JUMP TO IT

an abecedarian

by Cecile Earle

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

A grasshopper chirping and clicking his legs
by the flower pot, sees me, sits up, rolls his eyes,
“Come on,” he says to me, “A 
dictatorship is coalescing.
Even I know—Let’s call it what it is: 
Fascism. Has a stun gun turned you into statues?
Gather your forces,” he says, “Come on
humans! All of you—Yes, you too, Cecile. Now!
In this moment! Wake up! 
Jump on it! Now! You teeter! You 
know nations can explode in a flash!
Listen! All I see you doing is waving arms,
making gestures, filing papers. And still,
nothing is coming together as this 
oligarchy solidifies like a glacier. And you?
Puzzled. Positing solutions. Talk. Talk. Stuck in glue. 
Questioning as you chatter, chatter.
Rally now.
Stop them.
Time’s up! Don’t 
use now to 
veer on the side of caution!
Wake up! Democracy! Ours! Don’t let
X and his minions rule our world!
You can do it,”  the grasshopper says, as he 
zips into the garden. Waves. “See you tomorrow.”

Cecile Earle taught English at UCB and Bay Area Colleges. She also focused on Latin American affairs and social justice as editor with the Center for the Study of the Americas in Berkeley. She has published poetry, essays, memoir, and short fiction, and she has won awards for writing on immigration, nomadic migrations in Northern Kenya, and climate change with, among others, Soul Making Keats of the National League of American Pen Women, Bay Area Poet’s Coalition, Word Peace, and the Mendocino Writer’s Conference.

COVID LARGESSE

by Ed Ahern

Aesop got it wrong.

Or at least incomplete.

This life-long ant realizes

some of my money will outlive me.

And here comes a Covid check.

More for the kids? Not likely.

But how to best squander it?

I’m too old for expensive vices,

and already giving things away.

Spas and salons are wasted

on a wrinkled, bald man.

What’s left is geriatric dissipation.

Grasshopper trips and meals,

shows and concerts,

gorged on at sedate pace,

with lessened senses and focus

and an age restricted diet.

 

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where he sits on the review board and manages a posse of six review editors.

HOARDING LIGHT

by Susan Vespoli

Maybe I’m hoarding Molly
while on lockdown, luminescent
in her fourth year around the sun.

People gasp and ask,
you’re still seeing your granddaughter?
like it’s a crime,

and I want to hide her behind my skirts,
she who chalks cement
with hearts, water-paints rocks,

watches youtube
compilations of Snoopy laughing
and never tires of tossing

the rubber bone for my ecstatic dog.
I turn off daily death counts on the news
to watch her in the field of brilliant

poppies that sprang up in my front yard.
She who bends to sniff and pluck
and count the bees,

then runs after bugs
she wants to keep as pets:
crane flies and beetles,

a fat khaki grasshopper
wriggling between index finger
and her thumb

as I the buzz-kill cry,
Not in the house! It’s a living being 
that needs its family. Let it go,

and so, she does: opens pincer grip
as the insect soars
across the yard in an arc.

Susan Vespoli is a poet/essay who lives in Phoenix, AZ. Her work has been published in spots such NVN, Rattle, Nailed Magazine, Mom Egg Review, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.