MAGA SAGA... OR PROJECT 2025 CONTRIVED

by Gilbert Allen

Cartoon by Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune, UT

Fear queers.

Ban trans.

Hire liars.

Bring on Elon!

Pardon felons.

ICE raids

housemaids

nurse aides.

Prez sez

"I buy

Gaza Plaza!

Bombshell hotel!

Max tax

Canuck crooks!

Vex Mex!

They pay

duty booty!

Hate great!

True Blue?
Screw you.

Gilbert Allen has tried to live True Blue in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, since 1977. For more information about him and his work, check out the interview here.

ANITA BRYANT’S LAST CHRISTMAS WISH

by Chad Parenteau

The problem with wishes 

is that anyone can make them.

On her last day alive, she 

proclaims, I want the world

to become an orange, with skin

so hard nobody can access its

golden treasures by way of bit, 

blade or begging. A hard swallow.

She continues. But before that, 

a pie! I want a pie to strike 

this nation with a crust of fire

and a filling of ice. And every

child of God who ever stopped 

calling or writing their righteous

mothers will finally feel shame

we could never teach. 

A final gasp. And let my last

words before joining an eternal

choir of praise in paradise 

be a whisper in God’s ear, 

a show of appreciation and 

word of advice to His design.

With that, her soul departs so fast

it would have knocked Jesus’ 

family aside on their way to Egypt.

Then in the morning, from 

Christmas to New Year’s and

beyond, the grave dancers guild

develops restless leg syndrome,

kicking under tables and blankets,

unaware they’re missing their number.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston’s long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Crossroads, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and The Ugly Monster. He has also been published in anthologies such as French Connections, Sounds of Wind, Reimagine America, and The Vagabond Lunar Collection. His newest collections are All's Well Isn't You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives and works in Boston.

WINTER FRUIT

"Empire" star Jussie Smollett was hospitalized after “a possible racially charged” and homophobic assault and battery, Chief Anthony Guglielmi of the Chicago Police Department said in a statement Tuesday. —USA Today, January 29, 2019

James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .

REMEMBERING NICOLAI

by Bob Stanley

Stock vintage photo.

I didn’t forget about the old photo of Nicolai,
or what grandpa said about him,
that tears came easily to his eyes,
and that his oils of snow-capped mountains,
with rivers running behind blue pine trees sold well.
Grandpa told me Nicolai loved men instead of women: he always did.
The Nazis had taken him one evening
as he was going out dressed for the theater,
dressed in a long black coat and fedora.
They took him to camp Mauthausen,
robed him in striped pajamas and gave him a pink triangle for a name.
At the end of the war,
the allies liberated the camp,
but Nicolai was found naked and dead,
nothing left of him but a winter’s husk and dead raven’s eyes.

I often wonder looking back,
if Nicolai and the men he loved
were as happy as the men I saw dancing,
on the paper mache float in the Gay Pride parade:
with their asses exposed in black leather chaps,
red jock straps, green feathered boas, lipstick and heels
and sun-tanned smiles?

Grandpa died last week.

So now, looking at this old photo
of Nicolai and Grandpa at the beach as young men
I’m left to wonder
how I shall pour out what is left of my life.


Bob Stanley lives in Pickerington Ohio and works for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles as a civil servant. Personal heroes include brother Joey, brave companion in the fiery walk of the family past and what is to come, and his late mother Lillian who demonstrated both the healing and destructive power of imagination, and his father Jack who instilled the value of hard work.  Bob is currently working on his first novel and his first collection of poetry.  Bob likes to remind people that Franz Kafka and Herman Melville were also civil servants.

A NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING

by Mary Saracino

Poster by JessicaSabogal for We the People which will flood Washington, DC with NEW symbols of hope on January 20. You can download the set of posters for free at http://bit.ly/wtpdownloads.

I will wear black on January 20
a national day of mourning
while the collective soul of America
lets loose a dirge as an illegitimate president
takes the oath of office
his place secured in history
by fake news, voter suppression
the deception of a foreign dictator
and his own brand of white supremacy
spewed from his bully pulpit of
racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia
and every other kind of –ism the world has ever witnessed

On the next day the women of the world will don
pink pussy hats, take to the streets in cities far and wide
to march in protest, defying the fake king, the tyrant
in the Oval Office
reclaiming their vulva power,  the power to
procreate truth, to name evil, to smash
the glass ceiling of lies that tries to silence us

Mary Saracino is a novelist, poet, and memoir writer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her most recent novel is Heretics: A Love Story (Pearlsong Press 2014). Her novel, The Singing of Swans (Pearlsong Press 2006) was a 2007 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist. Mary’s short story, "Vicky's Secret," earned the 2007 Glass Woman Prize.

WINTER STARS

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Winter Sky Rising by Alan Dyer at The Amazing Sky

Stepping outside
To watch the winter stars
Those dazzling divas of illumination
Perform their seasonal pageant
In the infinite amphitheater
Of the cold black sky
I can almost hear the old Earth
Creak on its axis
As it rolls toward another new year.

There have been better years
Than the one just past
When for one thing
The medicos found cancer in me
And had to carve it out
And radiate the environs
To prevent a recurrence.
So far that's worked.
For another, my country
By hook and crook
Selected a new president
Of such surpassing vulgarity and venality
Of such mendacity and bigotry and corruption
As to alarm all people of good will
And those most vulnerable to the predations
Of the greedy and powerful
Of racists and misogynists
Of xenophobes and homophobes
Affirmed and emboldened
By this man's ascension to power.
There is widespread concern
That a kind of civic and social malignancy
Is gnawing away at the body politic
And people all over the land
Are struggling to determine
What treatments will work best.
The prognosis is uncertain
And fatalism seems most apt.

But I remind myself that last year at this time

I was not at all sure
I would make it to now
Yet here I am
Pulsing with life and good health
Bundled up on a cold bright winter night
Shivering happily under the stars.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday and others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

EGG RACE

by Devon Balwit

Image by Melodi2 via Answer Angels.

I write hate crime, mass shooting, extremist,
target, victim, second amendment, make
my students copy and pronounce, make
them lift their heads from their phones
and listen, all of us awkward, the ones
fasting for Ramadan, the ones who may
be gay, the ones who, secretly, do not care,
Orlando a place they’ve never heard of
in a country they barely know; they want
my language, not my history, and this lesson,
they can do without, my fumbling to do
justice to horror, while balancing the fragile
egg of blame in my tiny spoon, trying to dash
to the finish without letting it fall, homophobia,
intolerance, assault rifles, class ends and
I’ve taught something; none of us sure what.

Devon Balwit is a writer and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest.  Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News twice before. Her recent work has appeared or will soon in The Fog Machine, The Cape Rock, The Fem, Of(f) Course, drylandlit_press, and The Prick of the Spindle.