A PRESIDENT SO VILE

by James Penha

The New Yorker, July 20, 2020

"The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday." —The Washington Post, July 19, 2020

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” —Sherlock Holmes

If America were ever
to have a President so
vile and blasphemous

to his oath—to preserve

and protect—he’d seek

at every turn of a poll

by means unfair and foul 

to dwindle rival voters

especially those of color…

should a pandemic come

to rage, like him, against

minorities and raze the poor

particularly, might he not ignore

or even encourage a plague

he deems allied to his future?

James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .

MY HOMELAND'S SOUL

by Probal Basak




Just when fatigue of standing in queues
for life, for livelihood, for identity,
and for law-enforced kinship of all three
made me feel drowsy;
scary desks banging of democracy
spoiled the rest, waked me up.
Drenched in sweat in cold December
tired legs carried me in front of the mirror
to see how I look, what I wear;
frightened heart made me check my names,
what I eat, how I pray.
As if something precious, very precious
was being taken away.
No, it was not something.
It was the soul, my homeland’s soul
that was thrown away.

Author’s Note: As thousands of people have been arrested, and at least twenty-three people have been killed in the last ten days, as police tried to quash widespread protests over a new citizenship law in India that grants citizenship to religious minorities—except Muslims—from neighboring countries, I write to register my protest.

Probal Basak, 31, from India, started his career as a journalist working with the Press Trust of India and Business Standard covering mostly socio-political issues. He now writes poetry and his recent works have been published in journals such as Dissident Voice, TheNewsVerse.News, and Setu.

GYRATIONS ON THE NATION-STATE: A MOVEMENT IN STRINGS

by Diane Raptosh


 

Any man who stands

                  near a place the U.S. bombs

                                    is straight off

                                                      Enemy Combatant :

                                                                        One might call this

                                                                                          standing while war.

                                    Still I have yet to speak

                                                       of this in any classroom, yet to speak

                                                                        of nature recently freshened

to Brand: Wilderness™

                  as new world currency;

                                    I’ve yet to point

                                                      to the system

                                                                        of criminal justice

                                                                                          as so many schemas

                                    evolving in tandem;

                                              yet to point

                                                          to higher ed as host

to new mall cities,

                  not to mention

                                    the privatization

                                                      of all that used to be part

                                                                        of the Commons :

                                                                                          schools, public works

                                    parks, fire

                                                      departments  :   soon enough

                                                                        the postal and ambulance service,

Medicare / Medicaid.

                  The making public

                                    of the formerly private :  the orderly

                                                      outsource of chi

                                                                        to handheld devices,

                                                                                          the offshore of memory

                                    to the machine—

                                                      the shower, last bastion of solitude.

                                                                        They don’t have ears

and yet spiders

                  will shake

                                    their strings, reframing

                                                                        vibrations other

                                                                                          arachnids feel

                                                                                                            when leaves

                                                      they’re standing

                                                                           on quiver.  Whatever :

                                                                                         Thoughts glide in

on rhythmic pulses,

                  nothing like

                                    linear-sequence flows

                                                                        we’ve been taught

                                                                                           to instill   drill in   construct

                                                                                                            and there’s something

                                                      mugged about all

                                                                        the states’ answers—somehow

                                                                                          violence-airbrushed,

thesis statements sticking

                  to their guns.

                                    To take in scenes

                                                                        like stands

                                                                                    of weeping birch trees

                                                                                                      asks for a wholeness-synthesis-

                                                         simultaneity, so here

                                                                          I’ll smuggle in

                                                                                          a smithied image:

 pinnate leaves—

                  ridged like vaginal walls

                                      to fetch the attention

                                                                        of winds. Still listening?

                                                                                          I’m a little down

                                                                                                            about every system

                                                         of ranking, down on

                                                                        the quantification

                                                                                          of no end of thing     ~~    quick

name the quotient

                  of a cubed human squeeze  ~~

                                    down about

                                                                        the billionaires’ balls-out-incursion

                                                                                    into food/earth. Water/air.

                                                                                                      Furrowed vaginas. Against that

                                                      junta of generals

                                                                        hunched in power’s tower

                                                                                          graphing the next class war/

world war what-have-you.

                     And while I’m on a roll,

                                    might I gently suggest

                                                      the conscious uncoupling

                                                                                          of market from self? Of big-league

                                                                                          fake from the real?

                                                      This is to say that if over all

                                                                        I seem at a hard bloodboil

                                                                                                      against most scenes like state

-by-state financial cleansing, or floored

                        by the foreground status

                                    of the mock-up self—the world-scale

                                                                        rape of hallowed, heaving truth;

                                                                                          the statutory frack

                                                                                                            of commonplace terms

                                                like entitlement,

                                                                        political correctness   liberal bias;

                                                                                          states’ rights   law and order

sexual preference;

                      Shariah Law   illegal alien

                                     and food stamps  ~~ as if welfare

                                                        meant actual transfer

                                                                        of wealth to minorities. It’s mostly due

                                                                                          to the ways reigning narcissists

                                                      vivisect language

                                                                        to more or less moon you.

                                                                                          This sort of act’s

moral errancy actually lifts them,

                  how the Fed early

                                    this month huddled in

                                                                        to hoick up its rates.

                                                                                          Which brings us

                                                                                                            to the housing crisis,

                                                      the files of rank poverties

                                                                        birthed by nation-state’s neglect,

                                                                                          the Reichwing crew busy

blading their hands in a bid

                  to remake Magnate Nation more openly

                                    vampire-wan. I think

                                                                        I was saying that if I seem

                                                                                          not entirely myself

                                                                                                            you’ll have to forgive.

                                                      I’m pretty sure

                                                                        my sole choice now

                                                                                      is to become an expat

                  of the exterior.

                                    Step into here.

Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press) was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016), the highest literary honor in the state. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Canada. A highly active ambassador for poetry, she has given poetry workshops everywhere from riverbanks to maximum security prisons. She teaches creative writing and runs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at The College of Idaho. Her most recent collection of poems Human Directional was released by Etruscan Press in Fall 2016.