OUR FREE UNION

by Zumwalt

with respect to André Breton

Image by the poet using Nano Banana Pro

My country with the hair of embedded fiber-optic cable
With the thoughts of a backed-up four-lane freeway at dusk
With the waist of a redwood in the center of a scenic bypass;
My country with the lips of algae and silt from the Great Lakes

With the cheeks of a ticker tape parade on celluloid stock
With the teeth of a picket fence on a shifting, slumping shoreline;
The tongue of a cracked bell that just rings and rings on command
Of a televised courtroom, a satellite that spies in dark silence;

My country with the eyelashes of high-tension wires
With brows of the upper seats of a sold-out stadium
Of the blue light under the sheets
And of the steam rising from an executive sauna fifty stories high.

My country with shoulders of interstate concrete
And of a hydroelectric dam holding back the stars;
My country with the sticky, messy fingers of a contested ballot box
Of a strewn deck of plastic cards;

My country with armpits of coal dust and scented bubble tea
Of suburban sprawl and the nest of a bald eagle in a cell tower
With arms of Mississippi tributaries and of a thousand assembly lines
And of a mingling of the cornfield and ambushed migrant workers;

My country with legs of elusive wildfires
The movements of a swing state and a jazz festival
Calves of sequoia bark, feet of broken treaties and numbered amendments
Toes of subway tracks and tourists flicking coins into canyons.

My country with a neck of unharvested wheat
A throat of pulsing fiber and high-powered cooling fans
Of a protest stage shrieking in the bed of a dry river
With breasts of the Appalachian night;

With the ribs of a multi-story shopping mall
Of a ghost town shadowed by the noonday sun;
My country with the belly of a thumb-scrolled digital map
With a back of an abandoned silver screen;

My country with a nape of red clay and cooling asphalt
And of the threads of a smudged napkin on a diner counter at 3:00 AM.
My country with hips of a barreling NextGen Acela
With hips of a county rodeo and of Friday night tossed penalty flags

Of a pendulum swinging between fairground stand food and Michelin-rated dining.
My country with bones of Civil War reenactments
With the ligaments of uncirculated library books
With the tendons of a buffalo nickel gifted to a grandchild.

My country with the loins of an offshore drill and the grocery store pharmacy
Of prairie grass and vintage baseball cards.
My country with ears full of rotating sirens
Of eyes of parabolic, steerable radio telescopes.

My country with eyes of a flatscreen TV left on at night
With eyes of a forest gasping for breath…

My country that vowed to love us always:
Our hands held out for answers, trembling within rusty handcuffs.

Zumwalt's poetry feeds on alienation, shifting reality, and forced adaptation. Zumwalt is a repeat contributor to The New Verse News.

RAIN YEAR ROUND

by Christine Jackson

AI-generated graphic by Nightcafé for The New Verse News.

Under my tarp shivering, boots soaked, mud. Jesus an attack in this rain? We were ready, sure. My back muscles still zinged from days of digging burying metal cases under the trees, tamping soggy ground. Like for small graves. High school kids hacked into the Jay Six list. We were next. Tonight. My phone flashes a text from Irene in the vols tent by the road: 3 F150 pickups. A thrum of thunder rolls over the wintry field behind the library and my taut nerves. Trucks rumble into the parking lot. Profane confusion among bobbing flashlights. My binoculars pick up a dozen long-beards in ragtag camo and epaulets, oilskin duster coats. One horned helmet. Flagpoles with bayonet tips. I tap a quick text to our people.

 

Sprays of shattered glass and a percussive thud from a flash bang mean they are inside. Tipped shelves clatter. Rows of racks collapse, crash. Guttural whoops over their empty victory. The library’s massive alarm leaps to life, out-whooping them, pulsing louder in the rain. They scramble, cursing along the slick walkway. I huddle at the edge of the woods, my rifle close to defend sacred ground, the buried texts. We knew the Project’s targeted titles, so many, Shakespeare, Orwell, Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King. We saved what we could, but for how long?

 

The F150s roar away.  More would follow.

We had truth. Was it enough?

Icy rain continues to fall, steady, insistent,

pelting the tarp overhead like birdshot.

 

Christine Jackson is retired from her day job, three decades of teaching literature and creative writing at a South Florida university.  She continues to clock in on a life-long night shift writing poetry.  Her work has appeared in an array of online journals, including The Ekphrastic Review, Verse-Virtual, and South Florida Poetry Journal.

GRACE IN MINNEAPOLIS IN THE AGE OF ICE

by Barbara Draper

It’s afternoon as I sit looking out the library window— 

across the street a testy wind snaps a line-up of flags— 

 

the first for Ukraine, the next to remember the MIAs and POWs, 

the next to bring them home, and finally, an American flag.

 

Earlier this morning as I stood on a corner, a whistle 

around my neck, on look-out for ICE,

 

an Hispanic mom, holding her daughter’s hand, 

walking her safely to school, 

 

passes by, touches my sleeve 

and thanks me. 

 

Me of the privileged, white variety, 

grandmotherly, sure in my safety. 

 

Tears welled up— 

for her or for me? 

 

The unfairness, the enigma, the grace she gave 

with her great big heart. She touching me.

Barbara Draper’s poems have been published in Poetry East, Potomac Review, Rust + Moth and Sow’s Ear. She has authored one book of poems, Sometimes a Door. She lives in the Minneapolis area and is active in climate change work as well as running after three grandchildren.

THE TURNING TIDE

by Mary Janicke

 
a great tsunami washed ashore
            destroying all in its path
books tossed off library shelves
            young people left to drown
in a sea of bigotry
 
then the storm abated
            the tide receded
the public surveyed the damage
            and saw the harm done to the community
                        by the bigots and blowhards
and voted the transgressors off the island
 
civility returned
            respect for one another returned
and most importantly
            books were returned to library shelves
so that knowledge 
            could again be shared

Mary Janicke is a gardener, poet, and writer living in Texas. Her work has appeared in numerous journals.

Editor’s note: The tide turned in Texas, but the wave of book bannings continues elsewhere. Sign EveryLibrary’s petition against book bans here: https://action.everylibrary.org/bannedbooks?utm_campaign=govdislikes_1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=votelibraries

RITUAL HAND-WASHING

by William Nelson

But why, why? So strange
—an anonymous oversight
or burnt to ashes in our Holocaust,
or a tractate slipped behind a shelf
in our vast library of right and wrong—that

neither did Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai expound,
nor brilliant Maimonides explicate,
nor any sage Talmid Chakam, ancient or modern, tell

why the Talmud,

which so sternly, so minutely, so expansively
demands we cleanse our hands of their impurity
with water poured from a particular cup

before eating bread,
after eating bread,
before worship,
after sleeping,
after touching a corpse,
after defecation,
before reciting a prayer,
after touching hidden parts of our body
or a menstruating woman,
after leaving a cemetery,
and so forth, and so on, so strange

that our Talmud

omits to command us
to wash our opened hands
up to the wrist
with water poured from a particular cup

after strangling a people to death.

William Nelson is a retired lawyer living in Vermont. He won poetry prizes in college and in law school, and he has published a book of poetry Implementing Standards of Good Behavior (L'Epervier Press, 1972) and poems in various magazines (though not lately). Nelson returned to poetry after a career as a public defender. He has posted some of his poems on a Substack site.

NO WORDS FOR ESCAMBIA COUNTY

by Richard Fireman

It has come to this: Escambia County, Florida, schools have banned the dictionary. Five dictionaries are on the district’s list of more than 1,600 books banned pending investigation in December 2023, along with eight different encyclopedias, The Guinness Book of World Records, and Ripley’s Believe it or Not—all due to fears they violate the state’s new laws banning materials with “sexual conduct” from schools. —PEN America, January 9, 2024

If thine eye offend thee pluck it out
says the Bible, and we know 
the Florida governor is a righteous man, with principles
and not much thought. His laws
just made one county remove the dictionary
from library bookshelves. Now 
where do the children find their answers
except in the abundancy of misinformation?
Plenty of that to go around, no worry. 
You say the kids can ask their parents what the truth is
but they’re the ones who voted the fool into office 
so not much help there. It seems 
they’ll have to wait till they can vote 
if they can figure out how to do that
if there even is a vote by then
if there even is a world. 
But meantime they’ll just have to remain
in their literally meaningless limbo
and we have to wonder if it’s a coincidence
that the state’s initial is the grade its education deserves.

Richard Fireman, writing for over fifty years, has given readings at several libraries and Barnes & Noble, and has published over a hundred poems. In 2009 he contributed a chapter to the bibliotherapy book Writing Away the Demons. In September 2022 ten of his poems (five of which had previously been published) were featured in The Thursday Poets' Anthology: Dreams and Realities, along with those of eight of his fellow online writing circle members. His first poetry collection Constellations was published by Prolific Pulse Press in December 2022.

TRAVELERS REST LIBRARY GETS THREATENING CALLS…

AFTER REFUSING TO REMOVE PRIDE MONTH DISPLAYS 

—Greenville (SC) News, June 22, 2023

by Gilbert Allen

It's not a threat. “This is just what I've heard.”

The “good old boys” don't like this month's display.

One phones the staff—there are “whispers of war.”

He's not a threat. “This is just what I've heard.”

Just rainbow ribbons in the entryway

and a multicolored READ WITH PRIDE.

It's not a threat. “This is just what I've heard.”

The “good old boys” don't like this month's display.

Gilbert Allen has lived in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, since 1977. His most recent books are Believing in Two Bodies and The Beasts of Belladonna. For more information about him and his work, check out the interview here.

THE LIBRARIAN AT THE SCHOOL WHERE EVERY CHALLENGE SUCCEEDS

by Cecil Morris

Photo by Stu_Spivak

The Bible is among dozens of books [including the graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank's diary and numerous books with LGBTQ+ themes or characters] removed from this Texas school district. —NPR, August 18, 2022

I like our high school library now—the high ceiling,

the tall windows inviting light, the shelves throwing

their long shadows onto each other, their blond wood,

so easy to dust and polish now. Something stately,

a little grand, a little minimalist—a kind

of puritan austerity, I think you could say,

now that all the books have been withdrawn, all the ideas

removed from circulation, stored now off site and out

of sight. No more books to face or edge or try to dust,

those uneven tops. No more rows of books to cull

for the out of date, the never read—or checked out,

at least—the ones defaced by flip-page cartoons, or drawn-

in dicks, or very personal slurs that should be kept

to lavatory stalls. No more issuing fines

for books late or lost. I know, as librarian,

I should miss the books, both learned tomes and flights

of fantasy, but this vacuous cleanliness

appeals to my love of order and simplicity,

and the kids—the students—still come in with their phones

where they can find the whole world in bite-size chunks,

where they can Google, scroll, and cite Wikipedia.

And I do not have to check anything out or in

or shush any heads bent over the little lights.

I guess this is what the school board and parents want.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, divides his time between Oregon and California.  He has poems in or forthcoming from 3Elements, Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Evening Street Review, Hiram Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Scapegoat, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.

I GREW UP IN HIGHLAND PARK

by Tricia Knoll

Highland Park IL Fourth of July parade, circa 1965.

Twenty-nine spaces in the US carry this name.

When the news broke, I wondered if it was my home town.

It was. The place I lived for the first twenty years of my life. 

My home town as much as any other. Where I was born

 

more than seventy years ago. I hadn’t wondered how much

or what had changed. Videos brought it home. The store

that was once Chandlers where every year I went 

with my mother to get new pencils, pens, and notebooks

 to go back to school. The shoe store with the Xray

machine. The laundry owned by Chinese Americans 

where the windows always dripped with water. 

Mr. Leeds' jewelry store. Across the street

I bought my prom dress to dance with my first love. 

My first bank account on the corner of Central. 

Learning to drive in town across the railroad tracks.

Our library. Smelling the alewives on Ravinia Beach 

where I learned to swim and loved a sun tan.  

Hearing Louis Armstrong sing "Hello Dolly" 

at the festival. My father’s service

on the school board. The flooded

field where I learned to ice skate. The miles

of roads where I careened around on a bike. 

The day a migrating whooping crane stopped

in our flooded back yard. Long ago. Green

skies over oaks before tornados. 

 

My feet once knew every inch of that parade route.

You never really leave those old home towns. 

The red flags didn’t wave true here. The young man

got his assault rifle in a state and town known

for its tougher-than-most gun laws.

I supposed I wouldn’t know anyone who was there

after all these decades. That wasn’t true.

I knew two people who fled the explosions, one

a man I went to school with who fled with his

grandchildren and one a woman who lived next door

to me as a child. Everyone says it can happen

anywhere. I know that now. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet. When media people describe Highland Park's 30,000 residents as a small town, she's aware that in Vermont Highland Park would be Vermont's second largest city. She worried about possible violence in June for friends in Portland, Oregon going to the Pride Parade. Her next collection of poetry One Bent Twig is coming out from Future Cycle Press in early 2023—poems reflecting her love and concern for trees facing climate change. She has written about the red oaks of Highland Park.

REMEMBERING CATASTROPHE

by Anita Lerek

“The Lost Library Forest,” a painting by Luis Peres

Mother, how much time is left

for us in the forest library, 

where master spines 

clasp woody pages

pollinated by wind?

How much time before 

the boxing up, the clearing out

of minds meshed in ancient tree lives: 

now inventory, cubic footage,

caged, trucked away—

to bonfires staged by haters. 

1933, Berlin: Cigarettes, 

chocolate, sausages for sale!

To music and spotlights

some 50,000 books burn.

Burn the texts, said Artaud. 

Did he yearn for another heaven

to leave scripts of cruelty 

far behind?

I cry for you, Mother, 

stroke keys for you. 

Something must be saved here 

of your wounded spines… words. 

How memory’s flesh burns.     

Wind, carry my voice without a voice—

tell the trees that she, I—

Author’s Note: Homage to the thought of Edmond Jabes (The Book of Questions), and to the poem by Don Pagis, "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car."

Anita Lerek has spent her adult life juggling business with the enchantment of poetry. The visual arts, jazz, and social justice are life-long influences. Born abroad (Poland), she retains a sense of otherness, and a resulting affinity for the divergent. Her poems have appeared recently in Poetry Super Highway, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and River Heron. She is co-founder of Change Artists, a start-up online poetry community relating to political engagement. She is the author of a chapbook, History and Being (2019). She lives with her archivist husband in Toronto, Canada.

BLACK WOMAN ARRESTED FOR READING IN A LIBRARY, 1962

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S.

 

Black woman arrested for trying to read a book in a segregated library in Albany, GA. 1962. 

a dark bonfire 
roared 
step  
by  
step  
down 
thou shalt not read 
here 
she 
was 
booked 
(o the irony)  
she
the book 
her body still burns 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.”

A MURMURATION

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Cars destroyed by the Camp Fire sit in the lot at a used car dealership on November 9, 2018 in Paradise, California. CREDIT: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images via CBS News

Driving north on Highway 101 from Marin to Sonoma County, I notice a small flock of starlings rise above a fallow field into the dystopic, ashy, leaden sky to perform their liquid choreography come hell or high water or filthy air. To the north and east of us, a vast, murderous fire rages in Butte County, wiping out entire communities and killing many trying to escape the flames. The smoke from the inferno has plastered our sky for several days now, air quality is abysmal, and we (old people) and young children in particular are warned to stay indoors until the pollutants dissipate. We’re headed to pick up our little granddaughters and spend a few hours with them in the air-conditioned-and-filtered library. Like all of us who pass a significant portion of each day in the out of doors, the little ones are feeling cooped up and antsy. As I watch the astonishing flow of shapes the starlings create high above the field, swooping and soaring and wheeling in the angry air, I imagine their tiny lungs being assailed and assaulted and overwhelmed by the noxious particulates through which they are moving. Will they die premature, unnatural deaths because of toxins inhaled while performing their ancient ballet? Probably. As will many others of all species, including our own. Whether or not any particular fire is merely accidental in origin, the conditions that support and sustain the increasing number of disastrous wild fires we have endured over the past few years are no accident, but the result of the warming of our climate due to the maniacal consumption of carbon. Droughts turn trees and other plant material to kindling; increasingly high winds spread conflagrations with deadly alacrity. Scientists have told us all this for years, have warned us that such out-of-control blazes will occur with increasing frequency and intensity. So what malfunction in the mental circuitry of the gluttonous petroleum mongers causes them to lose sight of their/our common humanity, of their/our interconnectedness with all life? Why continue driving this biocidal juggernaut? What the fuck is going on?

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California.

INSCRIPTION FOR A BURNING BOOK

by Sarah E. Colona

On October 19, Paul Dorr checked out some books from the Orange City, Iowa library. Mr. Dorr was offended by our nation's founding principles of freedom of information and the First Amendment, so he decided to burn books he didn't like - deliberately destroying public property. The Orange City Library strives to "enrich a vibrant community by providing a comfortable space for the community to discover their roots, express creativity, and celebrate diversity through literacy, information, and technology." Through its mission, the library has included LGBT+ literature, which Mr. Dorr found incredibly offensive because he does not value the First Amendment. Because Mr. Dorr chose to censor thought and derail freedom, we would like to restore the books he burned to the Orange City Library. To make sure he will not censor speech and attack the LGBT+ community, we seek to replace the books with five copies each. All other funds will be donated to the Orange City Library to protect the freedom of thought and information. —Orange City LGBT Library Fund gofundme page. To donate, click here.

dearest pop & sizzle
     under an arsonist’s touch
          I came alight

shelf by shelf licked at hinges
     unleashed ills
          art & prayer combat

ignorance must devour
     tuck heat
          within each hateful act

carbon’s signature extinction
     what’s past is prologue
          most forget

Sarah E. Colona lives and teaches in her home state of New Jersey. She is the author of three poetry collections: Hibernaculum (Gold Wake Press, 2013), Thimbles (dancing girl press, 2012), and That Sister (dancing girl press, 2016).