WE LOVE GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE

by Cecil Morris

Supreme Court seems ready to uphold ban on gender-affirming care for minors. —NPR, December 4, 2024

Here’s gender-affirming care in my hometown: 

We give our boys some guns—long guns like ARs 
and shotguns and semi-auto handguns—
which, at first, are really just pointer fingers
and sticks and trigger-controlled hose nozzles
and, really, anything vaguely phallic.

We give our girls baby dolls and plush toys
and encourage them to hug and comfort,
to placate and coo, and, later, aprons
and play kitchens with miniature pots and pans.

We give our boys hammers and nails (of course)
and drills and fucking big four-wheel drive trucks
and dump trucks and fire trucks with screaming sirens
and teach them privilege and damage control
and the righteousness of conquest and noise.

We give our girls sixty watts of light and need
and teach them the virtues of silence and grace
and a thousand and one ways to cook a chicken,
to make repairs, and to turn tears on and off.

We teach them all manifest destiny.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher and Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, has poems appearing in The Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) will come out in 2025.  He and his partner, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

THINKING OF UKRAINE / LIVING IN INDIAN COUNTRY

by Dick Altman

in New Mexico

Smoke and fire, Ukraine’s signature  in the morning

paper, tells the physical story. Lines of people leading

to nowhere.  Second day headline to yesterday’s photo

of a pregnant woman on stretcher in front of a bombed

hospital: Mother-to-be dies.  The configuration of living,

dying, dead looms out of history’s mists, as I look

across pueblos of Rio Grande’s valley.  The great pall

of misery that binds Ukraine and Indian Country.

Treaties broken. Tectonics of people, like moving

land masses, shifting, transforming the human

landscape.  People driven like herded cattle, to slaughter. 

America’s East cleansing the Native heartland. Manifest

destiny’s tsunami sweeping Indians aside, all the way

to the Pacific.  Cultures’ flesh and bone left to decompose

on prairie, high desert plains, lowlands.  Dig up

the nameless graves, if you can find them.  The soil doesn’t

distinguish between Indian and Ukrainian. Worms eat

to the same bone.  Digital worms in one monumental hack

could disarm America’s defenses.  Shut down the grid. 

Prevent plane and missile from launching.  Go to sleep

in the dark and wake, ten hours later, to discover thousands

of alien aircraft have landed all over America.  And you

discover you no longer live in the land of the free.  You

want to escape, but to where.  Software that runs your car

has been high-jacked.  Look out to the street and strange

uniforms shove your neighbors into a line.  Like

American soldiers dismantling Indian villages that believed,

by treaty, the land was theirs.  Like Ukrainians waking

to ground and aerial attack.  Living on New Mexico’s

high desert plain, at seven thousand feet, might seem like

I’m literally above it all.  This is Indian Country.  My stock,

though not  my   eastern  European  forebears, nearly

obliterated Indigenous territory. Across the street and down

the  block, survives a   ten-foot   square of sacred, protected

ground. A metaphor of diminishment at the heart of one

civilization’s rise, another’s living burial.

 

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems.  His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.

UP UP AND AWAY

by  Judy Juanita

Billionaires space race published July 12, 2021 by Dave Whamond.

Billionaires millionaires the amerikkkan dream

Up, up and away onto the edge of space

Horatio Alger wins again

Rags-to-riches

Poor boy sandwiches

Raggedy Ann dolls

Immigrants in shacks 

Children in cages

We love it all, eh?

Up, up and away

The bigger the better

The farther from the crime scene 

The better. And the edge of space is

The Mall of America.

Opportunity our national anthem

Except except Tulsa in 1920-when? 1921

Black people black dynasties

Black millionaires buying and flying

Their own airplanes

Black businesses black prosperity

And we prostrate ourselves

For a black face on the $20 bill

   Eh?

Ask the black Okies

About the grand downtown they built

Especially for the bombs

Dropped especially on Tulsa

Listen to the sound of bombs

The bombs bursting in air

That Francis Scott Keys conjured

Ask the black Oakies

Then forward to Philly in 1990-what? 

1990-when? 1990-why?

Because a black mayor dropped bombs

On wild haired Ramona Africa 

An American millionaire, no?

Rags to riches, no?

Horatio Alger, no?

MOVE the antithesis of progress

Cleanliness

We, the clean, deodorant-rich country

Watching  televised spectacles 

Little blue-and-white suited people

Blast past the boundary of space as

The richest man in the world

Thanks his wage slaves and customers

For paying for it all

And all is forgiven because why? Because

When the land ran into the Pacific Ocean

Manifest destiny shot into space

Judy Juanita's latest book is Manhattan My Ass, You’re In Oakland,  a collection of poetry. Her semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul chronicled a black female coming of age in the 60s who joins the Black Panther Party. Her collection of essays DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland examines the intersectionality of race, gender, politics, economics and spirituality as experienced by a black activist and self-described "feminist foot soldier." The collection was a distinguished finalist in Ohio State University's 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize. Her seventeenth play, “Theodicy,” about two black men who accidentally fall into the river of death, won first runner-up of 186 plays in the Eileen Heckart 2008 Senior Drama Competition at Ohio State University.

BEFORE THE FIRE

by Marc Swan

"You say you want a revolution... " —John Lennon

Thoughts turn to the Founding Fathers—

an oxymoron perhaps. I envision 

them around the hearth,

wooden tankards, pewter mugs in hand 

contemplating the future of this new land. 

Did they foresee manifest destiny—

a two-coast country, 

French and English speaking to the north, 

Spanish speaking to the south, 

expanse of prairie, native beasts hunted 

down, more importantly 

Indigenous peoples decimated 

in the name of a united states? 

What of states, 

offshoots of a federal land grab—

thirteen to start then the quest began. 

In framing that constitution written 

so long ago— 

a two-party system 

now stuttered and stalled,

amendments sporadic, difficult 

to achieve, did they envision

blue states on edge, thick-bellied

red center, chaos, political turmoil, 

climate wracked by indifference.

Settled in front of my hearth,

feet resting on the ottoman,

thoughts turn to 2022—

rivers rise, forests burn,

a black sky holds the night.

Marc Swan’s fifth collection, all it would take, was published in 2020 by tall-lighthouse (UK). Poems forthcoming in Chiron Review, Gargoyle, Steam Ticket, Coal City Review, among others. He lives in coastal Maine with his wife Dd, a maker and yoga teacher.

RED, WHITE, & STORMY

by Scott C. Kaestner

Presidential porn star spangled banner
apple pie, boner pills to manifest destiny
fake news erected in pleated khaki pants
fat cats and skinny puppies do the electric slide
in the land of semi-automatic gunfire and fentanyl laced dreams.


Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, husband, dad, and good mojo seeker. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings and doings.

WASHINGTON AND THE REDSKINS

by James Penha

The Map Is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths—Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish

Fleeing European horrors,
God's chosen landed at a great rock
on which they built their havens,
their temples, and their theocracies
and squatted the nomadic tribes
ignorant of salvation and so damned
(if human enough to have life
after life at all). Settlers made
manifest their destiny
to exploit, expropriate,
disease, enslave,
blanket, and reserve the savages.
And when the natives resisted
eternal occupation, the settlers,
republicans by then and democrats,
made war and baubles
of redskins.

And now Washington mouths
itself agape in the mirror of the middle east.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.