BEATING UP THE POOR

by Dale Jacobson

Trump’s thugs come wearing masks 
like the KKK would hide their faces 
to not be known by the honest light of day.

To be surprised by American fascism 
is to forget to ask what the country has been 
for the poorest of the poor from the beginning, 
or how the worst of the worst made their law 
bright with fire, whips and murder.

You think reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school 
ever meant justice for all? Or for the poor 
a just country ever existed? And the hatred 
and terror Trump now brings to the cities 
is a new law of a land that once was free?

Yes, they are paid to break families apart, 
they are colder than the deepest cold of 

Minnesota winter. The past also has its allegiances, 

cold-blooded and brutal.

And what do these thugs get from the mayhem 
they generously offer as their vision of America?  
What do they take home for their supper of dreams? 
Their bribe is what they take.  
What is the moldy crust they want the nation to eat? 
They don’t care. They never did.

Dale Jacobson is a poet from Minnesota. He has published ten books of poetry and appeared in a number of journals, including APR, Great River Review, and Another Chicago Magazine.

THE FIRST DEATH

by Thomas R. Smith

So a lost brother has taken a bullet.

We grasp after a coherent motive.

Another of the terminally online?

Noticing the victim did nothing to help

protect others from this kind of death.

Said a few deaths are worth his “freedom.”

Would he have considered his own death

by the gun worth it? Are we allowed to ask

whether this is irony or karma?

The mind unmoored from spirit, scrambled

by strange signals, tears loose from the real.

Can we be honest about our part in this?

Life is change, but fear turns change to death,

fear rooted in hatred, self-hatred

of the changing different one within.

I mourn his first death, the earlier one

when he turned away from decency and kindness

to join the church of the desecrated heart.

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

HOW WE ROLL

Prelude to prayer and action

by Darrell Petska

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

Killing. Maiming.
Forever grieving.
That’s how we’ve rolled
since descending from trees
and living in caves.
Rolled with spear, with bow,
with sword, gun, and bomb.
Killing. Maiming.
For power, gold or spite,
god or country, king or knave.
Forever grieving.
Our own graves digging
or those of our loved ones.

Is killing our imperative?
Sorrow forever to yoke our necks?
Or might we have (we must believe
we have) hidden wings
awaiting prayer and act
to relieve us of these roads we roll on,
spill blood on, die on over and over
until life is cheapened, some cruel curse?
Wings we can will to grow,
to spirit away hatred, envy, and fear.
Wings at long last on which to fly
along peaceable skyways promoting
unity, egality, and love.

Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Father of five and grandfather of seven, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin with his wife of more than 50 years.

ARE WE THERE YET?

Ode to Passover

by Anita S Pulier

Painting by Frans Pourpos the Elder (c. 1565–1580) depicting God showing Moses the Promised Land. Source: Wikipedia.

Celebrate forty years of wandering.
Forty years of searching.

Read Haggadah to the children,
give thanks,

sing praises
for the tribe surviving.

Focus on the ancients,
not the news.

Ignore ICE, as it issues
this warning: if officers

view you as Other,
hear a foreign accent,

take notice of tatoos,
you will be wrangled

like cattle into pens
and, paperless or not, deported.

To where? Weep, explain
you have lived here

since you were two,
this is your home.

Your wife, your children,
your aged mother

may never see you again.
Glory be to what?

Listen! Angry screams nurtured
by hatred, drown out the cries

of kids in Florida, or Texas, or next door.
How many more will be force fed this poison

in the name of a merciless God
punishing the sin of survival?

and Gaza
and Gaza

Tonight, we Jews co-opt words;
suffering, pain, freedom.

I imagine the day that
anyone’s God

will deliver enlightenment,
angels will sing,

heavenly light will shine
on the cruel irony of the self-righteous,

the day each of us will be revealed
as the supplicant,

each of us the Other.
The day our ancient journey,

our Passover celebration,
will not fall so woefully short

of the promised land.

Anita S Pulier's newest  books are Paradise Reexamined and Leaving Brooklyn  (Kelsay Books). ). Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.

DECEMBER 2024

a Golden Shovel poem based on a line from Wendell Berry’s “Sabbaths 2005 I”

by Joanne Kennedy Frazer

distressed     appalled     by all    this

     i set alight    the Christmas Candle

       illumine my soul    against

darkness of hatred    of evil      that the

          culture      carries in the wind

Joanne Kennedy Frazer is a retired peace and justice director and educator for faith-based organizations. She began writing in her early 70s, and has now been published more than 80 times in anthologies, on-line zines, and magazines. Five poems have been turned into a song cycle titled Resistance by composer Steven Luksan and performed in Seattle and Durham. Her latest chapbook Seasonings (Kelsay Books) was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She lives in Raleigh, NC.

CRY OF A HEART IN DISTRESS

by Roodly Laurore & Bichini Laurore

“Spirits / Loas” by Payas Augustin Pierre Sylvain, 2012

Generations follow one another.

Same causes, same effects.

Chained hearts, slaves to hatred.

 

The wind of fear contaminates thought,

turns it into violence, sows mourning.

 

Anguished souls, thirsty for peace,

In the middle of a barren desert.

cry for the end of a painful pilgrimage.

 

Exhausted body, dejected mind 

find their peace

in a journey of no return.  

Roodly Laurore was born and raised in Haiti. He is an engineer and poet. His poems, widely published, are included in: Spirit Fire Review; Welter University of Baltimore; Taos Journal of Poetry; Kosmos Journal; Autism Parenting Magazine; Solstice Literary Magazine; Synchronized Chaos; The New Verse News; Jerry Jazz Musician and others.

 

Bichini Laurore, born in Haiti, is the son of Roodly Laurore. He is a lover of accounting and poetry with a passion for writing poetry in English & French. He has recently collaborated with his father Roodly Laurore in Taos Journal of Poetry. Bichini was 3rd place winner of an interschool competition in Port-au-Prince in 2020.

IDENTIFYING CHRIST

by Joy Kreves

In his final speech in court before his latest conviction, Navalny quoted the Bible: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” —Yahoo! News, February 16, 2024

No, Donald Trump is not America’s Navalny. —The Washington Post, February 16, 2024

On the one hand

a living carcass of a coward

who leads the GOP by nose ring

 

On the other

the now dead Navalny

who suffered then died for democracy for all

 

One, belly expanded 

with the gaseous stench 

of mockery and hatred

 

The other, thinned frame 

filled with wit and love

and bravery

 

Even a toddler could discern

which is more Christ-like

yet half of America remains confused

Joy Kreves is a New Jersey artist/poet, member of DVP/US1 Poets.  She has had work published in art exhibition catalogs and in WORKSHEETS Anthologies 2022 & 2023.  She says, I still remember grade school lessons on The Golden Rule.  We had to pledge allegiance to the flag of our country.  These lessons were reinforced in Sunday School.  I am baffled by the ability of so many to justify rude, dishonest, selfish and traitorous behavior.  What were they taught as children?  

UNOPTIMISTIC DAY

by Barbara Schweitzer 

Tennessee Republicans’ ruthless use of their state House supermajority to expel two young Black lawmakers for breaching decorum exposed a torrent of political forces that are transforming American politics at the grassroots. The GOP action, after the lawmakers had led a gun control protest from the House floor in response to last week’s Nashville school shooting, created a snapshot of how two halves of a diversifying and increasingly self-estranged nation are being pulled apart. AP Photo by George Walker IV: Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson and Justin Pearson raise their hands outside the state House chamber after Jones and Pearson were expelled from the legislature on Thursday, April 6, 2023, in Nashville. —CNN, April 7, 2023

I read the political news
and then I worry.
I go upstairs to the writing
room and stare.
I kill a moth that has
flown by our tacky traps
in the hopes that it is
the last one so I might
again pull the cashmeres
(gifts over years)
out of the cedar trunk
yes cedar trunk but no
it does not protect.
Every November I see
the damage little things
can do, like worries,
wormholes in everyday:
how will we survive
inside all this hatred
what is wrong with humans
how can we believe in evolution
when lame brains govern
and all are men at the root
and they are not created
equal...  I must believe but... 
It is just that we are not winged
and we turn to dust so quickly
it takes only a finger to squash
a moth and just five pounds
of pressure on that finger 
to kill us. Guns and men 
who rule will soon too
be dust, unfortunately 
most not before us.

Barbara Schweitzer is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets (Little Pear Press, 2008) and is now returning to poetry after a decade of writing (more or less) for theatre (which is a very different experience).

GRUMPY OLD WHITE MEN

by Jeremy Szuder

Man Looking Down his Glasses is a drawing by CSA Images at Fine Art America

The grumpy old white men 

walk the avenues of this village

at nine in the morning.

I’m washing my children’s clothes,

their ballet tights and 

their Taekwondo robes.

I push past the dinosaur days

of primal, guttural instincts and

oversized pickup trucks,

I push past leering elder stares

at beautiful black women who

stand in line just ahead of me

in our stodgy old banks, cashing

checks and filling up on rolls

of quarters.

I replace stickers that I’ve stuck,

on signposts and mailboxes,

removed because the old time 

religions didn't like my artwork.

The riptide of hatred is lost

as I push hard against the attempt

at stirring unforgiving waters.

And I look at my reflection in

the windows of these shops,

and I’m the same pigment as

these gravediggers are—

these Polo shirts and these mad,

sad, unfaithful souls.

These grumpy old fools, scratching

at everyone else's eyes instead

of just conveniently staying home

with their curtains drawn and

their fearful guns cocked and 

loaded.

Jeremy Szuder (he/him) lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, two children and two cats. He works in the evenings in a very busy restaurant, standing behind a stove, a grill, fryers and heating lamps, happily listening to hours of hand selected music and conjuring ideas for new art and poetry in his head. When his working day ends and he enters his home in the wee hours, he likes to sit down with a glass of wine and record all the various words and images that bear fruit within his mind. Jeremy Szuder only sets the cage doors free when the work begins to pile up too high. In this life, Szuder makes no illusions of being a professional artist in any way, shape, or form.

A NIGHT AT THE RNC

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

Oh, say can you see, by dusk’s dimming light, fake news spewing from the worst on the right, from the Senate’s blind mice, ignoring all vice, the children in cages, the jobless... no wages, federal troops, crushing protest groups, voters’ hopes flailing, domestic terror prevailing.  Oh say, can you see, by dawn’s angry red glare, pollution and hatred on the air, in praise of T***p’s props and photo ops, truth denying, the sick and dying, our worst fears rearing, Kent State reappearing.

Aging rapidly, alternately sad, and depressed, Lucille Gang Shulklapper is at other times the fortunate author of numerous poems (a dozen or so published in TheNewVerse.News since 2008)and stories, as well as five poetry chapbooks and a picture book. She recently started a program in her residential community titled Edgewater Poets, giving seniors a voice on a community channel as well as the staff employed there. 

AGAIN

by Lenny Lianne

Again the man said he’d just lost his job.
Again he said he lost his girlfriend.
            He’d just lost his way.
Again the man was lost yet
            said it was a free country.
            The man was lost in a free country and
again he said in this free country
            he’d lost everything,
                           everything that gave him any power,
                                                               any purpose,
                        — except his guns.
            He said in this free country the man with guns
                        had the power, was in power.
            The gun was all-powerful in this country and
again the man said he’d be damned
            if he’d give up this country
to low-life peons,
            said he’d go out of his way to shoot
all good-for-nothing outsiders
with their brown, black or yellow skin,
            illegals who didn’t look like him.
Again he said it was a free country
            and he was free to shoot riffraff
                        whether he looked in their faces first
                        or just aimed straight ahead or
                        to the left or the right.
Again the man said guns gave men power.
            In this free country the man with guns
                        was in charge.
Again he said he was in charge.
                                    In charge of the main event,      
                        the grand slam, the squeeze play,
            the final solution in his free country and
            he and his guns were center stage
                        and in charge.
       In charge of life and death
but mostly death.
Again the man with guns shouted “Charge”
            and shot straight ahead and
            to the right and the left.
And again death,
                   death again,
                        someplace, someday,
anywhere, at any moment,
                        in our country,
                        in this free country,
                   guns and death again
            and again and
again.


Editor's Note: President Trump met in the Oval Office on Friday with Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and discussed prospective gun legislation and whether the N.R.A. could provide support for the president as he faces impeachment and a more difficult re-election campaign, according to two people familiar with the meeting. —The New York Times, September 27, 2019

Lenny Lianne is the author of four full-length books of poetry. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Third Wednesday, Southern Poetry Review and other journals and anthologies. She holds a MFA from George Mason University. She's taught poetry workshops on both coasts. Lenny and her husband live in Peoria, Arizona.

GHAZAL

by Judith Terzi

Emmett Till (July 25, 1941 - August 28, 1955)

Heather Heyer (May 29, 1985 - August 12, 2017)

Simeon Wright died 2 years ago. A faithful cousin of Emmett Till.
Heather Heyer's also gone. A victim of hatred like Emmett Till.

Two men shot Emmett, 14, sank him with a fan from a cotton gin.
One man killed Heather with another machine. Like Emmett Till.

Simeon, 12, saw the men point the gun, grab the teen from his bed.
His life spent haunted by the abduction of his cousin, Emmett Till.

Heather followed her conscience. She marched to oppose the rage.
A street for her in Charlottesville. In Chicago, one named Emmett Till.

Heather was murdered while crossing her street not too long ago.
Sixty-four years have passed since the murder of Emmett Till.

Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay Books, 2018) as well as of five chapbooks including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus Press). Her poetry appears widely in literary journals and anthologies, has received nominations for Best of the Net and Web, and has been read on the BBC. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and is a former educator who taught high school French for many years as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

RAGE: TO SPREAD OR PREVAIL UNCHECKED

by Roseann Lloyd

He took umbrage, took offense,
he was quite offended, vexed even—
puckish  peevish  pissed—
aggravated
irritated
frosted yes frosted
in a cold rage
in a snit, a fit, in-
dignant
in short, he’d got a good mad on
made a mountain out of a molehill
made a federal case out of it—
he was on a roll all right
he flew off the handle
popped his cork
flipped his lid—
hopping mad
mad as a wet hen
a mad Hatter
mad as a hornet
boiling mad, ranting and raving
all worked up   all het up
RAGE page 2
puffed up
steamed up
ticked off
hot under the collar
he got his dander up
his nose out of joint
bent out of shape, sore, really sore
out of sorts
contorted with rage
he was blind with rage  snow blind  sand blind
he couldn’t see the woods for the trees
couldn’t see the nose in front of his face
couldn’t tell why they were waving at him


couldn’t tell if they were beckoning him closer
to signal an attack


couldn’t tell if they wave waving the flag of truce
to put an end to hateful rage

Roseann Lloyd has published four collections of her poetry as well as nonfiction.

WOW! HE TWEETS

by Ron Riekki

When he writes “Wow!”
he really means
the opposite of Mom,
the word flipped
upside-down
like families
he’d love to drown.

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

HOW TO REMOVE CONFEDERATE STATUES

by Patty Mosco Holloway





Locate them in Baltimore.
Give no advance notice, little fanfare.
Do it quickly; do it quietly
under cover of darkness
in the wee hours of the morning.
Allow flashing red lights and backup beeps
on heavy equipment.
Hire crews in T-shirts and hardhats.
Use crowbars, cranes, and cargo straps.
Hoist statues whole, bronze tons,
onto flatbed trucks.
Procure police cars to escort statues
out of town at sunrise.
Let the new day's rays
illuminate empty pedestals.

Next?

Find cranes strong enough
to hoist hatred from hearts.

Patty Mosco Holloway is a writing teacher.  She lives in Denver, Colorado. She often "hears" the starts of poems in conversations.  Advice:  Don't talk to her.

I HAVE HAD FRIENDS IN GREAT NUMBERS

by Judy Katz-Levine




There are barbed wire fences in my dreamless nights.
And hands caught in nets, children growing who cannot whirl.
There are torches tonight, and chants to drown saints.
And simple good people who want a steak at lunch, or hummus with a carrot.
I have had friends in great numbers, who watch with prescient eyes
of brown and green and black and gold and hazel  and azure-
The marches of hatred, the chants of those with bludgeons for
Writers, and I am one, journalists, and the films in black and white
Reeling through the avenues where magnolias should bloom,
Where souls are not crushed , because we will not permit it.
Where freedom fighters/writers are ploughed down like deer on the highway
In the nights of barbed wire fences in my dreamless dreams.
Because we will stop it, my friends.
I could tell you, my friends, who will come into my garden of ripening tomatoes, roses.
Who will give me echinacea with pink flowers, who will swim with me in sweet lake water,
And who will read my poetry for 40 years, keeping it a secret until the most crucial moment
That determines a hidden mountain behind the mist of decades.
I have had friends in great numbers, who take me to the ocean, and we have shared
The small rises and falls of our children in laughing texts.  We will not tolerate
We will not accept, these marches from a haunted hunted slaughtering, a genocide past, a genocide that echoes other genocides, and other genocides, and others
To be revived?  Forget it.  We’re here.  We know the score.
The lurid lips of nazi clowns shouting hatred slogans, the mowing down
Of friends?  We will speak/act now, we will stop this insanity.

Judy Katz-Levine is the author of these books: When The Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace, Ocarina,  and When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast.  Her new collection The Everything Saint will be published by WordTEch  in August 2018.  Poems have appeared recently in Kritya (India), Stanzaic Stylings, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, Blue Unicorn, Springhouse Journal, Peacock Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, and many others. Also a jazz flutist, she just played a 3 hour gig at the Farmer's Market in Needham MA.

THE CLOWN CAR

by Kyle Norwood

The clownishness of evil sometimes seems
To parody itself―buffoonish stare,
Garishly painted skin, foam-rubber hair―
Caricatures from circus-haunted dreams:

You’re in the stands and join in the applause;
Here comes the clown car, tiny as a toy,
While speakers blast Beethoven’s Ode to Joy,
But you don’t see how odd that is, because
You’re watching as the little car spits out
Clown after clown, burlesques of vim and pep,
With fake pink smile or red audacious pout.
One pounds a drum; the others dance in step
With flying feet in giant floppy boots.
Some moon the crowd, and some are even cruder,
Insulting us with boorish pantomime.
 (A choir sings Alle menschen werden brüder
Over the speakers, deafeningly loud.)
Looking around, you see that half the crowd            
Are dressed in frilly polka-dotted suits,                      
Hooting and stomping.  Clearly they approve.          
Meanwhile the clown car crew is on the move:  
Some run to block the exits; others climb  
Into the stands; two of them seek you out,
Surround you, grab you, lift you from your spot,
And drag you toward the ring of blinding light.
“Why me?” You cry.  “Why me?  What did I do?”
The folks in normal clothing turn their backs.
Last from the clown car steps a black-and-white-
Faced, bulging-muscled hulk, wielding an ax:
His hate-filled eyes are staring straight at you.

Kyle Norwood is the winner of the 2014 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from Southwest Review. His poems have also recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly, Devilfish Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Lake (U.K.), Light, Right Hand Pointing, and the anthology Poems for a Liminal Age. He lives in Los Angeles, where he earned a doctorate in English at UCLA.

CLOAKED IN CLOUDS

by Meryl Baer

Washington Post, May 17, 2017

The Man seduced the people,
Spilling warped words of wisdom.
The crowd kowtowed to their savior.
They yelled, they screamed
They jumped for joy.
The Man came forth to save them
Roaring Admire me! Adore me!
Love me evermore.
Crushing competence and candor,
The Man proclaims his Word.
The people say:
The Man understands our woes.
He speaks what's really in our hearts
Of hatred, fear and foes.

Meanwhile:
Snakes slither,
Squinting in the light,
Spreading venom.
They grab they stifle
The other, the unfamiliar, the foreign,
The ones abhorring The Man.

I wait, hope, anticipate one morning when
Clouds scatter and
Seeds sprout
Strangling those gnarly, nasty rascals
Unfurling hate and fear.


Meryl Baer is a recovering financial geek now freelance writer and blogger.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT OR BOTH

by Ron Riekki

When we saw the body being dragged down the aisle,
no one was concerned because it was only the fifth body
that day murdered by the flight crew.  The country was over-
booked, just too many people, and so a little genocide never hurt
anyone.  The blood smeared along the floor just meant jobs—
someone has to clean up all the lungs and livers and specks
of the underemployed from the thousand-dollar seat human pipeline
with no food, no movies, nothing but a seat, or part of a seat anyway,
the elbow of the person next to me in my lap, literally, the rest of the person
gone now; I suppose I should discard it, but there’s no garbage cans anymore.
I mean, not even on the ground.  We just litter, everywhere—there is no difference
between a junkyard and a national park.  Who needs difference?  We’re all the same.
We’re all basically from Africa, all of us, especially our President who is making

the American red hat great again.  When I think of our powerful and wise President,
I think of two words: hat & red.  It’s His symbol, our symbol.  Hat red.  The word
makes me feel proud.  I mean words.  Who cares about spelling or grammar anymore?
It’s all about moneymoneymoney.  A corpse these days can fetch you a hundred
           dollars.
To get on the flight, TSA rapes you.  It’s for your own safety.  I know that
when I was raped for my safety, I thanked the man with his perfect English.
He held my penis in his hand and I said thank you for making me not have to worry
about being abused on the flight.  He gave me a little hug, which caught my attention
and told me I had a thirteen-percent chance of living.  He gave me a little tiny package
of pretzels.  It was so small that I needed tweezers.  I just prayed that they didn’t know
I had Middle Eastern on my mother’s side of the family. I mean I prayed
           metaphorically.
I wouldn’t really pray.  I mean not unless I was doing it properly, patriotically, scared.
I mean sacred.  Sacred as hell.


Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Sewanee Writers Series and Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book from the Library of Michigan and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award/Grand Prize shortlist, Midwest Book Award, Foreword Book of the Year, and Next Generation Indie Book Award), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 IPPY/Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes—Best Regional Fiction and Next Generation Indie Book Award—Short Story finalist), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).