NEWSPAPER RUBBER BANDS

by Peter Henry

I miss newspaper rubber bands
The useful stash in the kitchen drawer
I miss the thud on the driveway
Promising hours of reading—
Detailed stories, facts, interviews, and opinions
Often fertilized by Deep Throat sources
Dropping follow-the-money clues.
With no heft, no will to fight the empowered villain
Mainstream media caved in to threats and paid $15 million

I miss fact checking and shame heckling
The sting of a snapped rubber band on bare skin
I miss the retreat from deceit
When waved newspapers cleared smoke
From smoldering embers
Tended by nefarious dissemblers
I miss the pink fingers of editorial endorsements
Now dead and blue from binding bands
Stretched over them by fat wealthy hands

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

Peter Henry is a retired information technology specialist and former high school English teacher. Besides poems, he writes songs, builds musical instruments, and explores the outdoors. A father and husband, he lives in Northern California with his wife.

LIKE GOLD

by Karen Olshansky

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records on Dec. 7, 2021, in a storage room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that had fallen over with contents spilling onto the floor. Justice Department/AP via TIME.

In front of deep yellow drapes

on the stage of the gilded ballroom

stacked in haphazard rows

in the marbled powder room

under the crystal chandelier

behind the commode

piled high like cardboard towers

in a storage closet near clothing 

wrapped in cleaner’s plastic

spilled like a garbage can ransacked 

by raccoons in cartons overturned

with scattered yellowed 

newspapers and photos:

precious papers,

secrets that protect, that keep 

us safe, that the braggadocio

hordes for his own pleasure and profit,

a man protected by

slavish minions

and deplorable citizens 

in thrall to an UnAmerica.

Karen Olshansky lives in Marin County, California with her husband and a well fed Koi named Pickle Face. She writes poetry in order to maintain her sanity. Her work has appeared in The Literary Nest, Tuck magazine, The News Verse News and the anthologies Lingering in the Margins, Unsealing Our Secrets, and Unspoken.

FLASH NEWS

by Angelica Whitehorne

I heard there was a time when the news was dropped off at your front door, tightly wrapped like a present of sorts and printed with dark black importance on the backs of dead trees, your unrolling of the world’s enrichment, the first sacrifice of your morning, right after sleeping, the last sacrifice of night and right before your first ritualistic kitchen devour. And I imagine how these readers of past would go to find a place, probably the same place as last week, and flap open the butterfly wings of the newspaper, nonchalantly hungry for the best worked happenings, so they could go into the talks of their day feeling primed, well read, and ready, aficionado on stock prices, lost dogs, drug scandals. And how sweet it must have been to read the typing of the world, curated and succinct. And even more how sublime it must have been to have it all end, to put the paper down and be done with it, close your shades to society and its grimy violence, back deals, syrupy success stories, headlines of hazard. To go about your day untethered to it—now the news envelops us always. I open the app to see my friend’s faces and there it is, news of a baby falling from a 12-story building. I scroll to my home screen and Apple positions all the world’s affairs in front of my eyes, and it is like lightning across the window of my phone, who could manage to look away? Our world is like a car crash, no like a highway pile up, and all these news sites are like watching the fenders collide into each other over and over again. The notifications announce themselves to me this midday and I see that another story of nature’s revenge, hurricane or tsunami or landslide has come, I slide the message away, but I do not turn them off. Turning them off would be like turning away from the awful. I grow guilty whenever I do not hold the tragedy of these stories second hand, continual consumption seems the least I can do. Me and my entire generation have lost our ability to put the paper down, and so we read from morning to night and roll it all over a second time in our dreams, almost as penance for the bad news not having our name in it. 

Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.

WHERE WOULD THE KARDASHIANS BE WITHOUT KRIS JENNER?*

by Ron Riekki

'I will never replace his beloved mom': Kris Jenner promises to 'always love' Kanye West like her own son in touching note for Mother's Day —Justin Enriquez and George Stark, Daily Mail, May 11, 2015

When newspapers died,
their son
took over
the business
and he liked boobs,
so he’d write
obituaries
about boobs
and show boobs playing
golf
and he made the weather report
a boob weather report.

The boobs
appreciated the fame.

In the old days,
boobs couldn’t be
involved in politics,
but now boobs
run for President
every year.

When the newspaper industry
died,
it was from all of those years
of smoking,
or,
excuse me,
sucking,
all of those years
of sucking
all of the air
out of the room
to make room
for the boobs.

Here’s a news
flash.

Here’s a news
peep show.

Here’s a noose.


*NY Times Magazine headline, May 8, 2015

Ron Riekki's books include U.P.: a novel, The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), and Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (MSU Press).