quarantine.

Better to light a candle than to curse the virus.
You cruise, you lose.

You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an alternative fact.
A sneeze in line saves time.

Zoom each day as if it were your last.
Don’t shoot Dr. Fauci.

David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.  His poems have appeared in Great River Review, The Journal, Natural Bridge, New Letters, Slate, and other journals.

AMERICA IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MUELLER REPORT AND THE ANGRY TWEETS THAT FOLLOWED

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker

Graphic: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES NEWS/GETTY IMAGES, TWITTER via Elite Daily

I.

She swallows the news, a lump in the back of her throat,

watching all the armies who rally to save her gather,

seemingly defeated, their hopes hanging 

upon the delicate flesh of failed ghosts.

Balance of possibilities can go either way:

with just a whisper of wind, touching hand giving strength

to moments of truth swinging gently, leaning, anchored, swaying, 

rediscovering & restoring, though always permanently rooted. 

A new furnace burns brightly, metal ablaze, wrapped in red heat;

sweat pouring, glistening brighter than molten steel, boiling her people

until the day is done & lions roar by the hearth-fire. 

The sun briefly shines, allowing moments for thoughts

& strange songs of what will happen 

tomorrow that may never be real.

II.

She grits her teeth & makes a home far away—

deep within caves within caves, farther back until blue becomes blackness.

She returns to her mother, to nothing,

for inside Plato’s ultimate form illusions of illusions demystified & ugly

rely on her starkness—this & all that she saw

when he crawled in her bed unworthy of sitting by her side,

her form easy enough to reach, as if an object of his desire

left alone to bruise & soil while lying beneath the earth,

left with angry words unable to differentiate

the stomping with supposed compassionate feet, 

the head held down feeling no regrets. 

III.

She can see the revolution from her window,

the small orbits, when they turn away & return 

& sometimes a star falls, a blazing fire shot down,

a demigod dying & it comes down on her—

the thing that once was but is now lost inside her,

borrowing girder, salvaging safety for others, 

relieving the pressure amid weary shoulders grasping

for strength, taking refuge in sacrifice & pain

of her people giving what they’re willing to never receive,

as they walk breathlessly into the ether,

surveying the fact or fiction placed in their hands.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.

THE GREAT DENIERS

by Richard Meyer

Thirty prominent climate scientists sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday, refuting his recent false statement that carbon dioxide is not a primary driver of climate change. —Inside Climate News, March 13, 2017. Image source: DonkeyHotey.

Their mental houses have a leaky roof
and cracked foundations built on shaky ground.
They squat inside, benighted and aloof,
imagining the Earth is safe and sound.                                

For them a fact is nothing but a spoof
devised by eggheads in a lab somewhere.
They blindly scoff at scientific proof
that points to threatened water, land, and air.

They sit in darkness, make-believe what’s true,
and bar the door so reason can’t get through.

Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the home his father built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Able Muse, The Raintown Review, Think, Measure, Alabama Literary Review, Light, and The Evansville Review. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone” and was the recipient of the 2014 String Poet Prize for his poem “The Autumn Way.” A book of his collected poems Orbital Paths was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

BABEL

by Rachel Voss

As a poet in the Internet Age, you find, through a quick search,
that the image you seized upon during a walk to do laundry is not,
sadly, an original one: Trump Tower of Babel.

(And that search just as swiftly uncovers the wisdom of the tarot—
apparently—did you know this?—the Tower card—yes, likely a reference
to Babel—is a trump card which immediately follows the Devil

and is associated with “sudden, disruptive, and potentially destructive
change”—truly, you’ve stumbled into an online abyss of hidden meanings
and Wikipedia distractions.  Return to your laundry.)  Crestfallen,

I do, but realize that as with all myth, it’s what you make of the story
that matters.  Is it a “fact” to hoard like grain in a pyramid built
by literal nonsense, rigid and unyielding?  Or is it a metaphor to continually

mine, one that will somehow always yield gold?  I settle on the latter,
settle into the chatter of the mind, replaying last night’s conversations:
the hungry talk, the ravenous listening, the bread, the wine.

What communion this?  A pop tune, perhaps, a drunken howl—no,
we will never be saints—choral support, the words we somehow all
remember, liked a mantra turned and returned to.

And so the story isn’t about the modern-day Nimrod, the hubris of phallus
gesturing lewdly heavenwards—it’s about the confounding tongues, mysterious
in their multiplicity, voices beautiful in their baffling difference

from our own.  We’ve been talking a lot about ‘doing something’—
and I think the talk, remarkably, is something.  Sing, goddess,
of “a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn’t” (Bishop)—

a cry that turned into the voice we use when we want to be heard
at a noisy party, or over the din of the city, or ignorance, or when you’re looking
for the right words to say, I can’t understand you, not anymore, we need

to go back to the time when we all used the same language,
a song as elemental as a beating heart, the sound that a human being
makes when it says, I’m here, we exist, and I want you to know

what I mean.

Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher living in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in The Ghazal Page, Hanging Loose Magazine, Unsplendid, 3Elements Review, Silver Birch Press, and Bodega Magazine, among others.