MR. MURDAUGH’S RECIPE: SIFT AND STIR SLOWLY

by Earl J Wilcox

Up close, Alex’s savoir faire

Kicks in—winsome smile, hair

To die for, smart sentence syntax, 

Precise mixture of faux nasal drip

And eye moisture to churn a jury,

Capture the AI red bulb of a robotic

Camera feed for TV’s ripe audience.

Two Kleenex tissues, Perry Mason

plot to sway one juror’s heart.

 

 

Earl Wilcox writes from South Carolina, where Mr. Murdaugh is on trial. The news from the low country is riveting.

JOHNNY DEPP WINS, AND I, LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, THINK OF THE MAN WHO ABUSED ME

by Emma Rhodes

I’m in a courtroom with him in my dreams.

Years live, tangible and growing inside of me.

Stench rotting from the inside out makes me gag, and

the judge thinks I drink and doesn’t believe a word I say.

 

As things rot, their appearance, smell, stories change. 

Leave something to fester long enough it becomes absence, 

memories warp but sickness remains. 

 

We beg you to believe our guts even when they stink.

 

There is a constant drip on the windshield of this car. The evidence is shown 

through the screen so it’s water-warped & memory-warped & 

dream-warped but he doesn’t deny a thing

 

The jury appreciates his honesty, his charm. 

 

Court takes a break. He says we need to play laser-tag—the judge said so. 

That can’t be true and yet suddenly I’m shot by light from all angles, 

put me under a spotlight and call me a liar.

 

The water continues to drip on the windshield.

 

They tell me I had the means to get out. Look at me now. Just drive away they say. Just drive away if it was so bad why didn’t you leave but facing the other wall is a boot on the wheel and I am stuck in his bed, his bathtub, pacing the one single hallway while he left in a car to see 

 

his parents (who are so proud of him, by the way. He was always a great boy.)

 

And Taylor Swift hasn’t said anything this time, none of the #MeToo baddies have spoken.

The water on the windshield breaks through and shatters. 

Glass shards in the courtroom. Everyone yells 

 

“violence!”

 

And I am left. Picking up one shard after another. He walks by, stomps on a shard so it crumbles into a million more (another inconsistency), says 

 

“thanks for keeping me around.”

 

I’ll stop writing about violence when I stop seeing it. 

I’ll stop writing about violence when the world stops trying to kill its women.  

Emma Rhodes is an emerging Queer writer currently living on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people. Her work has been published in places such as Prism International, Plenitude, Riddle Fence, and elsewhere.

DUNCAN AND BRADY

by Julian O. Long

after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict

 

Speaking of ’lectric cars,

once at a Fort Worth stop sign

a lowrider lifted a fender

like a dog might lift his leg to piss

and flipped me the bird as he took off

laughing around the corner.

That was long ago, but he knew what

he meant—and he loved it.

 

As the uptight white boy I was

in those days, I may have deserved

his contempt. These days I’d like

to blow him a kiss on the wind he stirred,

as he spun out that souped-up Chevy.

Would it were so, amigo,

would it were so.

 

Staggerlee remembers Xmas

but King Brady, he lies dead

and the ghost of old St. Louie

flew past my naked bed

when the rage for George Floyd started

up and down my street,

and the high-tailed carriages

came and went all night

breaking in the windows

knocking down the door

startling me in bed on the second floor... 

 

Busy now, containing Russia,

smug in my alabaster pink

pragmatism, I rejoiced in my country’s

apparent arrested decline. Cop who murdered

Floyd will go to jail, I thought. We threw out

the bastards who stormed the Capitol, I said—

forgetting only too eagerly

Republicans’ settled intention

to lynch the rest of us, La Migra still

lording it up at the border, catching runaways

jury finding Rittenhouse ‘not guilty on all counts.’

 

Nothin’ for it but the blues?

James Baldwin’s Staggerlee let pent up anger, blues remade,

hiss out of him like rancid air from some hack’s

rubber tire.

 

Seem like King Brady never died,

Duncan shot him,

doctor found him dead

but he just raised his hammy fist, took that doctor by the throat

and growled, “Sumbitch, you know I cain’t be killed!”

 

We’ll not overcome this last lynch mob—they’re us;

we’ll watch polite and passive as the Good Old US steals

away down Dixie one last time; no matter clawhammer steels

 

ring out from edges of fields

to tell it again

how we’ve all of us been—

 

yeah, we’ve been on the job

too long... 

Julian O. Long is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. His poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

DARK WOOD

by Mark Williams

So there I am in the jury box. Voir dire,
the judge calls it, which means speak the truth,
as in don’t and you’re in big trouble. “Have you had
any past acquaintance with either the prosecutor,
the defense attorney, or the defendant?” His Honor asks me.
I no sooner say, “No,” than the prosecutor says,
“May I approach the bench, your Honor?”
and His Honor wiggles his finger as in yes, and make it snappy,
so the prosecutor stands and approaches His Honor.
With their eyes on me, they exchange a few words
before the prosecutor steps to the box and asks,
“Do you have a beagle named Keeper?” Since I do
have a beagle named Keeper, and I speak the truth,
I say, “Yes.” Then he says, “Do you remember
the time you were walking on the levee,
and Keeper and another beagle picked up a deer scent,
and you and the beagle’s owner spent three hours
searching the woods for your dogs?” And now I realize
the other beagle’s owner is asking me these questions,
and my chances of being squeezed from the box are high.
Sure enough, “You’re excused,” says His Honor.

But in the upcoming case of

                       The Truth
                              v.
       The President of the United States

the majority of Senatorial jurors have demonstrated
they are no more capable of speaking the truth
than Keeper is capable of ignoring a deer scent. Not only that,
the majority of jurors are acquainted with the defendant
in the sense that Barnacle Boy, The Dirty Bubble,
and Man Ray were acquainted with each other
as members of EVIL (Every Villain is Lemons)
in Season 3 of SpongeBob SquarePants.
But with no provisions in place
to squeeze our Lemons from the box,
it is we who are lost within a dark wood,
with no hope, until November,
to get out.

Mark Williams lives Evansville, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, and The American Journal of Poetry. His fiction has appeared in Drunk Monkeys and the anthologies American Fiction and The Boom Project. In response to the current administration, his poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Tuck Magazine, and Writers Resist.

THE PRISONS

by Howard Winn

Image source: Credit Family Caregiver Alliance via WVTF

are full of old men serving time.
What to do about them
has become a penitent issue.
The punishment of young men,
or middle-aged men
has become
what do the frail and sick
criminals deserve as they age.
Eternal puritan punishment,
handcuffed to hospital beds,
tied to oxygen tubes to the nose
until death do them part?
Was that the original decision
of judge and jury?
Give them walkers for the exercise yard?
Attach them to dialysis until dead?

Most recently Howard Winn had poems and fiction published in The Dalhousie Review, Descant (Canada), Cactus Heart, Main Street Rag, Caduceus, Burning Word,  Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Southern Humanities Review, Cutting Edgz andBorderlands. His B. A. is from Vassar College. His graduate degree is from the Writing Program at Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at New York University. He is a State University of New York faculty member.

WHAT MATTERS MOST

by Gil Hoy

'The OJ Simpson murder trial became a symbol of all that was wrong with America: a legal system that could be manipulated and bought; allegations of police racism and planted evidence, dividing the nation by colour. Simpson become an unlikely folk hero to many and the "Trial of the Century" became a media circus. When the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, Kim [Goldman, victim Ron Goldman's sister] recalls: "I couldn't breathe. I couldn't hold myself up.”'  --The Express (UK) June 7, 2014

Ideology aside, in
the real world of
touch and feel---
being OJ matters,

while innocence and
guilt mean something,
OJ ish ness closes
the deal--- whether                    
he did it or not.

As a neuron-wired
knee jerk fancy
ad sells you a
crappy product,

a sweet-talking
harmonica mouthpiece
more than suffices.

May take eleven months
of attorney bills, but
better that than the two
short weeks it takes the
Court to send those

other poor jokers off for
death by injection of sour
drugs---no choking or
squirming for 25 minutes.

So when the glove don't
fit, you must acquit

I'm so sick and tired of
seeing that disgusting
smile on re-runs after
the jury came back

I could spit my guts out.

But every poor slob
should have one of those
silver-tongued bought
lying serpents---we'd save
a lot in prison costs.

Hell, the almighty dollar
even sells you a pet
rock---a pet what?
imagine that, a pet rock.

you don't have to
feed, clothe or
bathe it,

but you can't even
take the silly furless
little thing to work
with you for any
meaningful company,

not exactly prototypical
Aristotelian natural wealth.

Pet rocks even
make that glittering
fools' gold look good
by comparison---

the emperor's new
clothes on stilts,

just the best wool
wig pulled over
the peepers that's
out there.


Gil Hoy received a B.A in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Gil also is an elected member of the Brookline, MA Democratic Town Committee, and served as a Brookline, MA Selectman for 12 years. Gil studied poetry at Boston University, and started writing his own poetry in February of this year. His first poem “When Doctor Death Calls” was published in Volume #47 of Soul Fountain. “An Unjust Law” and “When Gandhi Lay Dying” were published in April and May, respectively, in The New Verse News. Gil is married, with three children, and lives in Brookline, MA.

DEAD MAN WALKING

by Jeff Burt

Source: Texas Department of Criminal Justice

The last lynching
will not occur in redneck backwoods,
will not occur in buckthorn bramble swamp,
will not occur from revenge in the hood
under the laughter of protection
and the protection of laughter,
for this is the world we wanted
and this is the world we get:

the last man lynched
will be jailed by judiciousness,
condemned by the passport of poverty
to regions the rich will never tour,
hung by a jury,
stung, doped, chemically fried,
taken from circulation
like a ragged dollar bill.


Jeff Burt works in manufacturing.  He has work in Rhino, Windfall, Thrice Fiction, and forthcoming in Mobius, Storm Cellar, and Star 82 Review.

SIX WOMEN IN SEARCH OF WISDOM

by Earl J Wilcox

Without a doubt, by any reasonable standards,
the defendant will not be tried by a jury of his peers---
an Hispanic man at the mercy of six women,
all white save one, sequestered, mute even to each other
until the lawyers have their say. These women—eyes
blindfolded, unseen by millions on TV, seek justice
to life’s queries: what is guilt? Innocence?
Who is my brother’s keeper?


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to TheNew Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.