A TIME TO PLANT, A TIME TO MOW

a DJT “Four Seasons Landscaping” moment

by John Stickney

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

“You know, grass has a lifetime 

like people have a lifetime, 

and the lifetime of this grass 

has long been gone. 

When you look at the parks 

where the grass is all tired, 

exhausted. 

We're going to redo the grass 

with the finest grasses. 

I know a lot about grass.

I own a lot of golf courses. 

If you don't have good grass, 

you aren't in business 

very long.”

So sayeth the Lord.

Amen.

Author’s note: This is a DJT verbatim poem from remarks made August 13.

John Stickney is a poet and writer originally from Cleveland, Ohio, currently living outside Charlotte, NC.

SIRENS IN THE DISTANCE

by Nancy Byrne Iannucci

Drought has parched the Northeast U.S. for weeks, draining reservoirs, priming the landscape for damaging wildfires and pushing politicians to implement water-saving measures. More than 58% of the Northeast is in moderate drought or worse, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. —NBC News, November 15, 2024. Photo: The Jennings Creek Wildfire burning behind homes in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., on Nov. 10. Credit: Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

In the name of the Bee —
And of the Butterfly —
And of the Breeze — Amen!  

—Emily Dickinson, "The gentian weaves her fringes"

                                                       

The rustling leaves 
sound more like abandonment
to me now than the innocence of autumn.
 
Tumbleweed has traveled from the West,
kicking up dust in foreign streets,
making me squint like Clint
 
in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
this time, I’m convinced,
it’s the Devil breathing,
 
tempting Grandma Moses’s
rolling fields of matchsticks
to give him just one spark.
 
I think the phrase, hell on Earth,
has been said too many times,
our words have become
 
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
the bees have warned us. 
the rains in Spain have explained
 
why Whitman’s grass is dead
and Kimmerer’s sweetgrass
 won’t braid, and now,  
 
the Earth is responding
in sirens, sirens blaring,
blaring in the distance
 
getting closer
and even closer,
are we listening now?

 
Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a librarian and poet who lives with her two cats: Nash and Emily Dickinson.  THRUSH Poetry Journal, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Eunoia, Maudlin House, San Pedro River Review, 34 Orchard, Bending Genres, and Typehouse, are some places you will find her. She is the author of four chapbooks, Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021), Primitive Prayer (Plan B Press, fall 2022), and Hummingbirds and Cigarettes ( Bottlecap Press, 2024). Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci

IN TIME

by Christopher Woods

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show Twelve from Texas was performed recently in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His poetry collection Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away is published by Kelsay Books.

HEADLINES

by Howie Good

“Springtime” Claude Monet 1886 Fitzwilliam Museum (University of Cambridge), Cambridge, UK

Baby dies in attic fire. 400 dead in floods and landslides. 3 killed, 6 injured in New Mexico shooting. “All of life,” the Buddha said, “is sadness,” as if he’d been reading the same headlines as me. Cops seek masked gunman. Ukrainian attack looms. 12-year-old charged with murder. Every day the mirror held up to existence only darkens further. Then the spring melt reveals there’s been grass alive under the snow this whole time. Birds return to the marsh from the hot countries full of excited chatter. Sunshine grows brighter and more frequent and falls like a benediction on old bent trees and fat buds and us who don’t even deserve it. 

Howie Good's newest poetry collection Heart-Shaped Hole which also includes examples of his handmade collages, is available from Laughing Ronin Press.

ODDS AND ENDS

by Gil Hoy

Dan Hudson. "Garbage Can" (1992), oil on panel, 24×34 inches.

On Wednesdays, 

I take my trash down to the curb. 

There's a blue bin for recyclables, 

a black bin for regular trash

and a brown bin for yard waste. 

You can tell a lot about a man 

from the contents of his trash. 

 

Our neighbor is obsessed with Covid 

and now buys most of her things 

on Amazon. Her son got sick a year ago, 

was in intensive care for three weeks 

and then died. Her blue bin is filled 

with broken down boxes every week. 

 

Her husband stays inside and has started 

drinking again. There are three or four

empty wine or bourbon bottles 

in their blue bin every week. 

 

A divorcee a few houses down  

worries about getting old. Her black bin 

holds the week's trash from products 

promising to make her gray hair brown again 

and remove the wrinkles from her face. 

She's put on weight since her husband left her 

for a younger woman five years ago. 

There are often three or four 

empty pizza boxes in her black bin. 

 

You can tell a lot about a woman

from the contents of her trash. 

 

Another neighbor has three birch trees 

next to his driveway. His yard waste bin 

is filled with grass the yard boy cut 

and birch tree branches that once encroached 

upon his driveway. His shiny Mercedes 

can now get in and out again without a scratch. 

His regular trash bin has empty pill bottles 

used to keep his blood pressure down. He bought 

the Mercedes and keeps his yard carefully 

manicured to keep up with his neighbors.

 

A house up the road has two recyclable bins 

that are always full. The house's black bin 

never has much trash at all. The owner works 

for a company that reduces greenhouse gases 

and makes our water cleaner. The owner 

attends political events most nights 

focusing on climate change. 

 

You can tell a lot about people 

from the trash they don't have.

 

A neighbor on the next street over 

is an accountant. His blue bin is filled 

with shredded paper: tax schedules, 

financial statements and old tax returns. 

By the time April 15 comes around, 

he has three blue bins that are overflowing.

 

Another one of my neighbors 

doesn't play by the rules.  

He puts his trash out early most weeks. 

And then he's fined by our Town. 

He was arrested a while back 

for stealing money from his clients 

and had to spend a few years 

away from his family. 

 

You can tell a lot about a person  

from how they handle their trash.

  

And as for me, my trash is not 

what it used to be. My wife passed away 

suddenly and the kids have all grown up 

and moved away. I don't talk with them 

or see them much anymore. 

 

I miss the deflated balloons from birthday parties 

and worn out hockey skates that used to be 

in my black bin. And the leaves that filled 

my yard waste bin when I could sometimes 

get the boys to rake. I miss my wife's 

empty fancy shampoo bottles 

I used to put in my blue bin.

 

On a good week, when I'm eating well, 

my bins may be as much as a quarter full. 

But most weeks, they're as empty 

as an old man's broken heart.  

 

You can tell a lot about a man 

from the contents of his trash. 

Editor's note: The losses mentioned in the final four stanzas of the poem are suffered by the poem's Speaker and not, thankfully, by its author. 

 

 

Gil Hoy is a widely published Boston poet and writer who studied poetry and writing at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. While at BU, Hoy was on the wrestling team and finished in second place in the New England University Wrestling Championships at 177 lbs. He served as an elected Brookline, Massachusetts Select Board Member for four terms. Hoy is a semi-retired trial lawyer. His work has recently appeared in Best Poetry Online, Muddy River Poetry Review,  Tipton Poetry Journal, Rusty Truck,  Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Penmen Review, Misfit Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Chiron Review, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. Hoy was nominated for a Best of the Net award last year.

TEAR GAS AND WOAD

by Peleg Held

A nude protester—dubbed later “Naked Athena"—faces off against law enforcement officers during a protest against racial inequality in Portland, Ore., on July 18. Credit Nathan Howard/Reuters via The New York Times.

Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem. —Julius Caesar, The Gallic Wars


She fingers the blue on slowly, feralled in its wake;
she counts the steps from inside out the fenced-in fields of grace.

A vitrumned likeness wavers, a cats-lick from the rim,
in the tea cup in the circle of the saucer's closing ring.

Let the tongue tip shape the watchword in the shallows of its bow;
let sentry sleep and serpent sing beneath the shuddered vow.

Here is where their end is born; there is nothing at the gate
but ink and skin, the sylph herself: the cunt-directed state.

Caesar may misread you in the peripherals of his glass
or more likely overlook you, a needle in the grass

but as you plunge into his heel he will see the face
of what gives womb its dark and what gives blood its taste.


Peleg Held lives in Hiram, Maine with his partner and 21 chickens led by the world's tiniest rooster, Gavroche-That-Lives.

IF I COULD

by Brooke Herter James

If I could I would
send you the sound
of brittle birch branches
tapping tiny buds
against my windowpane
this chilly March morning,
the silence of the solitary
bluebird sitting on top
of her nesting box,
the little snorts of the donkeys
as they make their way
around fast disappearing
islands of snow. I would
send you the sound
of sap dripping
into metal buckets,
of tiny blades of grass
pushing through ice.
Even as the lights are turning
off all over the world
I would send you
the sound of spring,
its quiet resolve.

Brooke Herter James is the author of one children’s picture book and two poetry chapbooks. She lives on a small Vermont hillside with her husband, two donkeys, four chickens and a dog.

THE LAWN

by Katherine Smith

Harry W. Porter Pumpkin Ash, The Lawn,
Pavilion IX, University of Virginia

On this grass in 1984
I met my true love
in front of the bookstore

where men in camouflage
brandish torches and a few women too
in fluttering skirts, march

not far from the Rotunda.
They chant of the past
but these men aren’t the past.

The past was 1984 when
we lay under the ginkgo
the man who loved

the Ivory Coast and I,
and music from Mali
played on the lawn now lit

by confused torches.
In the future
where the black-shirted men

leave their shadows
behind them in the grass,
lovers will hesitate

to lie under the ash tree.


Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

NO SINGULAR COUNTRY

by Alejandro Escudé

Harrison Ford was injured last Thursday afternoon when his vintage single-engine airplane crashed on a golf course shortly after taking off from Santa Monica Airport. Photo of the plane by Alejandro Escudé.

Oh furious desire for the present! That nose!
Like the botched schnoz of a prizefighter,
the splayed yellow wings, aluminum body,
the star, a model-slick Army Corps roundel.
Ford’s plane, whole, stark,  not the protracted
present, but the breakneck speed existence,
unafraid, the kind that wolfs one across time
despite failure. Have you risked it? The plane
asks, Or are you pulling back? Other cars
maneuver around me, stopped to cellphone
snap the pic. Say what you want, but the man
that took down that plane, that wasp-like,
double A battery-shaped plane, that metallic
cereal box, met the abounding void and tore
through it, no perturbation over loose ends
nor much hindsight, no babble or echoing
self-talk, just the return home with no home.
No singular country but the loosened sky and

there it sits, intact, on that cool green grass.


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. 

MARS

by Howie Good

The god of carnage has grown

a balding man’s stringy ponytail.

Red, he says, means danger.

He shrugs his cruelly thin shoulders.

A tractor stands abandoned

in a field of what looks from here

like black puddles of blood.

The future will burn a full 40 days.

We will walk beside our coffins.

Starvelings will stare out

from behind barbed wire.

Mothers will shriek. There will be

nice grass in the cemetery.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.