HOW SUBTLY IT HAPPENED

by William Doreski

Secretly, I slip the daylight

moon into my pocket. A crowd

has formed. As I approach,

stainless things clatter. A cop

 

kneels on a neck. A sigh kites

into the trees and deflates.

The cop looks too dispassionate

for this lifetime. The man

 

on the ground no longer speaks.

The stainless things rain down

with naked blades twittering.

I ease the moon from my pocket

 

and compare it to the face

of the cop and of the man

he’s stifling. None of these three

expressions can tell me the time.

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

A SONNET FOR GEORGE FLOYD AND MANY MORE

by Scot Slaby

Old white knights sit atop white steeds
believing blindly that their deeds
are God-ordained—a Christian right-
ness coupled with systemic white-
ness—ancient notions from the West.
They claim their weapons are the best.
Their helmets shield us from their faces.
Do they protect and serve all places?
Black knights have seen this all before:
refusing to bow before a Moor,
white knights wage wars to hold their power.
They raze our homes; their flames devour.

We must resist. We know it's right
to kneel. To raise one fist. To fight.

Scot Slaby's chapbooks include The Cards We've Drawn (Bright Hill Press, 2013) and Bugs Us All (Entasis Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms, Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology, Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Authors, unsplendid, and elsewhere. An international educator, he divides his time between Shanghai, China and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

DESCENDING

The endless origination of my Black son

by Jessica M Granger

file photo

The bones of my pelvis shift like tectonic plates
to accommodate your breadth, the gap widening—
a cramping uterus expelling you in tireless
pulses, your spherical head firmly cradled
against my ischium as you peek through—
the obturator foramen at future possibilities,
but more likely pain for what I’ve made you;
the weight of you ripping my rigged pubic
symphysis in two, the way a cop may you,
you placing a foot in a notch of the iliac crest,
(but not too quickly) and heaving as you plummet—
straining as your spine slides against my sacrum,
the violence of it snapping my sacrospinous
ligament, you grabbing it with your tiny hand—
holding me together as I dislocate your shoulder;
yet you release it for your final descent, must
let me remain broken and unfixed in the bed as
you struggle to clamber in millimeters toward
your final effacement with me, your first as you—
egressing from the canal to open your aboriginal
eyes and face the predisposed world ahead of you.

Jessica M Granger is a half-Cuban, half-Portuguese writer. She holds a bilingual MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas El Paso. She is an Army veteran, divemaster, and mother who seeks to understand life by writing about it. Her work can be found in TheNewVerse.News, SHANTIH Journal, The Molotov Cocktail Magazine, As You Were, and Ruminate Magazine, among others. She currently resides in Columbus, Ohio.

BLEEDING OUT

by Lisa J. Rocklin

Let's just leave it down:

the flag—
half-staff.
Raise it high
on days when

no one dies
            like that. 

Declare a holiday. 

Thoughts 
make ineffective gauze.
Prayers 

absorb no blood.
Flags were not meant

to serve 
as tourniquets
or crucibles of
            patriotism.

Let's just kneel 
together
every time
our banner waves
for these days 
we share—
collecting grief like debt.

Let's mourn 
the self-destruction
            of a nation. 

Let there be rage for 
the addict we can't save
who shoots up 
skin that isn't his
triggered by . . . 
            it doesn't matter why.

As long as he's fed
as long as we're willing
to yield more dead
as long as we keep 
loading the chamber
let's just leave it down—
as a shroud—

star-spangled 

and red.

Lisa J. Rocklin is a writer, facilitator, community builder, and associate director of Women Writing for (a) Change, a nonprofit organization in Cincinnati, OH, that offers supportive writing circles to nurture and celebrate the individual voice.

GENUFLECTION

by George Held

Senators Mike Lee abd Ted Cruz. Image source: Twitter/Ted Cruz.

“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander in chief of this country.” — Ted Cruz at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa, Nov. 9, 2015


Ted Cruz in Iowa courting Christian
Fundamentalists by declaring genuflection
the default prayer position
for US Presidents recalls
Abraham Lincoln (“I would neither slave
nor master be”) who would bow
his head in communion with his deity
but would not sink to his knees like a slave
nor would he rave like the Canadian-Cuban-
American even to climb in the polls
were there polls in his day when “poll”
meant “head” as in “poll tax”
or the “shaved poll” of a prisoner
and Lincoln would simply ask God
to bless this rough and unready,
agonized and striving country
as it writhed in second birth (the first
being in 1776) from 1861-1865, when
the great commander-in-chief would bow
his head and bow his neck without shamelessly
courting the fundamentalists of his day
by telling them what he thinks they want to hear.


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