OVERHEARD AT THE SPHERE IN LAS VEGAS DURING DEAD AND CO.’S SPRING RUN 2025

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

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

Fascism will seem inevitable long after
it arrives, or perhaps it’s the waiting
for fascism that is inescapable; you  
anticipate the pristine, diamond-fast, 
inconvertible moment of its advent 
like it’s Jesus, beveled and prismatic,
a milestone through which we’ll channel
every event of your circumscribed life.
Where were you, your grandchildren 
will ask, when coffee began to taste
off, fruits rotted faster, the lustrous effects
of oysters were outlawed because the flesh 
offended the tongue of the great leader
with a nano-speck of sand as though he
possessed the sensitivity of a prince asleep
on a mattress supported on the backs 
of loyal constituents, or because of his
unnatural disgust for the aboriginal environment. 
What if we applied the same terminology 
for fascists that we reserve for drug addicts,
a population jonesing for an authoritative
figure who will lead them by the nose
to their next hit, rush, or fix, of being 
totally dominated? You should be open 
with your children about your past drug
use, but not your present prescriptions, 
nor your plan of ditching your citizenship
while you wait out fascism in a foreign
nation, surreptitiously monitoring a
short-wave radio you pieced together
from bits and bobs of old door posts, 
vacuum cleaners and military regalia. 
Someday we might look back at this
interregnum with a glazed fascination,
although there’s no guarantee it will pass,
considering we no longer have communal
experiences, only niche encounters shared
among an ever-tightening cadre of familiars, 
like certain therapies or twisting the knife 
once it’s sunk into the rose of the bone, 
the sound of incursion is ever more gratifying. 

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of a memoir, two novels, four full-length collections of poetry, and four chapbooks of poetry. She lives in New York, yearns for her hometown of Los Angeles, and visits Las Vegas when Dead and Co. plays there.

BEQUEATHED

 a golden shovel by Bonnie Proudfoot

No meaning but what we find here.

No purpose but what we make.

 

That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:

Turn me into song; sing me awake.

                               —Gregory Orr

 

 

Say you are at the supermarket, no

say you are at the farmer's market, meaning

you don't go in for plastic wrapped food, but

you bring your stringy hemp bag. How nice, but what

did you think, that one tomato at a time we

can stop climate change, find

a way to keep butterflies and songbirds here?

 

Say you'll install solar panels on your roof, no

say you've already installed them, your purpose

feels urgent, you are off the power grid, but

the sun feels stronger every day, what

you never expected was tornados, floods, we

can barely hold on to any progress we make. 

 

Today each weather warning lasts longer, that

way the window of safety shrinks, and

we huddle closer, protect ourselves, our beloved,

while lightning sparks, we wait for all to clear

though we need more time to prepare, instructions

 

to face this new future. The earth will turn

against us, beyond the ladders of light leaning into

the clouds, beyond the hymns and songs

to creation, show me a new song to sing,

not king coal, not drill baby oil, give me

more songbirds to hallelujah my grandchildren awake.

Bonnie Proudfoot is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and reviewer whose work has appeared in online journals and anthologies. Her novel Goshen Road  (OU / Swallow Press) was longlisted for the PEN/ Hemingway and received the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her recent book of poems Household Gods can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

INHERITANCE

by Mary Hills Kuck

To Governor Kristi Noem

My grandmother gave me one sterling spoon

for each of my first twelve years. A wandering

rose fills the neck of the spoon, sends vines

down the stem, with roses here and tiny

leaves there, then finally a clustered bouquet

next to M marked for Mary, the name we happily shared.

 

Did she imagine I’d take out these spoons,

tied year by year in a soft flannel roll,

and set them on linen with vases of roses,

my friends gathered there to talk about art,

song, and church over tea, petit fours?

 

I’m sorry to say I use one at a time

in my mug of strong tea before eight.

Then I race off to teach, attend meetings or shop.

Yet the spoon stirs my thoughts of her love  

for her namesake, her hope for my future, my home.

 

Your granddaughter, Governor, as you have said,

gets a gift every year of your love.

She already owns a gun for each year

of her innocent two-year-old life.

 

Did you engrave on the barrel of each new piece

your name and the year of the gift?

Did you ask the seller to add little blooms,

tiny vines, or sweet pinky hearts?

 

How do you think she’ll make use of these gifts

when she’s reached the allowable age to aim,

indeed, fire; what prey will your granddaughter shoot?

Will she start with the birds, then on to the cats,

and finally seek out the big game?

Mary Hills Kuck has has published poems in print journals, including the Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, From the Depths, Poetry Quarterly, Main St. Rag, and others online. Intermittent Sacraments, her chapbook, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

TO MY GRANDSONS IN THE FUTURE

by Cathryn Shea

You benefit today from your innocent
enthusiasm for worms, grasshoppers,
and anthills. You study foxtails
and poppies, wade in the Yuba River.

When you read this in high school,
my hope is that you are in a public one.
Well-funded, or at least with an adequate budget
for the arts. I hope your summer is still
not breaking heat records
and in winter the Yuba does not flood
causing mudslides.

I hope you do not suffer premature neck strain
from bending over your cell phones.
If you have cell phones or know of cell phones.
Perhaps you wear a device attached to your eyes.
Perhaps you wear an embedded chip.

Does anyone mention climate change anywhere?
(That was a euphemism anyway.)
Is capitalism still running rampant?
Does your vocabulary even include such words?
Have robots taken over the classroom?

I ask you too many questions
and I apologize. By the way,
did you know apologia is the root
of apologize? Such a beautiful word

of remorse. I can’t imagine your vernacular.
I digress. (Oh, I can just hear you chiding.
Grandma uses too many strange words.)

I do hope there is still a Nature you can escape to.
Where the din of machinery can’t be heard.
Where artificial radiance
does not vie with the night sky.

Cathryn Shea is the author of four chapbooks including Backpack Full of Leaves (Cyberwit, 2019) and Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree (dancing girl press, 2019). Her first full-length poetry collection Genealogy Lesson for the Laity is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in September 2020. Cathryn’s poetry appears in New Orleans Review, Tar River Poetry, Typehouse, and elsewhere. See @cathy_shea on Twitter.

HALLOWEEN AT THE NURSING HOME

by Michael Mark

Image source: Reddit

The tombstones and zombie decorations
look more scared than scary among those
living in translucent skin, rolling their
wheelchairs with skeleton hands,
gasping in their oxygen masks.

The Grim Reaper creeps along the corridors,
behind a walker, to the costume contest,
scythe taped to his back with bloody bandages.

The bedridden plead for him not to pass them by.

No one pulls back in fright or shrieks
from anything other than pain or dementia
or to let themselves and anyone else out
there know they are, for good and bad,
still alive.


Only when the grandchildren come to trick-
or-treat in their jack-o-lantern and fairy
princess costumes do their sunken eyes
rise from their sockets and their colorless
lips tremble with fear.


Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer. His poetry has appeared in Angle Journal, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Empty Mirror, Everyday Poets, Forge Journal, Lost Coast Review, New Verse News, Petrichor Review, Scapegoat, Silver Birch Press, Red Booth Review, The thing itself, The New York Times, The Wayfarer, Work. His poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.