INSOMNIA CHRONICLES LIX

by Erin Murphy

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. When I hear contempt, I think contretemps. Instead of raging hatred, I see mild embarrassment, two girls showing up at prom in the same dress. Better yet, contra dance: two lines of partnerless dancers, a caller announcing moves to the beat of fiddles and mandolins. Years ago, a contra dancing club met Mondays in a local barn. Members brought potluck meals they kept warm under tea towels. Or so I imagine. I never went but was intrigued by the small ads in the weekly paper. All welcome, bring a dish. How did we find out about anything back then? No internet, no cell phones. If I were dropped in the middle of 1990, could I find my way home? The past is a foreign country, someone once said. Lately, so is this moment. During the pandemic, one house on our block had a Trust Dr. Fauci banner on the front porch. Across the street, neighbors planted a Fauci is a Liar lawn sign. My friend Joan says it’s everyone’s first time being a person. Most of us are personing the best we can. We try, try, stumble, try. Contra dancers weave in and out of other bodies, wipe brows with damp bandanas, grant grace for missed cues. Look each other in the eye.

Erin Murphy is the author or editor of sixteen books, most recently Swoon: New and Selected Poems (Grayson Books, 2026).

MEDIA SPEAKS

by Patricia Carragon

The internet is a war zone—

violence seizes eyes,

rhetoric bangs on eardrums.

Another report

shoves smoke up nostrils,

cuts vocal cords from 

speaking the truth.

The zombie apocalypse

handcuffed to take sides.

 

Justice walks

amid bombed-out cities, 

wears bandages and blood

of innocent minds—

limps on crutches,

unshielded—

determined

to breathe life back 

into the walking dead.

 

Finds Peace

trapped in the rubble—

its tattered feathers 

drip in blood and ash.

Inside its beak,

a scorched branch

of an unlived tree—

two leaves

still intact.

Patricia Carragon’s recent publications include Dreams in Hiding Anthology, Fixed and Free Quarterly, Jerry Jazz Musician, Out Loud, an LGBTQA Literary Arts Anthology (Red or Green Books), Soup Can Magazine, The Scene, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Anthology, When Women Speak Poetry Anthology, Vol. 1, Witchery, et al. Her debut novel is Angel Fire (Alien Buddha Press). Her books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku and The Cupcake Chronicles. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. 

THE TURTLE GAME

by Susan Terris

Kira Rudyk

In Ukraine, Kira Rudyk—member of Parliament—told

Wolf Blitzer on CNN, she has just been trained to use

a Kalashnikov rifle to help defend her city of Kyiv.

Our women, she said, will protect the soil same as our men.

Then she mentioned her young daughter. Instead of

trying to explain if/when/how/why Russians invade,

she teaches her child to play the game. If you know 

an attack’s imminent, you lie on your belly in the safest 

place that’s near. Hands on your ears, mouth open, 

 

so then you’re a turtle. It’s a don’t move/lie next to me/

pretend thing. As I watched, listened, tears slid down

my cheeks, and I thought for a moment that Kira was

the mother of my grandchildren, protecting them

with a Russian rifle and a game learned on the internet.

Susan Terris is a freelance editor and the author of 7 books of poetry, 17 chapbooks, 3 artist's books, and 2 plays.  Journals include The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, and Ploughshares. Poems of hers  have appeared in Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Ms. Terris is editor emerita of Spillway Magazine and a poetry editor at Pedestal.

ANGEL

by Alejandro Escudé

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022. Above: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas (three panels), 30 7/8 × 45 3/4 in. (78.4 × 116.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary 80.32. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the flag painting the flag

goes and is going into the flag

and it takes us with it

the flag that is into the flag 

beyond what we do when

we surf the net, as a nation

we’re a flag entering another flag

and a flag after that one. 

Jasper Johns knows this, 

or does he? You mustn’t ask

him you know. The interpretation

lags behind the artwork always

like a little girl struggling to keep up

with her father who is walking

too fast for her keep up 

but is she really unable to keep up?

The truth is leaving us, and you,

and taking a train to a new epoch

where a train will travel into

another train and another train

after that toward a sunset

that sets within a sunset and 

(you guessed it) another sunset

after that—because it was

Warhol who engineered the first

internet, an ad box for Brillo

that became box after box

after box. So Johns does too

with his flag and other things,

which is what a country is

…things.

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.

FLASH NEWS

by Angelica Whitehorne

I heard there was a time when the news was dropped off at your front door, tightly wrapped like a present of sorts and printed with dark black importance on the backs of dead trees, your unrolling of the world’s enrichment, the first sacrifice of your morning, right after sleeping, the last sacrifice of night and right before your first ritualistic kitchen devour. And I imagine how these readers of past would go to find a place, probably the same place as last week, and flap open the butterfly wings of the newspaper, nonchalantly hungry for the best worked happenings, so they could go into the talks of their day feeling primed, well read, and ready, aficionado on stock prices, lost dogs, drug scandals. And how sweet it must have been to read the typing of the world, curated and succinct. And even more how sublime it must have been to have it all end, to put the paper down and be done with it, close your shades to society and its grimy violence, back deals, syrupy success stories, headlines of hazard. To go about your day untethered to it—now the news envelops us always. I open the app to see my friend’s faces and there it is, news of a baby falling from a 12-story building. I scroll to my home screen and Apple positions all the world’s affairs in front of my eyes, and it is like lightning across the window of my phone, who could manage to look away? Our world is like a car crash, no like a highway pile up, and all these news sites are like watching the fenders collide into each other over and over again. The notifications announce themselves to me this midday and I see that another story of nature’s revenge, hurricane or tsunami or landslide has come, I slide the message away, but I do not turn them off. Turning them off would be like turning away from the awful. I grow guilty whenever I do not hold the tragedy of these stories second hand, continual consumption seems the least I can do. Me and my entire generation have lost our ability to put the paper down, and so we read from morning to night and roll it all over a second time in our dreams, almost as penance for the bad news not having our name in it. 

Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.

POWER OUTAGE

by Laura Rodley

No Covid here, just sleeping dog, sleeping cat,
no Covid here, doorknobs wiped off, laundry dry,
no Covid here, breeze courting sparrows and wrens,

no Covid here, the leaves of the maples turn it away,
no Covid here, the mice at the gates chew it away,
no Covid here, sparrows, rose breasted grosbeaks peck at its crumbs,

no Covid here, tomato plants flowering, lettuce plumping,
no Covid here, sleeping dog, sleeping cat, popsicles,
no Covid here, last night power outage, lightning bugs for lamps,

no Covid here, the chipmunks carry it away in fat cheeks,
no Covid here, porcupines shake their quills at it,
no Covid here, table umbrella up, providing shade,

no Covid here, alcohol preps in front hallway,
no Covid here, doorknobs wiped off, floors vacuumed,
no Covid here, front line Jim took navy shower, conserving water,

no Covid here, clothes off, decontaminated,
no Covid here, hands washed, twenty seconds, length of a long sigh,
no Covid here, watermelons holding onto their flowers,

no Covid here, only the clock ticked, told time, trembled,
no Covid here, candles on the table, matches, no flushing toilets,
no Covid here, lightning bugs gathered on screens, blinking,

no Covid here, neighbors wear no masks walking,
no Covid here, they say they had it, but could not get tested,
no Covid here, they say they can’t get the antibody test either,

no Covid here, antibody test hard to get, they work at home,
no Covid here, no internet, no wireless lightning bugs beating,
no Covid here, the fox carries away all corpses.

No Covid here, garter snakes keep guard in the garden,
no Covid here, maple tree leaves wave it along its way,
no Covid here, the grounds area guarded by field mice,

no Covid here, grass covered with spent dandelions, comfrey,
no Covid here, pathway into forest deep and long, but it ends.
No Covid here, sonic boom of jets propel it away,

no Covid here, rock and roll radio, oldies station,
no Covid here, new grass won’t allow it, nor the chipmunks.


Laura Rodley is a Pushcart Prize Winner. Her most recent books are Turn Left at Normal (Big Table Publishing) and Counter Point (Prolific Press).

EASTER PASSION AS NOTRE-DAME COLLAPSES

by Earl J Wilcox





In my town today, construction workers
digging in red clay clipped cable lines
to thousands of homes causing early
morning mayhem—no computer
access, cable news, email, stock market,
baseball scores, weekly NEW YORKER—
civilization as we know it. They say, I
learned many hours later, the fire began
in the spire while all morning I fumed
and fiddled the hours away by cleaning
listening to old CDs, feeding humming birds,
washed/dried/folded three loads of
laundry, walked for 35 minutes—all
before noon as the Cathedral burned.
Early afternoon, as the fire spread
and panic roared in Paris, I napped,
after eating a spare lunch of boiled
cabbage, lima beans and a small meat
patty, walked again, vacuumed,
angrily and with petty vengeance
sprayed carpet bees buzzing my
pergola, watered an Easter Lily,
began the first of several classic opera
CDs, strolled to the street to fetch junk
mail, texted family and friends,
(none mentioned a great fire!)
as Parisians panicked in peril, prayed
for God’s intervention here in Holy Week.
In my passion, I ignorantly enjoyed our
Magnificent Spring sunshine, took
Images of my majestic azaleas, wondering
how a pilgrim feels spending April in Paris.


Earl J Wilcox is regular contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

THE FIELD, SOMETHING BORES INTO IT

by Alejandro Escudé

Cover of the 2007 Washington Life feature on the Russian diplomatic compound in Maryland.

The columns are grandiose on the Maryland estate.
Green, greener, and inside, a more Russian Russia,
clean as Vodka, cleaner, and by right, legal. So,
in dark suits, dense cologne, diplomats walk over
‘welcome home’ mats to leave, ousted. The intelligence
apparatus hides in a piece of cake, a delicious cake too.
Something stalks the field, something bores into it,
a veiled screw, a bullet hole in the back but no blood,
a bloodless hole, that is the internet, a leak-less leak.

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.

HOUSE CLEANING REQUIRED

by Howard Winn

They lifted up the corner of the Internet carpet
and exposed the filthiness and rat droppings
as well as ordinary dirt of life that is
part of the way in which some people live
and think and lie when truth and cleanliness
is uncomfortable for the mucky minds
who dream up the details of a life which
enriches them despite the facts of science
which gets in the way of what they want
to believe when that knowledge is inconvenient
as well as what they want the gullible to
think is the truth when it is really just a
pile of dirt mixed with mouse droppings.

Howard Winn's work has been published in Dalhousie Review, Galway Review, Descant. Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, and Blueline. His latest work is Acropolis, a novel published by Propertius Press. He is Professor of English at SUNY-Dutchess.

BUDDHA HAD IT EASY

by Michael Mark

The Bergin University of Canine Studies Puppy Cam

It was so much easier
to become enlightened then.

They didn’t have the
Puppy Cam to deal with.

Buddha could spend all day under
the Bodhi tree with no thought
of puppies wiggling and
tumbling.

So cute.

Puppies sleeping in piles.
Puppies waking up.
Puppies blindly crawling
over each other to get food.

Each move updated in
real time,
to your phone, iPad, laptop
right to your HDTV!

Puppies peeing.
Puppies’ eyes opening.
Puppies barking and
scaring themselves.
So cute.
Puppies being licked
clean by mom.

That’s how he was
able to concentrate with
such precision, for so long.

Cobras encircled Buddha.
Elephants charged him.
Mara sent his sexy daughters
to be his concubines.
He didn’t blink.

But Buddha didn’t have
the Puppy Cam.


Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer and long distance walker – his latest journey was the Camino De Santiago. His poetry has appeared or is set to appear in Angle Journal, Awakening Consciousness Magazine, Empty Mirror, Everyday Poets, Forge Journal, OutsideIn Magazine, Petrichor Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, Ray’s Road Review, Scapegoat Journal, Spillway, Red Booth Review, Red Paint Hill, Sleet Magazine, The Thing Itself, The New York Times, UPAYA, Word Soup End Hunger, Wayfarer and other nice places.

REPORTING IN FROM THE SKY

by Kristina England





Last night, I forced myself into slumber
as a nine alarm fire left my State in grief,
two Boston firemen perishing in the ashes.
Now, sky-based for five hours,
I click the internet icon on my phone
receive no connection.
Too cheap to pay for inflight service,
I know nothing of the ground,
of my family, my country,
only of what I see -
the periwinkle sky,
my unfinished seltzer,
aircrew maneuvering the aisle,
and my travel buddy, one Deb Fisher,
her head tilted to the right,
arms crossed,
the soft breath of sleep
moving her forward in time.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, The New Verse News, The Story Shack, The Quotable, and other magazines. Her first collection of short stories will be published in the 2014 Poet's Haven Author Series.

SHALL WE OVERCOME?

Poem by Charles Frederickson

Graphic by Saknarin Chinayote 

In imperfect practice of tolerance
Perceived enemy is best teacher
Learning unity in spite of
Differences not unity without differences

Unable to end bullyrag phobias
At least we can make
Our bluish dysfunctional planet safer
Saner haven for future generations

America has become the most
Pluralistic nation on soiled earth
All men are created equal
Transplanted with major minority exceptions

Bringing together Christian Jew Muslim
Cavalierly excluding Hindu Sikh Buddhist
Taoist Jain Zoroastrian Wicca Atheist
Agnostic perverts damned to Hell

Let us not just tolerate
One another striving to create
Interconnected www.com  cordless spinning globe
Without borders rotating counter clockwise

Our common cause inclusive aims
Should confront ignorance with wisdom
Bigotry with tolerance vowing racism
Can will must be overcome

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .