THE KILLERS

by Howie Good

AI-generated video by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

You can hear the slow tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine. It’s the end of the so-called “American Century.” Conscienceless killers disguised as police prowl factories and airports and schools for new victims, and all with the sanction of a government of liars and thieves. The lamp beside the golden door has been shot out. My grandparents were poor Jews from the shtetl – in current parlance, “garbage people” from “shithole countries.” And look at me. My face, with its hollows and shadows, its worry lines and age wrinkles, is like a map, sort of, a map of a country I no longer know.

Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author.

ON THE ROAD WITH MY GRANDDAUGHTER BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION

by Susan Vespoli

~Dedicated to the man who just macheted Trump signs in Yuma and then drove his car over them

Feeling cranky about mean election signs

along Phoenix streets that tell lies or say F**k 

one candidate’s prayers, (paid for by his Republican

opponent for Senate) yet finding myself laughing 

at the Hitler mustaches graffitied onto the upper lip 

of Trump and Kari Lake, I tell myself to breathe, 

ask my granddaughter about Addy, 

the 4th grade friend she calls talented. How so? I ask, 

and Molly replies, well, she can suck in her breath 

so hard her nostrils seal shut, and she can stand  on her head 

and balance her water bottle on the sole of one of her shoes. 

Did you see her do it? I ask. Yes, she nods. I exhale.

Susan Vespoli believes in the power of writing to heal. Her poems have been published in NVN, Rattle, ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other cool spots.

POST-ELECTION BLUES

by Peter Calder

after seeing a small rally of people in George Square, Glasgow (file photo above) following the recent election results in the UK

He says they’re
all in on it.
Every single 
bastard one.
 
They know what 
they are doing.
Death of Scotland.
That’s what he says.
 
Politicians. Scientists. 
Journalists.
All of them—
Liars.
 
A ripple of hands
startles a pigeon
and sends the flock
soaring above the square.
 
But this Rally—he says
is rewriting history.
A pocket of truth 
in a new skin suit.
 
And I guess he’s right.
It is just skin 
holding us together.
We’re all in on it.
 
The left. The right. 
The indifferent.
Every single one of us 
wrapped up in it.
 
From Westminster 
to Glasgow lies
a body, bruised 
in patches of blue.
 
It happens almost
unnoticed. The birds
loop and scatter 
on the ground.
 
An old man
tosses crumbs—
and the flock
follows.

Peter Calder is a Primary School teacher living and working in Glasgow. He is the co-founder and editor of the Hull based magazine Descent Spread and has had poetry and short stories published in various UK-based magazines.

BELIEVING IS SEEING

by Phyllis Frakt
inspired by Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

cartoon by Bob Englehart

Self-interest is our malady.
The child cries mine! then grows up
to try a more wily strategy.
She invents suspect evidence,
then advances a conspiracy.
He amends the next textbook
to deliberately distort history.
Deniers, decriers, and liars 
turn science into travesty.
Their desires are a twisted warp
that thwarts all objectivity.
But the rut is cut so deeply
we’re all guilty of complicity – 
Yes, you! Even me, just possibly.

 
Phyllis Frakt's previous poems in The New Verse News are "Teach to the Test," "Caught in Between," and "Not in Our Star..." She lives in New Jersey.

DOLLAR GENERAL

by Allison Joseph 

The victims of the racist shooting at a Jacksonville Dollar General store:
Angela Michelle Carr, 52; Anolt Joseph “A.J.” Laguerre Jr., 19; Jerrald De’Shaun Gallion, 29 

Jacksonville, August 27, 2023

What comforts you when the world is terrifying?
How do you keep your nerves and wits intact?
With all these compromises, liars lying,
like Amy sang, I just go back to black.
Should I become inured to misery,
embracing it as if it is a friend—
ignoring daily news, the grisly
spectacle and tableau, the dead ends
of broken links in paid for local news?
No wonder that I'm breaking out in hives:
I shop online, no Dollar General blues—
No supermarket trip is worth our lives. 
Is poetry still something I can use
when every day we're murdering the muse? 

Allison Joseph currently lives, teaches, and writes in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University. Her most recent collections of poems are Lexicon (Red Hen Press, 2021), Professional Happiness (Backbone Press, 2021), and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018). Confessions of a Barefaced Woman won the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Award and was a finalist in the poetry category for the 2019 NAACP Image Award. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times and in the Best American Poetry Series. She is the widow of poet and editor Jon Tribble.

THE FLAG OUTSIDE A NEIGHBOR'S DOOR

by Jean L. Kreiling

Just down the street, outside a neighbor’s door, 
it reaches up and out, as if for hope 
or heaven, in an effort to restore 
its honor and resist the downward slope 
traversed by those who lied, who followed liars, 
who beat a man with those same stripes and stars, 
who lit and fanned and spread murderous fires 
that left some dead, the rest of us with scars. 
I see Old Glory fluttering in the breeze— 
but elsewhere, desecrated by a gang 
of thugs, it symbolized not liberties 
and laws, but rage, and justice by flash-bang. 
I miss the days when I was confident 
about what flags by neighbors’ front doors meant. 
 

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of two collections of poetry: Arts & Letters & Love (2018) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014).  Her work has been honored with the Able Muse Write Prize, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Prize, the Kelsay Books Metrical Poetry Prize, a Laureates’ Prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, three New England Poetry Club prizes, the Plymouth Poetry Contest prize, and the String Poet Prize. 

YEAR OF THE RANT

by Robert Knox

In a year in which only personal realities 
are consulted by humans, 
in which only over-sized creatures are heard 
and they merely grunt

In a year in which the hogs that grunt 
are only human, 
in which it can be seen that 
their blinkered eyes are rightly suspicious
and monitor the intrusive attentions 
of folks with cameras,
who are neither journalists nor tourists, 
but uniformed executioners bearing witness on themselves
 
In a year in which the words of the truly reproachable  
bear witness against themselves,  
in which the words of the prophets 
are everywhere and too numerous to recall
amidst the blinding lights of the next enormity,
too large for even the wiser among us to believe, 
or the most gullible
 
In which even the loudest of unsanctioned mouths 
fall silent,
for there is simply too much to say
 
and no lack of overpaid oath-breakers 
clamoring to bear witness against themselves.

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of a novel based on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, titled Suosso's Lane. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as Off The Coast, The Journal of American Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Califragile, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty, published in 2017, was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. The chapbook Cocktails in the Wild followed in 2018. He was recently named the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

THE NORTH AMERICAN BLANKENSPIEL

by Michael Thomas Ellis

The North American Blankenspiel, of the order

republicanus, family deceitae, and genus 

horriblus, is a splithound of the lowest phylum,

and is prone to attack anything unlike itself.

 

Those scamsack gavelbeaters have fracked away

our goodwill, webspun our naïve trust,

sucked dry the corpus democratus, and cast

it upon the now steaming dungpyre of hope.

 

Are you bonesmack with me on this?

Or do you side, snickerdly, with these

tatterbacked pursebiters and coinseekers

who would make pissplay of our institutions?

 

Dismiss those questions at your own peril!

These sociostrats are voracious squathogs,

and they will set their spitbark eyes on you next,

should you fail to dance to their soulburnt music.

 

Rise up against the factnapping Blankenspiel!

Send these noxious truthsplitters back to their caves,

lest they make embittered trembletons of all of us,

and our republic but a fiefdom of pervious kneebenders.

Michael Thomas Ellis is retired and piddles around the suburban outskirts of Tampa, writing a few poems here and there, submitting rarely, therefore published rarely. This is a bit of a departure, but hey, 'tis the season, eh? Vote... please.

SUBLIMINALITY

by Gary Glauber

More U.S. service members have been transported out of Iraq for medical treatment and evaluations following Iran’s missile attack on military facilities there, the Pentagon said Tuesday, nearly two weeks after President Trump and defense officials initially said no one was hurt. —The Washington Post, January 22, 2020. Photo: U.S. soldiers stand at a spot hit by Iranian missiles at Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq days after the Jan. 8 attack. (Qassim Abdul-Zahra/AP)

In those not-so-olden days,
they might kneecap you into submission
or try to shame you into changing your ways.

Today, the persuasion’s more subtle,
minds are changed without realizing
things encountered in media stream.

They float by like invisible balloons,
banners that point the way with
bold exclamations you’ll never remember.

Alone in the voting booth,
just you and your conscience
and inexplicable urges compelling you.

Foreign powers are acting poorly,
proving psycho-statistical truths,
gaining control from within.

Reading a mind isn’t necessary
when subtle control is relinquished
and a shocked world wonders

how nuclear winter has emerged
from within, not without,
fighting wars no one ever sees.

The new truth is contrived fiction.
Believers vehement with denial
conjure revisionist history,

spew touted party sound bites,
and daily break what others revered
on battlefields of public opinion.

This wall of boulders
grows larger over time
until no one quite remembers

or cares who it was
that cast the first stone
or the life we had before.

And we the unsure
in the chaos of uncertainty
fear the worst world war,

not knowing that bombs
of ultimate destruction
have already dropped.

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog, and strives to survive modern life’s absurdities. He has two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press).  A new chapbook of surreal poetry, The Covalence of Equanimity, a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize, is now available from SurVision Books.