WALKING THE DOG IN OCTOBER WITH POLICE SIRENS

by Al Ortolani

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

See how the past is not finished

here in the present

                             —WS Merwin

 

Dog, it is not a good time to run off leash.

There is an air of crises behind the wind.

 

Masked agents rip a former student from her children.

She disappears into phone calls from Guatemala. 

 

The President dumps imaginary shit from a jet fighter

and calls it humor. Tonight, 

 

there are more questions than answers.

We listen to the sirens beyond the rooftops, 

 

behind the strip malls and blinking stop lights.

The oaks gasp in the change of seasons.

 

Some nights I imagine the leaves wailing

as they lose their grip and fall.

Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in the Writer’s Almanac, the American Life in Poetry, and Poetry Town. He’s a contributing editor to the Chiron Review. Recently, his poems have appeared in Rattle, The Midwest Quarterly, One Art, and the Pithead Chapel.

FEEL FREE

by Nick Allison

Nick Anderson cartoon

To don a bright mask for the faithful to see
To placate the flock and pretend to believe
To drag the dead weight of unbroken chains
To laugh until laughter devours the pain

To plant the old flags and ring the new bells
To raise up the prices and see what still sells
To imagine that freedom is only a jest
To swallow your pride till it rots in your chest

To close all the windows and fasten the doors
To bury your secrets beneath the sea floor
To climb golden stairs till you stand at the top
To fall with the world when at last it all stops

To bolster your ego with glory and praise
To purchase a past with the fortune you’ve raised
To summon the fire and melt back the ice
To never look once at their sacrifice

To turn up the volume and smother the cries
To vanish in shadows and cover your eyes
To cut out your tongue to spite your own face
To put profit above the whole human race

To pull out your hair and to tear at the walls
To pave over gardens and silence the calls
To load up the cannons, the weapons of war
To never once ask who the cages are for

To dream of the faces you’ve lost all at once
To wake with their shadows and feel their cold touch
To walk through the mirror and linger a while
To shine your dark shoes and lie with a smile

To pin every failure on somebody else
To go to your grave deceiving yourself
To polish a crown and call yourself king
To scream for the stillness your riches won’t bring

To weep late at night in a bed all alone
Your palace of pleasure turned prison of stone
Surrounded by ghosts who won’t let you be
You’ll ask yourself why 
you still don’t feel free

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, college dropout, and writer based in Austin, Texas. His poems and essays have appeared in The Shore, Eunoia Review, HuffPost, The Chaos Section, CounterPunch, and elsewhere. He recently curated and edited the poetry anthology Record of Dissent: Poems of Protest in an Authoritarian Age. “While the Elk Were Moving” is adapted from the introduction to that collection. More of his work can be found at TheTruthAboutTigers.com and @nickallison80.bsky.social.

FROM NOW UNTIL NOVEMBER

by Thomas J. Erickson

“Towering Pine” by Alan Li

There are decades where nothing happens

and there are weeks where decades happen.

                                                    —Lenin

Out near the trout stream,

there is “the Pine Tree”

a towering white pine that somehow

escaped the blade of the lumberjack.

It was a signpost and a beacon

and we could see it from anywhere

while we walked across the plains to fish there

—me, Joe and Dad and Ed

until the dusk called us home for blueberry pie

and trout and potatoes fried in lard.

That was decades ago. Earlier this summer,

the tree started to fall. 

I was afraid it would be down

in a matter of weeks.

Today, though, the tree is still there. By November,

we might still be able to see it on the horizon.

Thomas J. Erickson is an attorney in Milwaukee where he is a member of the Hartford Avenue Poets. He likes to sit in court and write poetry before his cases are called.  His latest poetry book is Cutting the Dusk in Half (Bent Paddle Press, 2022).

HELP ME, JOE

by Alan Walowitz

I’m not the handiest man
though sometimes feel the need to prove I am—
at least among those still extant in my demographic
who might be foolish enough to wield a screwdriver 
a couple of  feet in the air
and intend to get close enough to what needs tightening.
Though not mistaken for the Wallendas
who repair the skylight when it won’t close right.
Or that D.B. Cooper guy I hire to change the bulbs
in the fixture that hangs a hundred feet in the air
from my foolish cathedral ceiling. 
You know, it’s been a while since
I climbed to the top rung. 
I’m happier watching from the ground
and telling those youngsters 
everything they’re doing wrong
and how I would’ve handled it
way back when, a couple of year before. 
Though I do remember from being up there, 
the thrill of the heights
I know when you fall, you hit with a thud.
Meantime, help me, Joe. 
Hold this ladder, will you? 
For this young one—
willing, ready  to climb up.

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

ON THE HOWLER MONKEY DEATHS IN MEXICO

by Pepper Trail

Their howls were pure vowel, shapes
in the mouth of existence: Here, here, we are here,
bringing the forest to monkey-life,
vibrating the leaves of caoba and pochote,
the fruits of zapote, guarumo and nanche,
howls that named the family, organized the world.
 
Yes, there was always heat—but now
different, a heat that makes silence 
through the night, through the day,
loosens the baby’s grip, then the mother’s.
They fall from the trees like rotten fruit,
their open hands holding nothing but questions.

Author's note:  As a field biologist, I have shared tropical forests with these monkeys, have been awakened in the night by their prodigious howls, have marveled as they leap from tree to tree with their infants on their backs. The news that we have made the planet too hot for these fellow primates, superbly adapted to the heat and humidity of the tropics, is tragic and terrifying. How can we not understand that we are next?

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

TO THE iPHONE FALLING 16,000 FEET FROM AN AIRPLANE

by Fran Davis

Representative image created using AI via India Today

Cuong Tran is the man whose iPhone fell out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 when the plane lost a door plug during the flight, which was going from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, on January 5. His phone was recovered on the side of a road and miraculously survived the drop of thousands of feet: It still had half of its battery's charge and was in airplane mode, opened to an email containing a baggage claim receipt.— Business Insider, January 13, 2024

A fierce gust 

ripped out like a rude birth

to incomprehensible air

propellered by wind

strong steel case

glinting sun

blue sky

dark earth

 

turning and turning

the hawk’s gyre

compass berserk with spinning

electrons scattered

hectic static stilled

 

freefall

calm at the farthest edges

deep silence of

time unscaled

 

violent jolt

jiggering compass

shuddering apps

readjustments

where is

where is

the tower

 

glass face swept clean

thumbs probing

questions

that can’t be answered

Fran Davis is a journalist living on California’s South Coast. Her writing appears in magazines and travel books. Her prose and poems have been published in New Verse News, Calyx, The Chattahoochee Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, Reed Magazine, Passager, and several anthologies. She is a winner of the Lamar York prize York prize for nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize nominee.

GRAVITY WILL GET US

by Alan Walowitz

“Just last night, there were shots fired outside of Temple Israel in Albany. And just yesterday, the menorah of Chabad Sunset Park in Brooklyn was vandalized.”  —Mayor Eric Adams, December 8, 2023

Some of us are willing to wait
till our native caution fails  
on the worn and slippery stairs.
No matter our disparate falls 
in the garden, or the desert, the reclaimed land,
or holding the safe door tight, 
against the next volley.  
It all becomes so much the same
in the short history of you and me. 
Today it’s news, tomorrow we’re gone. 
Who has the will to study and learn,
as Torah demands, such a short stay?.   
 
Everyone’s bound to fall,
even the lithe and balletic among us 
give way to age and our own sad shuffling.
Some will make a thud when we hit the ground, 
some a noise of lesser note,
as we learn, again, as if we didn’t know, 
this is not a movie. 
No shot, no bang, no dying fall.
Sometimes a shatter will sound
before we get the sharp reminder
what the slimmest shard might do.
 
Let me hide in plain sight long as I can—
I’ll agree to shut my mouth for now.
My forebears knew how to sound grateful,
and content, the price for being taken in. 
But one dyspeptic uncle, always a stranger,
warned never to feel safe—even here,
in The Golden Land.
Hah! his voice-- though not heard for years--
now rings like an alarm in my ears:
Boychik, you just wait and see. 

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

SABBATH

by Chris Reed

The deepening fall stalls my step,
invites a seasonal sabbath,
a slowing of time, luring me
to witness the dying world,
the retreat of light, warmth, color,
a trail of endings,
this yearly dress rehearsal.

Here is the world. 
Leaves, red-rimmed, rustle silently
like yesterday’s still photos from Gaza,
Israel, Ukraine, blood-tinged. 
The deck is wet from recent rain,
as water runs out in war-torn lands,
runs out for all, as rivers 
and aquifers shrink, while torrents
wash cities into the sea.

A rest. A time away from politics,
like leaving the red-faced relatives,
arguing in the sunroom, laced
with whisky fumes, surrounded
by blue-blossomed African violets.
I’d sneak into the kitchen 
filled with the smells and warmth 
of my grandmother’s baking bread
as she hugged me and nodded,
a knowing smile on her face.

Was it in Coetzee, I read that politics
is just a form we use for the hate
and frustration already there?
Was it in Miller, I read that when
as children, love is denied, politics
and how we treat our own children,
are where we fine-tune our cruelty?

The leaves turn paler, start to yellow,
the sky, a cleaner blue after the rains.
Sabbath is about sitting with gratitude,
sitting with possibilities,
sitting with some kind of god, 
some kind of love.
I wait.


Author’s Note: The seed for this poem was this week's New York Times story about the Amazon River.


Chris Reed is a retired Unitarian minister. Her poems have recently been published in River Heron Review, The NewVerse News, and US1 Worksheets, among other journals.

DREAMING SUMMER DOWN

by David Chorlton

Yesterday’s news sent the city to bed
with domestic terror for a nightcap, home grown
it said, easy to fund, you can’t
keep bad men down. And fall begins today
even if summer still has
a scorpion’s tail. A night of interrupted sleep
 
with a dream of far away;
how well those friends of years ago
appeared. Good health among the living
and even better with
the dead. Who would have expected such
 
a fine reunion, or found
the references to erotica made in Vienna?
Outside, it’s Arizona warm
with coyotes wandering the starlit streets
and bus shelters doubling
as bedrooms for the poor. The midnight traffic
on the interstate is singing
 
in a sparkling monotone
and the moon hangs
like half a cup of fire between two
leaning palms. Let the past
 
be the past, say Goodnight
and ride a beam of dreamlight home.
Fumble for the key.
Ignore the splinters in the door where someone
must have brought a crowbar.
Imagine! The cracking wood, the aching
hinge, the next door neighbor’s
 
reassuring words: don’t worry,
it could never happen here.

David Chorlton has considered Phoenix home for several decades. He used to live in Vienna but rarely dreams about it. Much of his poetry comes from life in Arizona, where he has found strains of unrest and social disquiet that he can't ignore.

CALIFORNIA CYPRESS

by Blair Kilpatrick

A large tree fell on a parked car and another car with the driver in it on Haight Street between Fillmore and Webster Streets in San Francisco on Tuesday, March 21, 2023. Credit: Craig Lee/The SF Examiner

Green bedroom curtains

barely parted

frame brown cypress

backlit by morning light

my gaze passes

through narrowed slit

like an arrow 

from within a fortress

 

I follow my eyes

in search of a perch

in welcoming crook

between branch and trunk

arms raised up like a supplicant

 

I find myself wedged

in tight angled space

high above ground

look up and down

ready to fly 

or free fall

tree fall

all fall

down

 

Two years later

we rise to cold silence

water retreating 

winds now stilled 

open curtains

reveal empty space

too much sky

where tree should be

 

Our cypress slumps

across neighboring fence

head rests on rooftop

exposed roots remain

tangle of brown

new mound of green

crows and wildflowers

mark a fresh grave

Blair Kilpatrick is a psychologist and folk musician. Her poetry has appeared in ONE ART, MockingHeart Review, littledeathlit, Amethyst Review, and it is upcoming in Syncopation and Soul-Lit. She is also the author of the music memoir Accordion Dreams (U. Press Mississippi). She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband.

THE WATERMELONS OF KHERSON

by Diane Kendig

When President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the newly liberated city of Kherson he joked that he was there because he "wanted a watermelon".

It was important to support people there despite the continuing risk, he added. But why a watermelon?

The president was referencing the fruit that has become an internet meme in the last few days - a fruit that is a symbol of the southern Ukrainian region. —BBC,  November 15, 2022

Pablo Neruda called it “the green whale of summer,”
but this is November and these whales,
beached all autumn on the shores of the Duipro,
could not swim up river to Kyiv
from the rich farmlands of Kherson, under siege.

And since the fruit has always been a sign
for the region, with its statue of this “moon on earth”
floating, cut open, its ruby slice bearing “black stars”
on a brick platform over everyone’s head, a flag
“green, white, red, /that dissolves into/
wild rivers, sweet as sugar,” when news came
of a counteroffensive to retake the city,
watermelon memes bobbed up on its Twitter account,
not yet freed but amassing like pods.

And when
their liberators arrived, the people surrounded them
and embraced them as people once did in Paris,
and the soldiers embraced the people. One soldier,
running to an old woman, on her knees
in front of her house, lifted her up and held her,
his grandmother.

The citizens greeted them with armloads
of flowers, mostly chrysanthemums,
because this was not the season of the sunflower
but of the fall, with yellow, orange, and russet mums.

And too, the watermelon rose up on the streets
in drawings and in all their real roundness,
this “mine or mountain of fantastic food,”
sustenance floating buoyantly in the hands
of the rescued and rescuers, sustaining them.

Diane Kendig is the author of five poetry collections. Her latest is Woman with a Fan. Her writing has ppeared in J Journal, Wordgathering, The New Verse News, Valparaiso Review, and other journals. She ran a prison writing workshop in Ohio for 18 years, and now curates the Cuyahoga County Public Library weblog, Read + Write.

LAST RIGHTS

by A.M. Juster

Nearly a quarter of Americans say it's sometimes OK to use violence against the government—and 1 in 10 Americans say violence is justified "right now." That's the finding of a new report by The COVID States Project, which asked 23,000 people across the country whether it is "ever justifiable to engage in violent protest against the government?" The report is one of several in recent months that find people more likely to contemplate violent protests than they had been in the past. Christian Davenport, a professor at the University of Michigan and a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, is… circumspect. While the numbers are "not especially surprising," Davenport said he's "not a fan of the use of polls exclusively" to determine a populace's potential for violence. "Individuals will say a great number of things on a poll," he said, "but never show up for anything." Photo: Trump supporters climb the west wall of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. —NPR, January 31, 2022

I hear them in their future seminars

propounding theories about our fall

that may well make them academic stars,

but make no sense at all,

and yet, if I were there instead of dead,

I could not mount a lively refutation

to what those unborn experts will have said, 

but would just vent frustration.

As when deflated praetors palmed off keys

to Rome on Goths they labelled "primitive,"

our leaders, cultures and democracies

became diminutive.

It never seemed it had to be this way,

and we were calm as strongmen made us weak.

There was still time. We knew what we should say.

Too many did not speak.

A.M. Juster’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Hudson Review. His eleventh book will be published by W.W. Norton next year.

LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF JOE BIDEN

by Chad Parenteau

The Boston Herald says

when Joe Biden falls

it is spring

 

black farmers were rescued

but press

begged for pageantry

 

for interviews

hot breathing mouths

near

 

the edge of six feet

obsessed with

closeness

 

waiting in the sun

the children

in the camps

 

incidentally

in Georgia

there were

 

the dead Asian women

but look

Joe Biden falling

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He is a contributor to Headline Poetry & Press and serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His latest collection The Collapsed Bookshelf was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

A PANDEMIC PRAYER

by Roderick Deacey

Don’t let me die a COVID death

pinned and tied by wires and tubes,

felled by fear and pain,

enduring dark visions

from potions that numb and confuse,

unable to touch the infinite,

losing the inevitable tussle for breath.

Instead, let me choose a worm’s death,

gently stilling movement

in the warm black soil.

Feeling the earth shiver and move

as it wraps me in its vast body

and cradles me

in its perpetual swing around the sun.

Or let me walk into the ancient forest

and sense the slow sap of centuries

sliding through the rough bark I lean against.

Let me mark the deep rhythm of the wood

as I feel myself slowly sink

into the tree’s heart,

to rest serene among leafy limbs.

Best of all, let me die a bird’s death,

swooping and swirling

high in a star-pricked sky—

not even aware

of tumbling flesh and feathers falling

as I joyously fly on

toward that brilliant rainbow slash of dawn.

Roderick Deacey is a performing poet in the DC area, based in Frederick, MD. In normal, non-viral times, he regularly performs with his drummer/percussionist and bass-player, presenting “neo-beat” poems inspired by the Beat Poets’ poetry and jazz forays of the nineteen-fifties. His beat poetry chapbook neo-beatery ballads was published in 2019. Deacey was awarded the 2019 Frederick Arts Council Carl R. Butler Award for Literature. Crossing genres, he won the Gold Award for best lyrics in the 2020 Mid-Atlantic Song Contest held by the Songwriters Association of Washington.