COCOONED

by Marjan Sabouri 

Underground shelters

with the smell of sweat and fear
in musty air—

These are my first feelings of war,
as I was a little child.
A dark cocoon

that surrounded my childhood.

Now, in my forties,
I experienced the second touch of war.
Israel attacked Iran,
while I was far from my homeland.
 

Darkness ravished me again.

Not as musty shelters,
but of total net blackout.
For days,
I had no news
from my loved ones.
 
All those fears and scents
came down on me.
 
The silkworm

that was ready to emerge

got cocooned again,
in the dark. 

Not long after,
a massacre of many Iranians

who fought for basic rights
occurred in only two days.
Unbelievably heartbreaking.

 
Memories run through my head,
a track of caterpillars;
 

The faces of those youths
beautiful and filled with hope

covered in body bags.
 
The voice of “Sepehr e baba, kojaei?” 

—the desperate father that called for his dead son among many dead bodies.

 
The ecstatic voice of the little child
when she saw her father’s face in TV

and screamed out of joy: “Babaei! Babaei!”—it’s dad—
without knowing
it was a list of the deceased.

 
The ululating and grief-dancing
of bereaved mothers

at the funerals of their beloved children—

As the cocoon
was getting thicker,
I made another memory of war.
America and Israel attacked Iran.
 
Broken and helpless,
people who live in enduring emptiness

—in mind and in pockets—

pray for the foreign attackers

to save their lives.

 
Wishing for freedom in war.
Wishing for happiness in ruin.
Wishing for life in death.
 
Will there be a hope

to tear away the cocoon
under the crash

and release the butterfly?


Marjan Sabouri, a 44-year-old Iranian woman, has a Master’s Degree in Illustration. She has completed many art works in Illustration and Design and has served as a University Lecturer for almost 12 years. Mostly, she writes her poems in Farsi, her mother tongue. However, since living abroad the last two years, she has started to translate her poems (by herself) to be shared with a bigger community of people in order to spread the message of Humanity, Peace, and Love worldwide. She wishes to be a voice protesting injustice and human rights violations, especially now, in Iran and in the Middle East.

NO. NO.

by Nan Meneely

 

 

This protest was regional, the work of dedicated leadership in several small Connecticut towns. A group of somewhere between 20 and 30 or 40 people of all stripes, races and ages (and signs) gathered outside a café where three local roads collide, every single Saturday morning from the one directly following Trump's first election for more than four years. Nan's sign read "Honk Against Hatred;" the vigil was supposed to be silent, but she was unable to restrain her shouted thanks for every honk. This is a picture of one of the first meetings, with the central sign that was reproduced after the first and larger one was defaced.

2016
We hold a protest silently with signs 
that welcome all who worship other gods.
A pickup ploughs the shoulder 
where we stand, kicks gravel as it stops.
We back up quiet, listening. A man in camo, 
raging, crying, leans across his passenger 
to scream his epithets: ignorant fuckers,  
we don't know shit of the animals we invite.
Who of us has watched a friend
disintegrate, arms and legs no more
than shrapnel in a blazing Afghan sky?
His mind is full of massacre.
He loved. He hates.

I want to climb in next to him,
hold him in my Nana arms until he stills.
I've heard his wounds before.
My husband keened in nightmare
when he found again among the vines
of Vietnam his comrade's boots
with nothing of his comrade but his feet.
 
I know my luck that I don’t know.
Even as the soldier curses me
in his convulsive bitterness,
I want to love him back 
from where he lives. 

2026
Ignorant fuckers, haven't you learned 
you kill the ones who survive ?

 
Nan Meneely’s first book Letter from Italy, 1944 (Antrim House) was noted by the Hartford Courant as one of thirteen important books by Connecticut writers in 2013. It provided the libretto for an oratorio of the same name, composed by Sarah Meneely-Kyder and performed twice by Connecticut choruses and symphony orchestras. Her second book Simple Absence (Antrim House) was nominated for The National Book Award and placed as a grand prize finalist in The Next Generation Indie Awards and the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award. She has been published and rejected by The New Verse News.

ABSORBED

by Theodore Eisenberg

Cy Twombly, Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, 1962. Cy Twombly Foundation via Two Coats of Paint.

When so many massacred in one 

episode, words also assailants. 

If you squint at the mourners—

feet, hands and heads break away, 

dissipate into the sanctuary’s hazy 

walls—and you begin to understand 

how families dissolve into scapes. 

 

But if you hearken with care, you 

hear cries from the wooden panels, 

whispers from the crevices. These 

the unsaid, now spoken, silences of 

once. But if you attend with a foolish 

heart, and hear song and laughter 

teem from wood and brick, you dream.

Theodore Eisenberg retired from the practice of labor law in 2014 to write. When words seem too restrictive, he paints. His poems have appeared in The Aurorean, Thema, Rattle, Slipstream Press, Crosswinds Press, Lighthouse Literary Journal, Main Street Rag, concis, Philadelphia Stories, Aji Magazine, Every Writer, Blue Mountain Review, Valley Voices, Hamilton Stone Review, Rust & Moth, The Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals. His chapbook This was published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. 

BUFFALO HAIKU

Sari Grandstaff is a high school librarian in the Catskill Mountains/Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. Her work has appeared in many print and online journals including The New Verse News, The Mainichi's Daily Haiku, the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association's Haiku in Action, and Prune Juice. 

BUCHA MASSACRE

by Cathy Hailey

Photo from the streets of Bucha tweeted by Kira Rudik, Member of Ukrainian Parliament, Leader of Political party Golos.

Dead woman 

Perfectly manicured nail

Rises from dirt.

Dead woman

Hands tied behind back

Civilian white tag.

Dead woman

Pulled by rope from road 

Avoiding mines planted within.

Cathy Hailey teaches as an adjunct in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program and previously taught high school English and Creative Writing in Prince William County. She is Northern Region Vice President of The Poetry Society of Virginia and organizes In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in PWC. Her writing has been published in The New Verse News, Poetry Virginia, The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project, Written in Arlington, and Stay Salty: Life in the Garden State (Vol. 2), NoVA Bards, Confetti, and others. Her chapbook I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth is forthcoming in 2023.

BIERSTADT'S CHIMNEY ROCK

by Bill Sullivan

on the anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre,

December 29, 1880

From the Collection of Colby College Museum of Art: Albert Bierstadt, "View of Chimney Rock, Ohalilah Sioux Village in the Foreground" (1860).

Eighteen sixty—in his Manhattan studio

Albert Bierstadt studies his year-old photographs

and oil sketches of the Great Plains and foothills

of the Rockies. He then turns to his images of 

the Lakota, the Oglala Sioux and his collection

of their artifacts. He pauses, fills his brush with

oil paint, approaches the board sitting on the easel,

saying silently, "Everything must glow, must shine

like the soft rays of the sun." He adds more dove gray

to the last of the low clouds; steps back, saying, “Yes,

it's all there and more, the luminous amber sky,

the aquamarine river, the lush green bushes

on the bank, the soft shadows, the warmest of suns."

 

And there are the two horsemen in the shallow water,

one with child mounted in front, the other to his right

relaxed, but with a rifle at his side. Far right a woman,

water to her waist, ready to do the morning wash

and on the bank three tepees, shelter for this band

and just beyond another man riding off for the day's

hunt. And all the carefree children and unleashed dogs

scattered about. It is family, clan and tranquility,

life beyond what is and will be and he knows that.

 

Knows that when he includes Chimney Rock—

a storm shaped relic of a violent volcanic past,

a weathered cone that rose some three hundred feet

above the prairie grasses and became a marker for  

the fur traders, Mormons and pioneers tramping a trail

west—to Oregon and California. Knew it when he

and the government surveying team followed the North

Platte River reached the structure, examined the gifts,

messages and drawings left by previous travelers—

determined dreamers who heeded the prophets' call:

"Go west! Our destiny!  God's will! This land, ours from

the Atlantic to the Pacific." Now the creaking oxcart

and wagon, soon the hiss and steam of the locomotive.

 

He places the prominent rocky tower in the distant

background, makes it appear insignificant,

but knows his idyllic world would soon bleed.

He did not conjure up the brutal chapters then—

the butchery, expulsion, internment, deprivation

and suffering. But his life spanned the tale. Yes, he

lived long enough to read the reports of the massacre

at Wounded Knee. Lived long enough to examine

the photos of the corpses—men, women and children—

being tossed into a mass grave—lived long enough

to ponder the photo of Chief Big Foot's frozen body

lying in the blood-soaked snow—his cupped hands

outstretched as if reaching out for his slain followers.

 

And what did Albert say that late December day?

Did he think of that halcyon scene he had painted

thirty years earlier? Did he shrug his shoulders,

conclude that it had to be, or did he weep?       

 

 

Before retiring to Westerly, Rhode Island, Bill Sullivan taught English and American studies at Keene State College, the University System of NH. He has co-authored two studies of twentieth century poetry and co-produced two documentary films. Here Am I, Send Me, The Journey of Jonathan Daniels, aired by numerous PBS stations, streams at PBS.org. His poems have appeared in numerous print and on-line publications. Loon Lore: In Poetry and Prose was published in 2015 by Grove Street Press. 

THE DIRECTOR'S CUTS YOU DIDN'T SEE

by Joseph Hope

The United States Country Report on Human Rights Practice in Nigeria, published on March 31, 2021, tepidly states that “On October 20, members of the security forces enforced curfew by firing shots into the air to disperse protesters, who had gathered at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos to protest abusive practices by the Nigerian Police Force’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Accurate information on fatalities resulting from the shooting was not available at year’s end. Amnesty International reported 10 persons died during the event, but the government disputed Amnesty’s report, and no other organization was able to verify the claim.” The US government report is seriously at odds with the CNN report reproduced above. 

A subsequent CNN report documents how the Nigerian government edited a key piece of video evidence. "The Lagos State government's security camera footage of the Lekki toll gate shooting did not capture everything."

We don't have evidence

but we have our truth.

We don't have evidence,

because it was ripped away from us 

with guns aimed at our heads.

People were shot and taken away to unmarked graves.

We have their faces crested on our hearts,

the nameless uncounted for.

Protesters waving their flags were shot in their heads

in their guts

in their backs

in all the places that could kill a man.

The numbers of the dead increases by enough.

A bullet goes through a youth's  

throat like hypens 

silencing the anthem in his mouth.

Mustapha is down. John too.

How many brothers do I have to bury 

to know how hard it is to dig a grave?

Peace and bullets ain't mixable, 

Don't you agree? 

Our blood is also red like the blood of Abel.

The dead are restless.

The dead  were shamed:

Their bodies were washed off the cameras, 

washed off the internet, 

washed down the filthy drains like shit

by the unremorseful ruling monsters?

But the dead have many tongues: so listen 

to me, you proprietor of death—

This is our Homeland!

It's our right to sing, 

think, and talk.

We will not yield

even if you level us like fields, 

and cut us away from our names and identity.

Turn us to organic manures 

and we will still grow trees 

whose adventurous roots will infiltrate your resorts (Aso Rock)

to strangle you 

and your ignoble generals.

We are too stubborn

to be wiped off clean.

We'll continue to speak underneath the earth 

until someone up there hears us.

Joseph Hope is writing from Nigeria, a student of Usman Danfodio University. His works are either forthcoming or already published in Reckoning Press, Evening Street Press, Praxis Magazine, Gemini Spice Magazine, Spillwords, SprinNG, Writers Space Africa, Nthanda Magazine, 5th Chinua Achebe Anthology, Ariel Chart, Best "New" African Poets 2019 Anthology, and many more. He's a young man running away from his name. How absurd!

MUNDUS NOVUS

by Pauletta Hansel

In this Oct. 27, 2020 photo, artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg walks among thousands of white flags planted near RFK Memorial Stadium in Washington in remembrance of Americans who have died of COVID-19. Credit: Patrick Semansky, AP via The Detroit News, December 14, 2020.

300,000 US dead, I read

this morning (old news

by the time you read these words).

This pandemic’s

in month nine, fully gestated.

The curve of it ready to pop.

My husband, the historian, 

looks across the table at me,

tells me this won’t be the last pandemic

of our lifetime, this won’t be the worst.

We’re in our sixties now. How much longer

does the next one have to find us?

Twenty, thirty years?

How many of them would we choose

to claim, years not given up to pills and tubes,

the cancer that his mother didn’t fight,

the dementia that wrote the ending

of both my parents’ stories?

I pick up again the book

that names my New World kin—

Ezekiel, Margaret—

newlywed and not among

300 grisly dead that year,

Jamestown, 1622, settlers

with their own weapons slain,

the Powhatan’s wasted dose

of our own medicine

to rid themselves of our encroaching whiteness.

Rapacious is the word

the author gives to my ancestral 

plundering of the world 

that was not new or ours,

and even now we thrust our will

across this landscape, not unlike the virus

we no longer call novel.  

Pauletta Hansel’s eighth poetry collection is Friend, epistolary poems written in the early days of the pandemic; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, and The New Verse News, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (2010-2020).

STAGING AREA

by Mark Danowsky

News of another shooting—

This time folks in a Walmart in El Paso are unlucky

I listen to the hourly recap while I wrap my ankle—seems I rolled it
in the process of loading the U-Haul

Tomorrow I’ll drive the 15’ truck 300 miles from West Virginia to almost safe
suburbs 9 miles outside Philadelphia

9 miles is the space I’ve been driving strangers all over this mad college town
more than a year now

I’ll drive strangers in the new space, too, though I hope to avoid airport staging
in spite of the possibility for decent fares

While packing, I called the $20 Walmart coffee table and the $8 Walmart shoe rack
my “staging area”

We carried that staging area to the trash earlier

Now on NPR they’re talking about a staging area outside Walmart—
families trying to find each other after the terror
forced upon them by an active shooter

I don’t know if they’re still putting children in cages at our southern border but
the images I’m conjuring are horrific enough

A man with a gun enters a public space to disrupt as many lives as he can

Another man with a gun takes a child from his father’s arms because
he says the father failed to properly change a diaper on their endless journey

Remember when we started to build that bridge to nowhere? It’s hard
to think badly of a bridge when for years now there’s been so much talk of walls

After unloading the U-Haul at the new place I’m going to get a few necessities
at the local Walmart

I’m going to go because America gets back on the horse
even if we forget what caused us to fall

I’m going to go to Walmart because it can’t be like Aurora
when the cashier at the A-Plus says I look a little like the shooter and I don’t
enter a movie theater for the next four years

I’m going to go to Walmart because sometimes
going to Walmart isn’t about class or flag-waving or quality or luxury

Sometimes Walmart means America and we just have to nod and take a knee

Mark Danowsky is a writer from Philadelphia and author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Eunoia Review, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, Kestrel, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

REQUIEM FOR THE TREE OF LIFE

by Roberto Christiano

Magnified and Sanctified be your name.

When I was a young man, full of youth
and ardor and ideals, I took modern dance
at Dance Place in Dance Alley,
Adams Morgan, the Hispanic Section of D.C.

I never was a dancer but I was an actor
and I needed a pliable body to express
my characters.

At the end of every class, Carla Perlo,
our teacher, would say, “May your names
be written in The Book of Life.”

Somehow I suspected my name would not
be on that list, not because I was a gentile,
but because I was unworthy.

But that was when America
was the America of the beautiful
Hippie spillover and such blessings,
while not ordinary, were not extraordinary.

My body is older now,
and will not tolerate modern dance
or even bend to jazzercise,
despite the willingness of spirit,
or the voice of blessing.

I think about The Tree of Souls in the movie Avatar,
a great enormous weeping willow—instead of leaves,
crystal glowing stalactites which turn a most delicate
violet pink in the night. If The Tree of Souls is destroyed,
as it almost is, it will be the end of civilization.

And now I know as I go into Saturday mass,
a week after the Pittsburgh news,
at Our Lady Queen of Peace,
that two miles down the road
at Beth El,  Shabbat is there,
and I hear again the prayer.

And so I pray in the only way I know,
to the crucified rabbi,
with death only a heartbeat away,
and eleven candles lit,
and I sing,
all are worthy. all are worthy here.

May your names be written
in The Book of Life,
May your names be carved
in the bark of The Tree of Life,
May your souls dwell in
The Tree of Souls.

Shabbat Shalom.
Shabbat Shalom.

Editor's note: This Saturday, November 24, marks the one-month anniversary of The Tree of Life shooting. 

Since then, two people were killed and two others shot in El Dorado Arkansas on October 28; two people were killed and three others shot in Vallejo, California on October 30; a woman was killed on November 1 by the same man who killed two men the day before; two people were killed and four wounded in a Tallahassee, Florida yoga studio on November 2; a gunman killed twelve people including a sheriff's deputy and wounded many more at a college bar in Thousand Oaks, California on November 7; three people were killed and another shot at a bar in Globe, Arizona on November 11; three people were killed and one wounded in a shooting at a home in Dunn, North Carolina on November 12; four people were shot and killed in Tsayatoh, New Mexico on November 13; three people died after a quadruple shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on November 14; and four people died on November 17 in 2 separate shootings in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Yesterday, two women and two men were found in a home in Philadelphia with gunshot wounds to the head; a police officer and two other people were killed in an attack at a South Side Chicago hospital; and one person was killed and four others injured in a shooting  in downtown Denver.

Roberto Christiano won the 2010 Fiction Prize from The Northern Virginia Review for "The Care of Roses." He was also a Pushcart Nominee for poetry published in Prairie Schooner. His chapbook, Port of Leaving is published by Finishing Line Press. His poetry is anthologized in the Gavea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry published by Brown University.

A MOTHER'S LAMENT FOR AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

by Shirley J. Brewer




Gun shots punctuate country music.
An endless series of ragged wounds
ruin amber waves of grain.

A damaged boy in black
takes aim behind his killer toy.
Gone our purple mountain majesties.

All the years I spent nurturing my child
dissolve in puddles of blood.
America! America!

Without solace, alone I become
a maternal vigilante.
Till all success be nobleness
and ev’ry gain divine.

A grieving parent, I want to destroy
weapons of rage throughout this land.
Oh, beautiful for heroes proved
in liberating strife.

My mission: Annihilate the guns.
Let the alabaster cities gleam
undimmed by human tears.

My child’s life matters.
Will you help me, please?
America? America?
From sea to shining sea.

Shirley J. Brewer serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology in Baltimore, MD. Recent poems appear in Barrow Street, Comstock Review, Gargoyle, Passager, Poetry East, Slant, and other journals. Shirley’s books include A Little Breast Music (2008), After Words (2013), and Bistro in Another Realm (2017).

CARRYING FORWARD

by Tricia Knoll 

I have too many funerals to plan.
That’s what the rabbi said when asked

how he handles the mourning
and mornings that come after

the worst has happened. I need a break
the physician begs, no more stinking news.

I have to practice healing all over again.
The poet chews up the words she knows

for hate and they rub raw like hand-me-down
rags, unbought, stamped like prison garb.

The child asks after the star. What night
holds the star on that building?

The parents try to say all nights, all stars,
we are all one under all of them.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who grew up in a community similar to Squirrel Hill. She regularly attends a church in a denomination whose buildings have come under violent attack for its religious liberalism and strong social justice stands.

THIS COUNTRY

by Judy Kronenfeld





        Anti-Semitism was something that happened in history,
        that happened in other places.
        —Sophia Levin, 15, Tree of Life congregant              


My immigrant father, born in Germany,
was “a little roughed up” after Hitler,
after the first anti-Jewish decrees,
was scared “once or twice” by a knock
on the door before he left for America
with his younger brother in 1934,
following his parents the year before.
Only his settled older sister and her
family made the mistake of staying
until they couldn’t escape.

Maybe in order to live
in this new country, to have
 a wife and child of his own,
my father chose to keep his sister’s story
mostly close within, his private
memorial flame. Maybe his heart
was so heavy it broke, but he wouldn’t let
it scar and harden against love, or let
a furrowed brow cloud every hour,
unlike a few whom evil terrorized
beyond hope.

All I know:  as a young child growing up,
here, in this country, I wasn’t compelled
or even invited to dwell, to imagine
the last years of those relatives
I could never meet:  the broken glass
on the streets, the stars shining
on their coats, the black engines
steaming in the station, the swallowing
fear in their stomachs, then the soup
of potato skins, the lice,
then their starved flesh and protruding bones
becoming smoke just about when I was born
on a golden, free street.

But eleven people exterminated in a synagogue,
on Shabbas morning, here, in this country,
in Pittsburgh—native ground
of Gerald Stern, Michael Chabon,
Gertrude Stein—by someone who says
All these Jews need to die, and as I rage and mourn,
a sliver of imagination lacerates
my heart with fear and makes my stomach quail,
and I can hear the heavy boots on the stairs,
the rap of knuckles on the door at 2 A.M.,
and I can see my aunt, my uncle,
my cousins whom I’ve never seen,
who were wrapped away from me
by my father’s love, who were herded
at gun point to their deaths—
arising out of the safely past and gone.

Judy Kronenfeld’s last three books of poetry are Bird Flying through the Banquet(FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Ghost Town,  Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other journals, and in two dozen anthologies. She also writes creative nonfiction, which has appeared frequently in Under the Sun, in Hippocampus, and in other places. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing, UC Riverside, and an Associate Editor of Poemeleon. 

PALELY AND FLAMILY

by Devon Balwit

after Plath’s “Poppies in October”

Palely and flamily,

we ignite beneath the skins 

we were bagged in at birth.

Waxen and bathetic

we are St. Sebastians

of pointing fingers.

We wring our hands,

familiar

with the posture of martyrs.

No god watches 

at a distance

as we load magazines

into chambers.

What an endless rat-tat-tat.

What a shrill keening.

The funeral corteges

snake for blocks.

Candles gutter in clusters.

The comfort 

we hunger for

sizzles like tiny wings.

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Rattle, Rise-Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

AGAIN

by George Held

Oct. 27, 2018 Squirrel Hill is home to a large Jewish population. Above, Tree of Life synagogue. Pam Panchak/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/AP via The Washington Post

Jews are being slaughtered again, ho hum –
In serene leafy Squirrel Hill this time

After days of pipe-bomb deliveries
To Dem bigwigs, enemies of the T***p state,

As reported by those enemies of the state,
The media; now the Jews again, those

Enemies out of central casting always
On call for the demented demons

Of domination as they once again
Focus their hatred and execute scapegoats

In the name of some Judenfrei utopia
That can never exist, because once

Judenrein, those left will turn on the weak
And most despised among them

And the executions will begin again…
So don’t look for barbarians at the gate

They already are right here inside –
Inside our borders, inside our hearts


George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017). Under the Escalator, his dark fantasy for children, came was released last month.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . .

by George Held

by Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Gun control support fades three months after Florida massacre 

—Reuters/Ipsos poll May 23 2018

This time it was going to be different.
This time the losers were going to win.
This time the good guys were named Emma
and Cameron and David and the survivor
parents were hip, articulate, determined.

And then they ran into the NRA,
the intransigent bought legislators,
the Second Amendment zealots and the
nation’s sense of titanic inertia in
favor of the status quo, and nothing changed.

The wise guys were right: No massacre, like
Sandy Hook or Las Vegas, will change
the deep culture’s love of guns and aggression,
winners and losers…plus c’est la même chose.

George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017).

A GIRL MUST BE BRAVER THAN WE EVER ASK OURSELVES TO BE

by Michael Brockley

by Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

I wasn’t surprised, just scared. Chaos hides wild cards in its holster. An heirloom is twice as valuable when broken. My hair covers my eyes as I lean into the reporter’s mic. Those saxophone solos I listened to, those mad songs with titles I no longer remember. C’est la vie. I always expected it would happen here. I can no longer tell where you begin and I drop out. I fled past the echo of gunshots. Past the corpse of my first boy friend. Before a detective outlined his body with chalk.  I used to write poems with line breaks but now I write broken poems. The time we wasted on love songs. Thoughts and prayers. Chaos slipped a joker into my purse as I smiled the way one does when monsters hold five aces. When I found the jester entangled in my last kleenex, I read on the card the vow Chaos always honors: “Let me introduce you to your bogeyman.” 

Michael Brockley is a semi-retired school psychologist who works in rural northeast Indiana. His poems have appeared in Flying Island, Third Wednesday, Gargoyle, Atticus Review and TheNewVerse.News. 

THE FABULISTS

by Devon Balwit

Alex Jones, whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, says that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”Credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times. “In three separate lawsuits—the most recent was filed on Wednesday in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn.—the families of eight Sandy Hook victims as well as an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting seek damages for defamation. The families allege in one suit, filed by Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport, that Mr. Jones and his colleagues ‘persistently perpetuated a monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.’” —The New York Times, May 23, 2018

In a post-truth world, your loved ones never died,
all 26 of them spirited back into bodies,
you, nothing more than performers of grief, hacks
for hire by unseen puppeteers. That pietà
where you held your six-year-old, confirming
his fatal wound, never happened, you expert
in manufacturing mourning. Your child’s brother
wonders how he can be told to doubt his memories,
wonders why anyone would suggest such an erasure.
Why would the President promise, I will never let
you down—but to the wrong ones, the deniers?
Fathers struggle to explain this to surviving children.
Mothers march grimly into the court house.
Twenty-six truths stand in stubborn admonishment.



Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

IVANKA IN JERUSALEM

by Jeremy Thelbert Bryant

I can’t breathe as Ivanka’s white teeth flash grin
can’t erase the whites of dead child’s open eyes
can’t forget the beautiful young man with smoke stains
can’t unsee the blurred body dropping from a bullet strike, slow
                like an elegant dancer
can’t ignore the men with kid slingshots shooting into fog

There’s Ivanka, men before her who believe in a god,
there’s cameras and applause
Elsewhere, there is death

Jeremy Thelbert Bryant is a poet and a writer of creative nonfiction. He is a graduate of the low residency MFA program at West Virginia Wesleyan College. When he is not teaching English, he is burning incense, listening to music, drinking coffee, and writing. His work may be found in Pikeville Review and Prism. He finds inspiration in the red of cardinals, in the honesty of Frida Kahlo’s artwork, and in the frankness of Tori Amos’ lyrics.

OUTCAST

a rhupunt

by Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

A Palestinian demonstrator with a slingshot is seen during a protest. CREDIT: Mohammed Salem, The Washington Post, May 14, 2018. “ZEITOUN, Gaza Strip —  Israeli forces killed 58 Palestinians at the boundary fence with Gaza on Monday, local health officials said, a level of bloodshed not seen since the most violent days of Israel’s 2014 war in the territory.” —The Washington Post, May 14, 2018.

When dreams draw near
And specters leer
I face my fear
And call the crone.

By night she stands
On sun-scorched sands.
With folded hands,
She weeps alone

For wasted lives
Cut short by knives
Where hatred thrives
On blood and bone.

I search her face
For signs of grace.
“Show me the place;
I will atone.”

She bows her head.
“To mourn your dead
You must break bread
On mount of stone

With open palm.
Present the balm
Of peaceful psalm
Where thorns have grown

On Dome of Rock.
You must unlock
The hearts you mock
In undertone.

You must unwrite
All deeds of spite
As Sarah might
Had she but known.”

Resolve holds strong
Till evensong.
I right no wrong—
Good will has flown.

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a writer, poet, and editor who taught in community colleges for more than a decade. Her tanka and bardic verse in the Celtic style have been published in England, Scotland, Canada, Indonesia, and the United States. An avid swimmer and an enthusiastic fiber artist, she currently lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA.