THE CONVENIENT WIFE

by Elisabeth Frischauf

cartoon by Bill Bramhill

Pockets strife

Shoulders the blame

Picks up the stain

For anyone

Fanning the flame

Against husband’s fame

Deep in her bosom

Buries misdeeds

Twitter poison feed

Lucky this man

Justice of our land

Whose wife

With bravura and passion

Hangs

Our stripes and stars

Upside down

Elisabeth Frischauf is a psychiatrist, grandmother, and visual artist in many media: ceramics, collage, mobiles. Poetry is intimately bound up with her art.  Being multilingual and anchored in two cultures—the family homeland in Austria and New York City— enriches all her work. Her epic narrative memoir poem, They Clasp My Hand, short-listed for the Austria Literary Prize, was published in April 2022 by the Theodor Kramer Verlag, Vienna, Austria. This book is in process for on demand, English only, by She Writes Press.  Two more memoir verse books are in the publication pipeline.  She publishes poems in various on-line magazines. She lives with her husband, playwright Richard France by a lake in Putnam County, New York.

RITUAL

by Amy Shimshon-Santo

the year crawls toward an end 
sharp knife between its teeth
& bleeding tongue

a year of vowels

displaced from their consonants,
zipped together 

by a three letter word 
that is not good for children 
& other living things

I walk to the edge of language
thin stick between my hands 
holding a makeshift flag

colorless as the memory of water
scavenged from cotton 
clothing of the departed

it is time to place the year inside 
an urn, bury it in the Earth
lie down beside the unimaginable

hear the new year drumming
& dreaming itself into being, wanting
to be born

Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a warm-blooded vertebrate with hair. She writes  poetry, essays, performs spoken word, improvisation, and choreography. Read or listen to her poetry collections: Catastrophic Molting (2020), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (2020), and look for her forthcoming book Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (2024). Teaching and facilitating trans-local community arts projects have been central to her social practice for 30+ years. She is available as a guest artist, arts educator, coach, and editor. Dr. A has been nominated for an Emmy Award and three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative non-fiction. She was a finalist for the Night Boat Poetry Prize, and earned a place in the U.S. Service Learning Hall of Fame. Connect with her at @shimshona / @amyshimshon

PRIDE

by Marion Evalee

Carrying a jumbo rainbow flag onto the Salem Common under the rainbow arch are Ken Elie, left and Ed Hurley, right of the group Boston Pride, who turned out to support the North Shore Pride group. Joe Brown photo via The Salem News, June 25, 2023

The great Arc-en-ciel
Is colorless,

Not on the wing.
A heart needs something,

Color needs light,
A flag needs the wind—

Whoever’s eternal
Rebounding breath

Has deadened with the night,
As it often does.

I keep walking
Over what was

The parade grounds
(What will be the Commons

By the time we celebrate
Our independence)

Like an old vet,
Though it’s getting dark.

Marion Evalee, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has appeared in The Amethyst Review, Willows Wept, Survivor Lit, The Boston Compass, Neologism, and Montage. A selection of her poetry is featured in the anthology 14 International Younger Poets (Art and Letters, 2021). She lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

YOU BAN BOOKS, YOU BAN DRAG, KIDS ARE STILL IN BODY BAGS!

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma

“Neighbor is not a geographical term,

it is a moral concept.”

—Rabbi Yoachim Prinz

On Tuesday, my neighbor’s white magnolia scintillates against a beach blue sky. I wear shades to trek past farm fields and pines to vote in spring’s local elections. 

 

I hope to stem the tide of “back to basics” policies, fig leaves for fears—tax dollars spent on gender neutral bathrooms, light shed on our egregious system of chattel slavery, 

 

calls to address our cancer of white supremacy. These questions that refuse to fold themselves back inside the bottle are not our enemies. The universe calls us to travel along 

 

their twisting turning highways and open to the sacred space of meaning. I pass a small corner beauty shop where a flag flaps today at half mast, like every flag across America 

 

until the three nine-year-old children and three adults slaughtered at Nashville’s Covenant School are properly buried. I have another neighbor who hides inside his garage a truck bearing

 

a bumper sticker from the local gun shop. It is bright yellow with red letters that drip as loudly as the thirteen stripes on our flag. This guy has planted that flag in his yard 

 

alongside a sunflower flag, flags of pastoral scenes bought at the local garden shop, sometimes a MAGA flag. The American psyche is the backyard of men like this, 

 

staked with false flags and strewn with dollar-store lawn trinkets that look like they were dumped there by last week-end’s severe storm. Only all this stuff—

 

fiberglass giraffes and mushrooms, bunnies and Celtic crosses—is intentionally placed. Tell me again what Jesus said about loving our neighbors, even those who cry wolf

 

when some neighbors speaking truth into bullhorns don’t look like the Bull Connor neighbors who have burdened us with day after day of our children’s humanity stunted 

 

by the ever-hardening space of schools with metal detectors and SROs in combat gear. Last week, in an adjacent town, an eighth grader shot dead a 10th grader. 

 

Also, my neighbors.

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in The New Verse News, OffCourse, Plants & Poetry, Parentheses, Tuck Magazine, and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.

THE APPROPRIATED FLAG

by William Aarnes

                        a final dispatch from Clemson, South Carolina, June 27, 2022 

 

Fifteen or so white men gather  

on Mondays before dawn 

 

on the intramural field/parking lot 

closest to Death Valley. 

 

Perhaps they’re innocent, 

meeting to pray together 

 

(I’ve seen them all kneel), 

if prayer is ever innocent. 

 

They’ve been a constant for years, 

looking as if they’re training 

 

for something. Sometimes, 

though not this morning, a boy 

 

or two are out here with them. 

They’re in their customary circle, 

 

the Stars and Stripes at the center, 

the emblem of every right               

 

they’re ready to defend. 

They’re talking things over, 

 

likeminded, making sure. 

When the dog and I pass, 

 

a few look our way, polite, 

offering smiling nods.    

William Aarnes is leaving South Carolina.

ANGEL

by Alejandro Escudé

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022. Above: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas (three panels), 30 7/8 × 45 3/4 in. (78.4 × 116.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary 80.32. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the flag painting the flag

goes and is going into the flag

and it takes us with it

the flag that is into the flag 

beyond what we do when

we surf the net, as a nation

we’re a flag entering another flag

and a flag after that one. 

Jasper Johns knows this, 

or does he? You mustn’t ask

him you know. The interpretation

lags behind the artwork always

like a little girl struggling to keep up

with her father who is walking

too fast for her keep up 

but is she really unable to keep up?

The truth is leaving us, and you,

and taking a train to a new epoch

where a train will travel into

another train and another train

after that toward a sunset

that sets within a sunset and 

(you guessed it) another sunset

after that—because it was

Warhol who engineered the first

internet, an ad box for Brillo

that became box after box

after box. So Johns does too

with his flag and other things,

which is what a country is

…things.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

LETTER FROM SOLITARY

by Katherine West

March 2021

The birds are singing 

and it isn't snowing 

We have our vaccines 

and schools are open 

It is warm enough to sit outside 

but too cool for forest fires 

In sunny spots brown grasses are turning green

from the inside out 

The cat hasn't shed her winter down

still sits on my lap for warmth

She is my most intimate companion 

on this March afternoon in 2021

I have survived the shipwreck 

that tossed me up on this desert island 

on this alien planet 

this solitary confinement 

for a crime 

I didn't commit 

And although Spring is coming 

I'm cold

I could be old and all 

my relationships memories 

I could be dead 

and all my lovers ghosts 

sitting on the side of my bed 

that empty symbol of sleep

and love 

that flag 

that empty symbol of unity 

at half mast 

Half the time 

the ghosts hold my cold 

hands in their cold hands 

whispering platitudes 

like therapists 

over the phone 

like friends 

on a screen 

They cannot hold me 

They cannot hold me down 

as I drift like old smoke 

old scarves 

as I fray

unravel 

silk skeins 

cool 

weightless 

slim 

as threads 

of red sunset 

resting like raptors 

on the updraft 

like strands

of blood 

lovely 

and unloved 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has 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. Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel, When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited has just been released, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in March of 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing. She is presently at work on the sequel to When Night Comes. It is called Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist.  

THE FLAG OUTSIDE A NEIGHBOR'S DOOR

by Jean L. Kreiling

Just down the street, outside a neighbor’s door, 
it reaches up and out, as if for hope 
or heaven, in an effort to restore 
its honor and resist the downward slope 
traversed by those who lied, who followed liars, 
who beat a man with those same stripes and stars, 
who lit and fanned and spread murderous fires 
that left some dead, the rest of us with scars. 
I see Old Glory fluttering in the breeze— 
but elsewhere, desecrated by a gang 
of thugs, it symbolized not liberties 
and laws, but rage, and justice by flash-bang. 
I miss the days when I was confident 
about what flags by neighbors’ front doors meant. 
 

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of two collections of poetry: Arts & Letters & Love (2018) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014).  Her work has been honored with the Able Muse Write Prize, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Prize, the Kelsay Books Metrical Poetry Prize, a Laureates’ Prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, three New England Poetry Club prizes, the Plymouth Poetry Contest prize, and the String Poet Prize. 

IN-SUH-REK-SHUHN

by Rémy Dambron

they said this man was just like them we said he doesn’t feel the same

they said he said that’s just fake news we said this is a dangerous game

they said he’s making us great again while we witnessed his power abuses

they diminished and deflected delivering his excuses

we called this pattern treacherous nefarious hateful nasty

they called him biblical 

patriotic bold and crafty

we said he’s promoting violence 

they said he doesn’t mean it

we showed them clips of footage 

they said we just don’t see it

we said hands up don’t shoot 

black lives matter me too

they said shut up and dribble 

all lives matter back the blue

we plead for justice 

but just us took a knee

so they beat us up with shields batons and false decrees

we said we have our rights 

they said well not today

we said these were our streets 

so they gassed us all away

we protested peacefully 

get your knees off our neck

they called us anarchists

then wrote themselves some checks

we turned out in record 

to win the election

they claimed there was fraud 

pledged their objections

we agreed to a recount 

they cried stop the steal

maskless they rallied 

refusing to heal

they threatened more violence despite our constitution

we said he’s propagating 

they called it lib delusion

then hundreds and hundreds 

with his flags and motifs

assailed the steps

of our nation’s top chiefs

we cried this is madness 

the building’s not secured

they said our take-back has begun and we will not be deterred

we said look at the police 

they’re like ushers in disguise

allowing them to enter 

with insurgency supplies

we saw gates open wide 

with a skirmish or two

then a lonely black cop

with just a stick and film crew

never drawing his firearm 

just clutching his baton

yelling and retreating

his leverage too far gone

they paraded their faces 

took selfies and stole files

besieged and disgraced

our nations state house defiled

they were released without consequence 

set free without question

acquitted of their felonies 

at forty fives direction

we watched in horror for hours

what we had known would come true

his fascist america 

executing their coup

Rémy Dambron is an English teacher, proud husband, and activist whose poetry focuses primarily on advocating for social justice and denouncing political corruption. His work has been featured on What Rough Beast, Writer’s Resist, Poets Reading the News, and The New Verse News.

FLAG

by Frederick Wilbur

An artwork by Banksy is seen in this image obtained from his Instagram account on June 6, 2020 [Banksy/Instagram/ via Reuters via Al Jazeera]

In the flag’s shadow
memorial flowers darken, wilt.
It is a black tatter
distressed by political wind.

Ours, for which it stands,
is in mourning—
the common good
is dead.


Frederick Wilbur’s second poetry collection Conjugation of Perhaps is available from mainstreetragbookstore.com.

THIS IS NO TIME FOR SILENCE

by Katherine West

It is time to get up and do something
Time to make a flag and wave it
Not a banner of boundaries, not that tired old striped thing
Maybe an aspen sapling against a pure sky, lit

From above so it seems to pray
Maybe an image will sing louder than words
Something troubadour and chaste
Speaking quietly of return

Can we take it to a new world again?
Plant it on the beach, come in peace?
Can we make a second chance to begin
To turn the world green

Instead of blood red?
Or is this the end?


Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness, performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov, and teaches seasonal poetry workshops that revolve around "wilderness writing."  She has 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 Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and TheNewVerse.News  which recently nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize.

BLEEDING OUT

by Lisa J. Rocklin

Let's just leave it down:

the flag—
half-staff.
Raise it high
on days when

no one dies
            like that. 

Declare a holiday. 

Thoughts 
make ineffective gauze.
Prayers 

absorb no blood.
Flags were not meant

to serve 
as tourniquets
or crucibles of
            patriotism.

Let's just kneel 
together
every time
our banner waves
for these days 
we share—
collecting grief like debt.

Let's mourn 
the self-destruction
            of a nation. 

Let there be rage for 
the addict we can't save
who shoots up 
skin that isn't his
triggered by . . . 
            it doesn't matter why.

As long as he's fed
as long as we're willing
to yield more dead
as long as we keep 
loading the chamber
let's just leave it down—
as a shroud—

star-spangled 

and red.

Lisa J. Rocklin is a writer, facilitator, community builder, and associate director of Women Writing for (a) Change, a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, OH, that offers supportive writing circles to nurture and celebrate the individual voice.

FLY IT AT HALF-MAST ALWAYS

by Rick Kempa

"The New Normal" by Pat Bagley

A few AP headlines, January 27, 2019:

Search on for Louisiana man suspected in 5 deaths

1 dead, 1 wounded after shooting near Atlantic City

Police: 5 people shot overnight at Indianapolis bar

Teen arrested in shooting death of another Blue Springs MO teen

MSU police: Woman shoots herself at campus shooting range

Reno police: Man killed when shot multiple times in vehicle

New Haven Police investigate shooting of pizza delivery man

Fly it at half-mast always
because we are never done grieving,
because, one by one by one,
we are killing each other daily.

Fly it at half-mast
to declare our permanent sorrow,
the holes in our hearts, the horror
that we are no longer horrified.

Fly it to mark the fallen,
yesterday’s, today’s, tomorrow’s,
ten thousand exes on the streets,
a million feet of crime scene tape.

Because we are willing to sacrifice
our neighbors, our children
to defend our right to own,
to be killing machines,

because we fall so short of what we
could be and refuse to be, because
our numbness is complicity,
fly it at half-mast always.

Poet and essayist Rick Kempa lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he has recently finished his thirtieth and final year of teaching at Western Wyoming College. Other work of his on the themes of social justice and the lack thereof has appeared in Haight-Ashbury Review, Los Angeles Review, Little Patuxent Review, The J Journal, and elsewhere. His latest poetry collection is Ten Thousand Voices (Oakland: Littoral Press). 

AWOKE

by Lauren Haynes

Masks for everyone!
The tycoon flatters with free gifts
and they applaud his charity, a champion
of the working class.
Silk blindfolds for sleep
to lull leaky minds
that would spill ideas
and bleed tears of a dream blinked free
to see
the man licking the doorbell
of someone else’s home
a distraction, the war of words
forged to subvert the fact that
over there, the water runs radioactive
and there will be no food on the table
no books for learning—no, call me fantastic/look at the snow,
battles waged with flags waved by hands that will never know
the meaning of their colors,
hands held up by bodies that tremble with hunger, with fear.
Tomorrow is here, but we look away from the mirror.
So much unexplored universe out there . . .
we starve. we starve. we starve.

Lauren Haynes is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. She worked as an English school teacher for years and seeks to contribute to a better world.

AFTER HELSINKI

by Robert West

President Trump chaired a meeting Friday of his most senior national security advisers to discuss the administration’s effort to safeguard November’s elections from Russian interference, the first such meeting he’s led on the matter, but issued no new directives to counter or deter the threat. —The Washington Post, July 27, 2018. Cartoon source: Dayton Daily News.

Lower and fold the flag, my friends, assign it a sacred drawer:
to fly it now would only mock the good we’d flown it for.

And don’t repeat that noble pledge we said each day at school,
till we’ve regained our self-respect and fired that fascist fool.

Robert West's poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poetry, Light, and other venues. His latest chapbook is Convalescent (Finishing Line Press in 2011). The editor of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons, published by W. W. Norton in 2017, he lives in Starkville, Mississippi.

DILEMMA

by Joe Amaral

The large, bold woodcut image of a supplicant male slave in chains appears on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier's antislavery poem, "Our Countrymen in Chains." The design was originally adopted as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s, and appeared on several medallions for the society made by Josiah Wedgwood as early as 1787. —Library of Congress

Six minutes until game time
and the anthem is about to begin.

I’m afraid to kneel for inequality
in front of 11,000 drunk people

holding their hands half-heartedly
over hearts awaiting the start of

a collegiate soccer game where voice
rather than tangible action counts.

I want to avoid the hostile sneers of fans
awake in fake patriotism, ignorant to

police brutality. My kids follow the lead
of the crowd and stand. I ditch my family,

climbing concrete steps into the breeze-
way, my back to the flag, ducking into

a bathroom. The blood and soil floor is
piss-stained. I sort of kneel, listening as

the reverberation of a bad singer gravels
something antiquated and fragilely austere.

I feel for those going through the motions
dead-eyed. They know dutiful conformity

is an empty gesture unspoken. But a fist
in the air, a knee on the ground, now that

is no small token.

Joe Amaral works 48-hour shifts as a paramedic on the central coast of California. He has two young daughters, Zelia and Rui, and his wife Marina is a surgical nurse. They love spelunking outdoors, camping, traveling and hosting foreign exchange students. His writing has appeared worldwide in awesome places like 3Elements Review, Arcadia Magazine, Crow Hollow 19, The Good Men Project, The Rise Up Review and Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. 

OUR FLAG SPEAKS

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

A homeless man on a park bench in Brooklyn. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images via The New York Times.

how many have I seen fall     countless
as every flag has carried into battle
yet you have not asked me
how I should be honored because of them
so I have remained silent  until    now
honor    the word  the thought  the ideal
that raises everyone to something greater  noble   true
however trite that may sound
so I would have honor in other words
those that give voice to the silenced
to speak for the few, the different . . .
even those who oppose your own heart’s path
I am only cloth and color    the value I have is from you
and when you Pledge  make  those words real
for I fly not just for those countless lost or maimed
but also for those whose living defeats them
for everyone whatever stripe or shade of flesh
standing is but a moment   a song  a brevity
let all this honor be your life time  your daily gratitude
for those I saw fall and die

Sister Lou Ella Hickman has been an all-level teacher and a librarian. Presently she is a freelance writer and a spiritual director. Her poems and articles have been widely published in numerous magazines. One of her poems was published in the anthology After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. Her first book of poetry she: robed and wordless published by Press 53, was released in the fall of 2015.

TAKING A KNEE

by Martin Ott

You could be getting knighted or holding a ring,

the sun lined up squarely in the sights of your throw.

I have worn a uniform, positioned flags at half mast,

and aimed a rifle in the air while caskets are lowered.

You could be praying or imagining how white stripes

press down on blood lines basking in a field of stars.

They are balancing on caps that could break in battle,

warriors throwing themselves at the one holding on.

You could believe in silence that speaks to us in mass.

Wind whipping our flag is the same no matter the stand.


Martin Ott’s most recent book is Spectrum, C&R Press, 2016. He is the author of seven books and won the De Novo and Sandeen prizes for his first two poetry collections. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and a dozen anthologies. He tweets and blogs.

FLAG FOOTBALL

by Ed Werstein

Randall Enos / Cagle Cartoons

The president tweeted
his little whistle and threw the flag
in front of the protesting players.

For once the players weren’t
trying to call attention to themselves.
For once they weren’t stomping
or goose-stepping around the field
beating their chests with their
“I’m number one” finger
pointing toward the heavens,
or jumping into the laps of joyous fans.
They were kneeling.
Simply kneeling, to call attention
to an injustice suffered by others,
and to call attention to the fact
that they saw this as an American problem.
The problem for the president
was that they weren’t kneeling to him.
So he tweeted his whistle
as referee-in-chief, and threw the flag.
The call was unpatriotic conduct.
The president wanted the NFL renamed
The National Flag League. He wanted
the ball replaced, and a flag marched
up and down the field
in an even more war-like game
to match the militaristic fever
he wanted to stir up in the country.
Most of all, he wanted the players penalized.
He was used to people kneeling,
but right in front of him
and for a different reason.

Ed Werstein, Milwaukee, a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, was 60 before his muse awoke and dragged herself out of bed. He advocates for peace and against corporate power. His poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Blue Collar Review, Gyroscope Review, and several others. His chapbook Who Are We Then? was published by Partisan Press.

WHEN WE TALK

Michelle Marie was a blog correspondent for Stop Street Harassment and reader columnist for The News Tribune.