ALL IN THE FAMILY

by Alan Walowitz

Maybe you wake up cranky again, 

and the sun’s unwelcome as ever

through the broken slat in the blinds.

You holler across the hall, 

You’ve got to make something of your life.

Then, he hardly stirs when you go to shake him, 

but he tells you of his plan to kill you.

There’s no use talking it out.

No coming to some understanding.

He means it this time 

 

Sometimes, I get crazy thoughts myself—

I’m too old for this. 

What’s left of my youth

has leached out slow like air from a tire. 

How murder is where we come from, 

Cain and Abel, the Flood, and then the Golden Calf—

which was only a sign of our shared impatience.   

 

So, you take him to some tangled place

and it all unwinds like a movie,

part of you watching, and part of you 

present in a way you’ve never been.

Maybe you’re hoping some voice intervenes.

You’d gladly call it God, if the script requires, 

though you’re probably considering the headlines, 

the generations to come who might never understand. 

Or, perhaps, there is no voice. 

and it's just you, come to your senses. 

 

No matter. Chances are he’ll only remember 

a trip to the country, just a kid and his dad.

A nice enough day, the story might go, 

except for maybe this cheap device

that never would solve anything: 

the bleat of another innocent animal,  

caught in the brambles, ready or not,

to take our place.

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 Story of the Milkman and Other Poems  is available from Truth Serum Press.  From Arroyo Seco Press,  In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars.  The chapbook The Poems of the Air is from Red Wolf Editions and is free for downloading. 

OLD TESTAMENT TEXAS

by Laurence Musgrove

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

And our Lord God released his anger

upon the innocent, saying, “Perhaps,

I will gain their attention on the day

they celebrate their independence

from logic with a big horrible flood,

a punishment for their blasphemies

against the creation I have gifted

them for their salvation, while they

instead, continue to burn it all down,

drowning their children in Satan’s oil.”

Laurence Musgrove teaches English at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. He also edits the online poetry journal Texas Poetry Assignment. 

CAROLINA WRENS

by Clay Steakley

The second day of October.

Thickets of Carolina Wrens

Singing the song called Home.

The mountain towns paved

With floodwash, heaps of silt, 

Deathly mass of wayward trees.

Red maple, Yellow poplar.

Those remaining will pennant

The air in time for the funerals.

The Carolina Wren is small-bodied

And big-voiced. The Carolina Wren is

June Carter singing Wildwood Flower

Ginger lily, goldenrod, and aster.

Red chainsaws, yellow backhoes.

Brown water. Everything is brown water.

A safety-vest-orange maple leaf

On a dark casket is an easy image,

But that makes it no less real.

The Carolina Wren is a plain thing.

Unadorned, like this writing,

But overspilling with living.

Where is a town when it has

Been washed downstream?

It is in the people sharing meals.

Cool in the mornings,

Cool in the nights.

Wrens sing the song called Home.

Clay Steakley is a writer, musician, filmmaker, and theatre artist. His work has been published alongside Aimee Bender’s and Lauren Groff’s in Slake, as well as in Cathexis Northwest Press, Fiction Fix, From the Depths, and Waxing & Waning. He was a finalist for a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship, and received the Ruby P. Treadway award for creative writing. He was a 2020/21 OZ Arts Art/Porch Art Wire Fellow. Clay's current project is The Fire Cycle, a multidisciplinary collection of poetry, music, film, and visual art. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

HELENE

by Terri Kirby Erickson

Cadaver dogs and search crews trudged through knee-deep muck and debris in the mountains of western North Carolina on Tuesday looking for more victims ofHurricane Helene days after the storm carved a deadly and destructive path through the Southeast. —AP, October 1, 2024

He found his wife’s body draped over

a limb, her skirt flapping in the wind

 

like a bedsheet pinned to a line, her

long hair hanging like Spanish moss.

 

He dropped to his knees in the mud,

moaning like a bear caught in a steel

 

trap, ready to gnaw off its leg to stop 

the pain. He didn’t care, anymore,

 

about their splintered house floating 

like matchsticks down the river, never

 

felt the dog’s rough tongue trying to 

lick the agony from his face. Still, he

 

could not make himself believe what 

he was seeing—pictured her, instead, 

 

walking down the aisle with flowers 

tumbling from her hands. He vaguely

recalled saying to her, Till death do us 

part, but it tasted like gibberish in his 

 

mouth, words with no meaning about 

a time he was sure would never come.

Author's Note: My poem, ‘Helene,’ is an imagined narrative prompted by reading and hearing about the devastating destruction and loss of life in western North Carolina (my beloved home state) that occurred as a result of Hurricane Helene. I also drew upon my own experiences with trauma, grief, and sudden loss while writing this poem.

 

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Rattle, The SUN, and numerous other publications. Her awards include the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, International Book Award for Poetry, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize among many others. She lives in North Carolina, USA.

IMAGINE WANTING TO LIVE

by Kristin Yates

So much you break 

the windows of your home

with the blunt force 

of your will 

to live—

though the house treads water,

and devastation 

like a muddy choke surrounds you 

where your life, your loved ones, used 

to breathe—

imagine wanting to live

so much—

you crawl to the roof

and you hunch

and you hold

and you wait

and you watch

and you wonder

how many bodies

human

nonhuman

dead

almost dead

are cremated 

in the flood’s current

and you pray to your will to live 

and you pray to the storm

and you pray to tomorrow

to let you       live,

please

let me      live. 

If you look close enough 

on the roof of any storm, 

you’ll find 

someone who wants         to live. 

Kristin Yates is an award-winning poet, artist, cat cuddler, and work in progress from Lewisville, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Tiny Seed Journal, Beyond the Veil Press, Writerly Magazine, Unstamatic, Campfire Poets, Scavengers, Green Ink Poetry, Last Leaves Magazine, and others.

APOCALYPSE

by Katherine West

detail of the poster for the film Apocalypse Now

I stand with my back to winter 
as if I could hold off blizzards 
with force of will alone 

I am the last dam without a crack 
Water trickles over my shoulders 
Flood whispers in my ears 

I am rain following fire 
tracking its crackle and whoosh 
lowering like a raptor after prey 

I am the final embrace before death 
grabs you by the ankles 
leaving only your soul in my arms 

I am the last mother
carrying a million children on my back 
swimming for safety against the tide 

I am the last dancer, the last poet
the last artist using my own blood 
to paint the last sunset 

I am the last person on Earth 
I have broken all mirrors, all my brothers 
are only songs

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, Writers Resist, Feminine Collective, Southwest Word Fiesta, and The Silver City Anthology. 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, the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado, and the Tombaugh Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

LAST WEEK, WHEN IT RAINED

by Alice Campbell Romano

This river savaged my neighbor

poured six feet of water into his basement

water higher than his head

In another house

and another

and another

she slopped up onto the first floor,

onto the boards

onto the rugs

ruthless

No sooner did one neighbor

finish his repairs

after the hurricane—

seventy-five thousand dollars—

than the river

bulged,

swelled,

pooled,

in every room,

floated

his new furniture,

gurgled and laughed

and rose up outside to cover cars

parked on the street

And down the street on the corner

the whole corner is lined with everything

the family who lives in the house on the corner

has to throw away

chairs, a sofa, bookcases, baby beds, cabinets,

whatever was contained in the cabinets,

why name them all? Everything stored

until a time when the family would agree on

what to sell and when, and now there’s nothing but

mush and melted glue and sog.

The river today winks and scintillates

under the bridge, well between her banks

while a few early autumn leaves ride her ripples.

Am I not beautiful, she whispers.

Alice Campbell Romano lived a dozen years in Italy where she adapted Italian movie scripts into English, married a dashing Italian movie-maker, made children, and moved with the family to the U.S., where they built, she wrote, and the children grew. Her poems have appeared in—among other venues—Prometheus Dreaming, Persimmon Tree, Pink Panther Magazine, Orchards Poetry, New Croton Review; Beyond Words, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Quartet Journal, Instant Noodles Devil's Press, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press. In January, she was awarded HONORABLE MENTION in The Comstock Review's 2022 Chapbook contest, "...not an award that we give every year, but an honor set aside for a few manuscripts." Alice swooned. 

CHICAGO, STANDING FAST

by Jack Phillips Lowe 

Chicago’s air quality: ‘We’re in the crosshairs.’ Wildfires and wind push region’s air to worst in the world, global pollution index shows. —Chicago Tribune, June 27, 2023. Photo: The Chicago skyline is blanketed in haze from Canadian wildfires seen from Solidarity Drive on June 27, 2023, as weather officials issued an air quality alert. (Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune)

They’ve counted you out… again.

They say you’re gone, for good this time. 

They say we must get used to 

speaking of you in the past tense. 

Is there nothing left for you,

dear town, but to be forgotten?

And perhaps forgiven, too, for all

that you were and weren’t?

Will there be any hope of legacy— 

the slim chance of being exhumed 

from the ashes of time, an ancient outpost 

to be ooo-ed and ahh-ed over by scavengers,

born centuries after you breathed your last? 

With no one left to tell your stories, 

will they fumble through your relics— 

children trying to piece together 

a picture puzzle that was made 

by grandparents they never knew?

I steal down your empty streets,

duck in and out of your deserted doorways, 

a ghost too naive to know that it’s passed.

I hunt faces in darkened windows. 

I chase traces of voices, fragments of songs

bouncing down bare alleys— 

I won’t believe that I’m alone. 

Chicago, I won’t quit you.

Go ahead, tax me—

take every one of my few dimes.

When my pockets are empty, 

I’ll present to you the lint from them,

gift-wrapped like the sweetest box of candy 

you ever tasted on St. Valentine’s Day.

Bon appetit, Chicago!

I refuse to fall out of love with you. 

Chicago, you can’t scare me off. 

I know all your tricks—

fires, floods, blizzards, 

heatwaves, riots, wrecking balls, 

lies, corruption, graft,

crappy sports teams

and blood, blood, blood.

Don’t forget: you made me.

I’m a monster in your own image, 

inoculated against all your horrors.

Chicago, I’m staying right here. 

Someone much smarter than I once said 

that a town is an idea, as much as a place. 

As long as there is a group of people, 

however small, to hold that idea in their hearts— 

come hell or high water—

then, that town will survive.

Look around you, my home. 

I’m not alone. Those faces I sought

peek out from all corners and shadows.

So many know and value you—

more than you do, yourself.

You’ve tried suicide before. 

But it never works out. 

There’s just too much life in you—

life that won’t be denied.

Stop, dear town, this self-flagellation.

Our faith in you lives on. 

We won’t let you destroy yourself.

Chicago, we’re standing fast.

Jack Phillips Lowe is a lifelong resident of the Chicago area. His poems and short stories have appeared in Clutch 2023, Cajun Mutt Press, and Red Fez Magazine among other outlets. His most recent book, Flashbulb Danger: Selected Poems 1988-2018 (Middle Island Press), is available from Amazon.com.