HOW TO SPOT A FASCIST

by Helen Jones

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

Don’t think they come with jackboots in the dawn
Or kick your door in on a freezing night.
Now fascists take control with Facebook ads
And Tik-Tok videos to make you laugh,
Let you believe that facts can just be changed,
Decide reality is just a trick.
 
Then suddenly your job has disappeared
Raw work-experience kids have wiped you out,
Universities are threatened, books are banned,
Medicaid blown apart and foreigners locked up,
Poor people die and old alliances break.
 
          Fascists begin with elections
          When you are not paying attention.

Helen Jones was born in Chester, U.K. She gained a degree in English, many years ago from University College London and later an M.Ed. from the University of Liverpool. She is now happily retired and spends a lot of her time writing and making a new garden. Her poetry has been published in several journals in the U.K., and she is currently working on a novel set in fifth century Deva.

NEWSPAPER RUBBER BANDS

by Peter Henry

I miss newspaper rubber bands
The useful stash in the kitchen drawer
I miss the thud on the driveway
Promising hours of reading—
Detailed stories, facts, interviews, and opinions
Often fertilized by Deep Throat sources
Dropping follow-the-money clues.
With no heft, no will to fight the empowered villain
Mainstream media caved in to threats and paid $15 million

I miss fact checking and shame heckling
The sting of a snapped rubber band on bare skin
I miss the retreat from deceit
When waved newspapers cleared smoke
From smoldering embers
Tended by nefarious dissemblers
I miss the pink fingers of editorial endorsements
Now dead and blue from binding bands
Stretched over them by fat wealthy hands

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

Peter Henry is a retired information technology specialist and former high school English teacher. Besides poems, he writes songs, builds musical instruments, and explores the outdoors. A father and husband, he lives in Northern California with his wife.

JULY OF ELECTION YEAR 2024

by Tarn Wilson

This year, if I keep my pace, 

I’ll read over 100 books.

I don’t know if this is a victory 

or a sad state of affairs.

I don’t know if I am in love 

with the world or addicted 

to distraction. Preachers and 

politicians used to call novels 

filthy and frivolous, wanted

us to read only stripped facts 

and sermons on virtue. Now, 

we’re pleased if children read

at all. Everywhere you look

screens hold miniature stories, 

trapdoors and tunnels toward 

truth and illusion. Last week, 

I asked a 24-year-old which 

candidate will win the youth 

vote for president. Biden is 

ridiculous, she explains: all

those gaffes-turned-memes.

Trump, she decides. He’s funnier.

 Funny? I ask. He has wittier 

insults. He says what we all wish 

we could say. Democrats are 

schoolmarms, then? I ask. 

Mothers who make you feel 

ashamed? What about the danger 

to our democracy? Low wages /

high rents. It’s all the same to us. 

We need more facts and tracts 

on virtues. We need novels, too,

about civil wars and WWII, 

about loss and love and grief 

and trees, anything to help us 

feel, in our bones, what it is 

we have to lose. Actually, she says, 

face lighting, RFK is trending 

on TikTok. His policies are crazy,

I say. He’s doing pull ups, she says. 

He looks strong. People like that.

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award), and the craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts: 501 Prompts to Unleash Your Creativity and Inspire You to Write. Her essays and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Brevity, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, Ruminate, Sweet, and The Sun. 

THE ORIGINAL TRUMAN SHOW

by Phyllis Frakt

“Want to understand 2024? Look at 1948.” —Nate Cohn, The New York Times, January 4, 2024

“I trust the people, because when they know the facts, they do the right thing.” —Harry S. Truman, November 1, 1948

Give ‘em hell! they yelled at me.

Then I made 352 campaign speeches
in 31,000 miles of whistle-stops.
Millions came – they cheered,
learned the facts, did the right thing.
I have to admit I inflated a bit,
but you can’t accuse me 
of confusing the issues 
or spewing fake news
like today’s raving orange outrage
with his distortions and contortions,
his lies, denials, indictments, and trials.
My time of truth and trust fell
to an entire age that gives you hell.

 

Phyllis Frakt writes poetry in New Jersey. Her previous poems in The New Verse News are "Teach to the Test," "Caught in Between," "Not in Our Star...," and "Believing is Seeing."

100

by Tom Bauer

A residential building destroyed by Russian shelling in Borodyanka, Ukraine. Photograph: Maksim Levin/Reuters

That many days since they went marching in.

A hundred turns of horror and eyeballs

peeled back and fixed upon the safe truisms:

that this is what it is and this is wrong.

Emotions are the rulers here, not horror.

Are we urged to cry for the babes in earth,

unseen and unsung, dispatched with certitude

to certain doom for good truisms we love?

I’m like a gumshoe, just want the facts, ma’am.

No need to tell me who is right or wrong,

trying to convince me you know the real truth.

Who speaks true when murder is the argument

to prove the virtue of the cause? I can’t

see past the fact the top guys are getting paid.

Tom Bauer grew up playing violin and listening to spoken word recordings. When he was ten, he rashly announced he was going to be a poet. He did a bunch of university and stuff. He's had some poems published. He lives in Montreal and plays board games.

GRAND PAUSE

by Rick Mullin

I can’t relax when Miles tells the band

to keep it tight. He’ll fire you on stage!

I’ve seen it happen. On the other hand

there’s no alternative. An anxious age

provokes an anxious anthem: Straight ahead!

I can’t get back to normal when the news

is so predictable. The cycle never ends.

I can no longer tolerate my views.

I can’t retrieve the names of several friends.

Remember what the poet Rilke said.

About the truth. About the pile of facts.

I can’t find where he said it, though. Can you?

And here’s another thing: I can’t relax.

On stage, there is no exit interview. 

I keep it tight. The spotlight’s turning red.

Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.

JUST THE FACTS

by g emil reutter

The shade is always drawn
bland as a meadow hiding from the sun
robin pecks at cracks in dirt
worms deep in hardened soil.

This poem could be about window shades
a meadow, a robin or worms but it isn’t.

Coffee maker gasps and chugs, good to the
last drop, I pour my morning fix. Sun is shy
today, humidity at 83%.

But this poem isn’t about a good cup of coffee
or the weather today.

On Wednesday I watched as the old man spoke
baggy eyes, drawn face. A serious man encircled
by the circus of sound bite panelists. He spoke
the truth, did not perform.

Not a hoax he said, integrity he said, obstruction
true he said, no conspiracy with the enemy he
said, contacts he said. Although there was a
sputter here and there, his just the facts response
reflected courage, the search for the truth.

The Russians are coming again in 2020 he said.

In this time of chicken-hawks, cowardly pols
self-important talking heads, this old man
pushed up the blind, let the sun in.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue, President Bone Spur
squints from the light, speaks of performance
distorts facts, criticizes the heroic old man whose
shoes he could never wear.

And so it is, moisture from the air seeps into the
ground, unrelenting robin hops and listens, plucks
a fat worm through the softened surface. Much as
the old man did on a Wednesday in July of 2019.


g emil reutter can be found at here.

ELEMENTS: CUBIC ZIRCONIA

by Joan Colby

The authentic from the fake;
Even experts find it hard.
The man-made crystal
8.5 on the Mohs scale.
The diamond a perfect 10.

The naked eye cannot discern
Brilliance from brilliance.
The cheap version vs.
The blood diamond men die for.

Consider this ring: the 5 carat sparkler,
How it is envied
Or suspected.

The zircon entirely colorless
As a man without character.
The diamond leans into the prism
Of faint hues, like a man
Who still has doubts.

When it counts
Who can tell
The real glitter from the falsehood.
Facts of the matter
Or fake news.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

AGAINST THE NEED TO WRITE POEMS IN THE AGE OF T***P

by Alan Walowitz

Photo Illustration by Jackie Friedman | Images courtesy iStock, Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images via The Week

In poems the facts don’t seem to matter much
but these alt-facts just rip the poems right out of me—
the thought of madmen milling unvetted at our ports
to eat the still-beating hearts of our young
keeps me up long into the night, and sometimes gets so bad
I have to head downstairs for a late-night snack myself;
aliens hover at the polls ready to disguise themselves as the dead—
how can I make even a gesture toward a poem,
under these intolerable conditions.
Wordsworth knew it’s best to conjure up a lake lapping steady
and not fire up the hookah his friend had left as a house-gift,
though God know Coleridge has convinced me once or twice to try
and it’s worked nicely some dark and stormy nights
while waiting for an imagined visitor on business from Porlock.

Me, I prefer to know some things might be true—
the time on the clock should be approximately right,
then I can look outside and tell day from night,
though wrong from right has always been a tougher sell
in someone like me who likes to make stuff up.
But here they are the alt-facts lined up right outside my home
in pretty paper, ready to prop up whatever I might prefer to think—
a tsunami’s due that will make my property waterfront,
or a torrent of water slushed down any unsuspecting throat
will wash the truth right out of even the most innocent.
Whatever I feel, what joy, what many-splendored
wonders of this brave new world we’ve stepped into
across the threshold of the T***p-house mirror—
hell, there’s no longer reason to write a poem.

Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John’s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan’s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing. He’ll be reading at the Cornelia Street Café on Tuesday, March 7th at 6 pm.

FACT CHECK

by Dorothy Baird

generosity suffocates
under the weight of incivility
the tongue bludgeons
with fudged facts and loud voice
slips like reality from smiling lips
snippets of sound bites
recast a person’s words
gives the crow’s croak
to the nightingale
the cloak of honesty
does not conceal intent
nor does it disguise
the will to mislead
fraudulent films damage
before they’re found out
editorials emerge as rants
headline news stories
turn print yellow
truth sacrificed
to emotions unrestrained


Dorothy Baird has taught writing and literature in both high school and college. After frequent relocations took her family zig-zagging across this country, she considers herself a corporate tramp. Now happily settled in Chapel Hill, NC, she is busy with poetry.

SMALL WAR

by Richard O'Connell

Image Source: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Evil is statistical: a long-range game of mind:
Programming the data: it's merely a matter
Of parallel logistics: a mythic country
Ground in the joint jaws of an identical cancer.

Look at the map: It's a lesson in dissolution.
It could go on forever if we're careful,
Diverting blood and the precise amount of terror:
The only treason: reason: quelling the confusion.

It's a matter of girding them: a bright meat grinder:
Of obfuscating all the nasty boring facts:
Those muddy faces fleeing towards you from vague fire,
Carrying their homes and the maimed on their backs.


Richard O'Connell lives in Hillsboro Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Measure, Trinacria The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, Margie, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Formalist, Light.