THE NEW AMERICA: BRING YOUR OWN DEATH

by George Salamon

"As states have faced  challenges to carrying out executions by lethal injections, various work-arounds and alternatives have been proposed . . . Arizona may have come up with the most original concept yet: an invitation for lawyers to help kill their own clients. With drugs that can be used for lethal injections in short supply, the Arizona department of corrections' latest execution protocol states that attorneys for death row inmates are welcome to bring their own." The Guardian, February 15, 2017

No more irresolution
For those awaiting execution.
It's rugged individualism to the end
Thanks to Arizona's new godsend.
Where the condemned's lawyer
Is appointed his destroyer.
Once witness and fellow weeper,
He may play grim reaper.
We shuddered once to that final yelp,
To be marketed as an existential act
Of self-help.

George Salamon is still trying to watch the American scene sixty-nine years after his arrival from Europe.  He does it now from St. Louis, MO.

WHEN THE DEATH DRUGS FLOW

by Gil Hoy

Kelly Gissendaner, 47, the only woman on Georgia's death row was executed early Wednesday morning by lethal injection at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison. She was sentenced to death after being found guilty of conspiring to murder her husband in 1997. The man who carried out the kidnapping and murder, Gissendaner's then-boyfriend, Gregory Owen, received a life sentence. Dozens of supporters and death penalty opponents kept a vigil outside the state prison as Gissendaner awaited her fate. Pope Francis, an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, had urged officials to commute her death sentence. Gissendaner's execution marks the first death sentence carried out against a woman in Georgia in 70 years. She was the 16th woman executed in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. —Yahoo! News

Through human veins,
   Through what yellow flesh
Remains on the bones of
  Consistency and justice,

In frozen groves of orange
  Peaches, with worms---
Pious robes and study
  Have no paradisial power

Against the iron hammer,
The wheels
   The powerful pistons,
Pulsating levers of leveraged

Machines that    will not,
cannot, work. Callous
Callousness collides. Thrice
came the ice, no

Small dice of the role
To entice and
  Fatten the leech---
Till the red of his blood

Turns black and cold,
 Old---till she sings her
Song sorry, to be
 Told and retold.


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer and writer. He studied poetry at Boston University, while receiving a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His writing has appeared most recently in The Montucky Review, The Potomac, The New Verse News, The Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News.

APPLESAUCE

by Gil Hoy

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court . . . blocked the next three executions scheduled in Oklahoma pending its review of the state's controversial three-drug cocktail for lethal injections. The ruling was expected, since both lawyers for the convicted murderers and the state itself had urged the justices to intervene. But Oklahoma also wanted the court to allow executions to resume if it could find a replacement drug, and the court left open that possibility. --USA Today, January 28, 2015; Cartoon source: Penn Live

If the supreme court

Says 43 minutes
Writhing squirming
On death cot

Is cruel and unusual,
We have tried true

tested alternatives.

Shave head, part of leg
   To welcome flow of electrons,

Strap chest, legs to chair
Metal skullcap

electrodes on head
Moisten sponge---
   j-u-s-t   right

Hood over head
Flip switch---

Asphyxiation
   Cardiac arrest
nervous system Paralyzed

Defecation,  urination
Smoke steam Escape
  from body
Boiling Blood

“The body’s temperature
becomes so hot, the flesh
falls off
if touched”

Third fourth
degree burns
Body may catch
   Fire

The Sound of
Sizzling Bacon tickles
your ears

Eyeballs pop out,
  but rest comfortably
     on cheeks

Body bleeding
body Cooking, The

sweet smell
of broiled vulgar Flesh

permeates the chamber
into your nostrils.


Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News.  He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction in February of last year.  Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in The Potomac, The Zodiac Review, Harbinger Asylum and Earl of Plaid Literary Journal.

POTASSIUM CHLORIDE

by David Chorlton

(CNN) -- A double murderer was executed in Florida Wednesday night, becoming the third man put to death in an American prison during a 24-hour period. All three died by lethal injection.

A gurney stands still on its wheels
beneath a square of light intense enough
to reveal a human soul.
The floor is polished so clean
it floats from wall
to unblemished wall.
There’s a pillow,
freshly cleaned, and straps
no grief could ever break
to contain the spasms
when the clock shows time
coming to an end.
A neatly-typed protocol
describes every step
from cooking the final meal
to escorting witnesses away,
but has nothing to say for an instance
of the cocktail’s failure,
as if it had been written for a firing squad
and could not describe a dead man
spitting bullets out.


David Chorlton came to Arizona in 1978 after living in England and Austria. He has spent more than three decades stretched between cultures and writing poetry, the pick of which has just appeared as his Selected Poems, from FutureCycle Press.

AN UNJUST LAW

by Gil Hoy

The drawn-out execution of Dennis McGuire has prompted many to question lethal injection in Ohio. McGuire's execution took about 25 minutes; a state expert said he expected it to happen in a matter of minutes. -- The Plain Dealer, January 26, 2014.

Can’t get Ohio out of my
head, damn.

Took 26 minutes to kill
him, some new-fangled
poison not the usual,
a half-baked horror show.

Sour drugs flowed through
blue veins, the prisoner
strapped to a gurney gasped
vacant eyes staring,

rattling,
nose snorting,
choking almost guttural--
like food stuck in your
windpipe
on and on, convulsions.

By all accounts, he was
a horrible savage man

25 years ago,
raped, tortured and killed
a young woman with child,

just married, still to live
and be enjoyed.

So nothing cruel or unusual
here, an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth,
Lex talionis, as prophesied.

But this death more
like a Macabre blunder
at a public square picnic
hangin’ from days old,
when the man’s head
in the too-tight hemp noose
might come clean off,

Minute after lingering
minutes, following terrible
60 second minutes
Strangling from the inside,
a mammal gasps for breath.

Heard that his blood in the
crowd had to cover their ears
and wipe their tears from
soaked ashen faces,
I say listen up, after what he did.

If you agree, show the
video play-back to your son,
so he can see what we do,
though slow suffocation
is not for the squeamish,
something to Hide?

Murder: premeditation
and unlawful killing,
the state does you one better,
premeditation and ceremony,
and who are we
to tell the state what to do,
sounds AOK to me.

Much ado about nothing.
Throw to hungry lions
crush ‘em with fat elephants,
devoured by wild sweaty-toothed beasts
does the trick
tear them apart by Galloping horses,
burn him like an over-cooked
headless turkey for your Thanksgiving roast,
crucifixion, decapitation, boil until cooked.

Firing squad? Pass the loaded Gun
please, stoning? A duplicitous
contest to see who casts the first
stone. Disembowelment, OK,
dismemberment, tie him to a
cannon and set the charge, so cool

your mouth just drips with blood
like a stale English Pudding,
gas, hangings, electric chair,
That covers it.

But somewhere I read and
believed to the marrow, now
shaking terrified: turn to him
the other cheek also, or we
will all be Toothless and Blind.

No one’s listening or caring
anymore,

Blood red Hearts disgorged on a
winding cobblestone trail that leads
to a distant dream
That our eyes don’t hear anymore
and that tastes forgotten anyway.


Gil Hoy is a trial lawyer in Boston, and grew up in Brookline, MA. He received a B.A in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. degree in Government from Georgetown University, and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Gil is an elected member of the Brookline Democratic Town Committee, and served as a Brookline Selectman, the Town's highest elected office, for 12 years. Gil is married, with three children, and lives in Brookline, MA.