INAUGURATION DAY 2025, THE PELICANS ARRIVE

by Catherine Arra

White grace floats the lake, rippling in icy torrents

of another Trump tirade.

 

A stopover in migration, a congregation

of reacquaintance-feeding-reuniting in purpose.

 

They paddle in silent choreography, know nothing

of deportations, hate-vengeance-greed.

 

Know to stay clear of marsh grass, where alligators

nest-hunt-eat more than needed.

 

Their long-bowed faces remember loss—how easy

to destroy a nest than to build one.

 

They glide into flight formation. Broad webbed feet

flapflapflap in domino percussion.

 

Snowy wings underscore the black of mourning.

They fly away. 

Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter, when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. She is the author of four full-length collections and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in Unleash Lit., Eclectica Magazine, LitBreak Magazine, Poem Alone, and The Ekphrastic Review.

SOMETHING ABOUT WOLVES IN LOUISVILLE

by W. Barrett Munn

They hunt

as if they were four wolves,

a pack in pursuit of its prey.

When found they surround.

Fearsome, they isolate the young, the weak.

The black

night of the deserted moon masks

their padded steps but rapid hearts

and adrenal sweat unmasks

their stealth intent.

In silence they surround.

Less silent comes their rush:

Sudden. Sure.

They come as one

faceless, nameless, savage fury

until prey can only hope

survival of encounter

but this prey never had a chance:

judged and juried,

justified the pack brings down

its game, misguided hunger quelled.

In silence they survive

the questions; they

close the open net

no game escapes

no mistakes as

the righteousness of nature

nestles close.

Silence is a necessity

voices turn blue ischemic,

black and whites become necrotic.

But the smell won't fade in silence.

Stench always has a cost.

Silence as a weapon is

too weak when conscience speaks

too weak and unreliable when

other hunters—larger,

more powerful—

lay down their open traps.

W. Barrett Munn lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His poems have appeared in Copperfield Review Quarterly, Volney Road Review, Speckled Trout Review, and The Asses of Parnassus. He is a graduate of The Institute of Children's Literature where he studied under Larry Callen.

WHAT KIND OF BIRD

an erasure poem by James Penha derived from 
"You Thought Modern Life Was Bad. This Neanderthal Child Was Eaten By a Giant Bird" at Smithsonian.com 

“About 115,000 years ago in what is now present-day Poland, a large bird ate a child. As Laura Geggel at LiveScience reports, it’s not known whether the bird killed the Neanderthal child or happened upon its body and scavenged its remains, but two tiny finger bones found by paleontologists tell a gruesome tale, all the same.” —Smithsonian.com, October 11, 2018. Image by PAP/Jacek Bednarczyk.

“Trump says he is considering a new family separation policy at U.S.-Mexico border.”

—The Washington Post, October 13, 2018

The lingering question is what kind
of bird could attack and eat a human child?

Researchers don’t address the topic,
but the record shows
other instances of hominin children becoming
bird food. . . .

When you dig into it,
there’s actually somewhat of a rich history of hunters
gobbling up children.

Even today, there are occasional reports.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .

HELL IS PUNGENT WITH GUNS

(My Neighbor Calls Gun Owners ‘Beelzeguns,’ 

Says They Call Themselves ‘Gun Nuts’ 

Because Otherwise They Don’t Have Any Balls)

Graphic from Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

by Ron Riekki


There have been two killed and twenty injured
by gun violence in the U.S. since Parkland.*
The melting pot is melting because of climate
change and the heat of being ambushed by
a blizzard of shrapnel. I taught a course on gun
violence and near the halfway point a student’s

girlfriend was shot and killed on campus. Life
used to stand until a Loaded Gun carried me
away to my graveyard shift where I don’t teach
anymore, sunk into the valley of security,
unarmed security, where I’m paid to stay awake
and at night, in the mountains of dark I remember

a kid telling me during that class that he used to take
his gun and shoot it at the lake at his parents’ camp,
December, Alabama, trying to make the bullets
skip. I asked him if he thought he might have
killed someone by mistake doing that and he told
me, Nah, no one was around for miles. There’ve

been more than two killed, more than twenty injured
now since.* Since. In Detroit, I remember a moment
on the street where someone commented on
another person’s visible bullet-hole scar.  He
lifted up his shirt to reveal more and then a bunch
of those nearby started sharing their bullet holes,

pant legs rolled up, shirts off, the drinking
of wounds. In Virginia, I delivered a Feast Pizza
to a trailer where the guy sat on his historical sofa
holding an old shotgun pointed at my college chest.
I asked what the hell he was doing and he said,
I just wanted to see your reaction. His girl-

friend told him to put the gun down,
but he didn’t. When I got back to the Dominos,
one of the other drivers asked, Did he do it to you?
He likes to do that to everyone who delivers there.
A cop told me about a kid who got shot in the eye
and the bullet ricocheted and came out the other eye.

During EMT class, the instructor asked if any
of us had been shot and one of the students
raised his hand; he’d shot himself by mistake,
cleaning his gun. The instructor told us a story
of how he got shot by a kid when he was doing CPR
on a rival gang member that they didn’t want saved.

By a kid, I mean a child. By a child, I mean that we
are drowning in the shallow end. After school shootings,
gun sales go up. I mean, throw up. As in puke. “It’s too
soon to talk about gun control.”  Hell, it’s too late.
Graffiti by my apartment says, What You Rape
Is What You Sewer with an AR-15 policed underneath,

plastered to the wall, pulverized to the wall in onyx
paint. Two times in my life, when talking about gun
control, I’ve had a person reach over and pull a gun out
of nowhere. Anti-magic. One was under a couch.
Another in a purse. As if guns were cigarettes.
As if guns were TV channels. As if the guy who lived

across from me in Chicago wasn’t shot and killed
in his apartment. My favorite superheroes never
use a gun. That’s for villains. Batarangs and bat-darts—
sure, but I always prefer those who simply outsmart, whose
sheer intelligence comes out. The opposite of those
who cure guns with guns, who stop choking by choking

more. The king of choking. We elected the king
of choking. Chos—a Persian word for fart.  The NRA chos-
king. A rump . . . Real hunters use bow-and-arrow. They bow
before the flesh and honor the animal by using every
body part, not sitting next to an elephant, leaning
against its belly with the gun in his crotch. Cowards.


*Accurate as of February 21, 2018. The numbers have enlarged since then.


Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).

TROPHY HUNT

by Pepper Trail

Image source: The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant, what man
Not driven by hunger
Not confronted by your bulk, your tusks
Not defending his house or farm

Knowing what we know
Of your vast and furrowed memory
Of your lines of mothers and aunts
Of the slaughter pursuing you across the continent

What man
Thinking of you, elephant
Your dignity, your utter majesty in this world
Thinks of killing

Travels thousands of miles
Spends a useless fortune
Is led to you, elephant, quiet in your life
Asks for the heavy gun, and shoots

What man
Cuts the tail from your great body
Poses for the pictures, fills out the forms
Flies satisfied away

Leaving an erasure in the map of Africa
Your circuit of waterholes, lost
The hiding-place of your family bones
The silent harmony of your song, sung through the earth

What man
Consults the record books
For spread of ego, weight of pride
Fills a trophy-room with ignorance
Elephant, what beast?

Pepper Trail is a conservation biologist, poet, and photographer living in Ashland, Oregon.  His poems have appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Pedestal, and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards.  He has long been involved in efforts to protect wildlife and wild places.  His collection Cascade-Siskiyou, a cycle of poems about Oregon's Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument (currently under threat by the T***p Administration), was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

BUT IN BATON ROUGE

by John Dooley

The figure of a large
unarmed middle-aged black
skinned man drowns in a fog
of gun smoke and his own blood,
beneath two badged blue-uniformed
policemen holding guns with triggers
completely pulled, magazines empty.

An eight point buck hangs head down,
feet tethered to a large oak,
reminds me of a thing of beauty,
desiccated, emasculated, wasted, bled,
hung out to dry for the glory
of the commemorative photo;
great white hunters stand
proudly in solidarity nearby.

But in Baton Rouge, the red stick,
there are no antlers, no ruminants,
no prosecutors, and no meat lockers.
The conviction rate for law enforcement
officers murdering black men is .01%
from all white juries. Although black
skinned persons comprise less than 25%
of the population, they comprise 100%
of all officer-related murders in Baton Rouge.
Flagrant fragrance, flat line, no scents at all,
no rhyme or reason, a dead fall.

John Dooley lives in the national forest near Prescott, Arizona, teaches in the Masters in Counseling Psychology program at Prescott College, and advocates for peace.

THE WILD UNGULATES OF TUSCANY,or ELECTION 2016

by Sherry Stuart-Berman

                                        

Wild boar going into the forest at dusk to forage for food in Chianti, Italy. Credit Nadia Shira Cohen for The New York Times, March 7, 2016.

                                                                     
The Baron says: We need a wall.
Hordes of voracious wild boars
and roe deer suck
our sugary grapes, they forage
our oak and chestnut woods;
there are car accidents, huge holes
in the ground, we can’t harvest
our wine, we’re at war.

For years the hunters
preferred to unleash the dogs,
lure the swine with loaves
of bread and corn, then shoot em’.

But as you can see, folks, that’s not working.
We need steel posts, gas-fueled cannons,
electric wires, and machines to emit
high-pitched frequencies
only animals can hear.
Let’s make Chianti great again!


Sherry Stuart-Berman is a social worker and therapist working in community mental health.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Earth’s Daughters, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Fifth Review, Atticus Review, Knot Magazine, and the anthologies, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai, 2 Horatio, and Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books. She lives in New York with her husband and son.

MANHUNT

by George Held

A note with a caption "Have a nice day" left on an opening in a pipe by two inmates who escaped Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. (Source: New York Governor's Office)

Why do you always secretly root for the hunted?
Is it American love for the underdog,
your persecution complex, paranoia?

You feel sorry for the hunters, embedded
in uniforms and armed to the teeth
but terrified of ambush or sniper.

Why do you hope that the canniness
of the fox will outwit the nose of bloodhounds
and elude the mechanics and strategy          

of the men encased in uniforms
as they march strung out across a cornfield
in PA or file along a dry creek bed in CA?

You hear the experts on TV call the hunted
“psychopaths” and smugly speculate on whether
they’ll be brought to earth by the hunters

or by their twisted selves. It’s best if they
die in a televised shootout, to save the state
money for a trial and stem viewer sympathy.

And as the camera pans in on the front yard
you feel the sense of doom when the hunted
strolls through the gate in that picket fence

and lives are about to change forever …


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.