BEST FACE FORWARD

by George Held

Image: Selfie by Kresten Forsman

Reinvention, America’s
Most alluring cosmetic, now
Flourishes on social media.

Depressed or bored with how
You look, just change the foto
On Facebook and take a bow

With the newly enhanced you to
Wow your followers and friends;
Just watch the “likes” pile up, the “So

Cutes!” and “Awesomes!” making amends
For your blues and boosting self-esteem
Until some new rejection sends

You to take an iPhone selfie that you deem
A darling reflection of your best self-image,
Just the photograph that will redeem

You in the eyes of others, make you the rage
Of the moment on Instagram, whatever.
Yes, the chance to reinvent our visage

Proves again the genius of the founders
Of “Face”book – long may its format last
While we forever change our pictures

To meet the faces that we delete so fast
Online, blowing off each other’s horns,
That we have lost our sense of the past.

Try as we might, we cannot be reborn
Like our faces, however cosmeticized,
And inevitably age turns its scorn
 
On all of us. When you’ve compromised
Your pilgrim face and bookmarked your still life,
Your soul cannot try on another size.

George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out soon from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

ERASING HISTORY

by Janet Leahy

Image source: 7NewsDenver

"A newly conservative board for the Jefferson County School District, which is Colorado’s second-largest, raised the possibility of pruning the curriculum of books and material that could be seen to exalt civil disobedience and promote unpatriotic thoughts. Where does that leave the civil rights movement? Vietnam?" --Frank Bruni, “The Wilds of Education, NY Times, September 27, 2014

"The organization that oversees the Advanced Placement curriculum, whose history course is being defended by massive, ongoing student protests in a Denver suburb, has now said that it backs those protests. The College Board’s Advanced Placement Program supports the actions taken by students in Jefferson County, Colorado to protest a school board member’s request to censor aspects of the AP U.S. History course," said a statement from the College Board released on Friday. --HuffPost, September 27, 2014


In Colorado
students march with teachers protesting
the school board’s agenda to change
the AP history curriculum.
Why teach evolution, climate change,
the civil rights struggle, the exploitation
of Indigenous People?
Why teach critical thinking?
Just erase the chapters of the past that might
cast a negative light—
the bombing of Hiroshima, slavery.
Rip whole chapters from history books.
Red-flag for omission accurate facts
that show Americans
treating others as less than human.
The scholarship of history in question.
Yet these students
keep their eyes on the prize,
demanding an education aligned with truth,
knowing
ignorance is not bliss.


Janet Leahy writes poetry in New Berlin, Wisconsin.  A member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, she has two collections of poetry, The Storm, Poems of War, Iraq and Not My Mother’s Classroom.

THE ARTHUR MURRAY STUDIO IN MOSUL

by Christopher Woods

Has gone dark and quiet and sad,
But still the dancers come,
All ages, both sexes, sit in chairs,
In circles, or in lines facing each other,
No longer allowed the art of movement.
But imagination still breathes deeply
As they imagine dancing a polka,
Foxtrot, recall the smiles of partners
Taking each other’s hands, or holding
A lover close as a song ends.
No music here now, but who can forget
A glorious Strauss waltz, a sensual samba.
Still, they cannot, will not, surrender.
So in the ballroom gloom,
They silently, defiantly,
Hum Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Over the din of madness
In the street outside.


Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Texas.

AND SPLINTER

by Mark Danowsky

Image source: CNN, September 22, 2014

Obama Says Airstrikes Go Beyond ISIS --NY Times, September 23, 2014

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

History is a lesson in repetition.
I know I’ve heard that said before.
Just like I’ve heard about us arming
and training rebel groups before.

Later, it almost goes without saying,
we will be forced to send more troops,
our troops, guns to combat guns
we sent the rebels we trained
since now they’re in charge
and causing us problems
because they will not give up
guns or beliefs
for our idea of democracy.

Look, we do what we have to
for others, in a well-known exchange
of autonomy, independence, hell
even free temptation
to be insular, given the dynamic
nature of our global community.

It’s an exponential market out there.
No one wants to be picked on
today, check out foreign policy
in Switzerland and France.
Most of us want greater good
in spite of mistakes made
and made again
in pursuit of good.

Evil cares little for mistakes
finding factious home
among the fractures
becoming legion
as we must in desperation
to eradicate this menace
by division.

Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The New Verse News.  His poem "5am Summer Storm"won Imitation Fruit’s “Animals and Their Human’s” Contest, in 2013. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently lives in a van down by the Susquehanna River. He works for a private detective agency and is assistant copy editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. 

A REDSKIN FAN TAKES OFFENSE

by Chris O’Carroll

RICHMOND, Va. – Three Virginia lawmakers have formed the “Redskins Pride Caucus” in an effort to help Washington Redskins keep the nickname some people deem offensive. --CBS6, June 23, 2014

They gave my team a trademark on its name,
But now they say they’re snatching it away.
Political correctness is their game,
And Injun giving is the way they play.

I want my team to sound badass and scary,
Like warpath savages with tomahawks.
I want every opponent trembling, wary,
Fearful of brutal tackles, sacks, and blocks.

Since “Redskin” is a byword for ferocity
(I’ve seen the Westerns, so I know the score),
To change the team name would be an atrocity.
In fact, I am convinced there should be more

Franchises getting ethnic in your face --
Spearchuckers, Wetbacks, Spades, Bogtrotters, Chinks.
There’s big-time juju in names based on race.
Who cares what some Cochise or Tonto thinks?


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  His poems have appeared in Literary Review, Per Contra, Shot Glass, the Spectator, and the Washington Post, among other print and online journals, and in the anthologies The Best of the Barefoot Muse and 20 Years at the Cantab Lounge.

HE WON MAJOR SCORN

by Jan D. Hodge

Image source: Chumpmonkey's Electronic Cartoonatorium

There was such acid in his smile
And such hardness in his thought,
It was no wonder what deep chill
His conviction brought.

Never considering that words
Extracted from attitudes adjusted
By stress positions and waterboards
Were not to be trusted,

He spoke with infinite scorn
At those who discredited his view,
Lip curled, sullen and smugly stern,
Unbeautiful, untrue.

Not one to retreat from truculence,
Even a change of heart changed nothing.
We are vexed at such intransigence
And such deep loathing.


Jan D. Hodge has had poems published in Western Wind (5th ed.), Writing Metrical Poetry, and many print and online journals, including North American Review, New Orleans Review, Iambs & Trochees, Defined Providence, IthacaLit, and South Coast Poetry Journal.  His double dactyl renderings of Shakespeare, nursery stories, and tales from the Arabian Nights have appeared in the American Arts Quarterly website, Lavender Review, Off the Coast, Light Quarterly, Kiss and Part, Poetry Revolt, and Umbrella Journal.  The title of this poem anagrams John Crowe Ransom, whose "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter" obviously served as the model for the poem.