A BANNER DAY IN FLORIDA

by Michelle DeRose

Alan Gratz’s “Ban This Book” tells the tale of a fourth-grader’s quest to bring her favorite book back to the school library after officials had it removed. Late last month, a Florida school district banned “Ban This Book.” A parent involved in Moms for Liberty, a right-wing parents-rights group, submitted a complaint about the book in February, alleging that it depicted sexual conduct and was “teaching children to be social justice warriors.” Though a school district committee recommended that “Ban This Book” be kept on shelves, the Indian River County school board voted to ban it last month. —The Washington Post, June 13, 2024

So thin bands of women who love 
liberty (because their heads-of-households 
told them to) banned the book 
Ban This Book. If words don’t build it, 
it never happened. Scrub climate change
from state websites and Florida’s coast 
rises like Lazarus. Certain words, like loaves
and fishes, work double miracles. 
With no gender queers, some gun 
violence disappears in a pulse. 
Requiring proof of rape for abortions 
erases abortion and rape with a stranger’s
magic wand that, waved in a yard,
transforms twelve year-olds to the most noble
profession. They might wed NFL stars,
be the next to erase abuse in their world,
just a giant pink rubber in their clutch.

Michelle DeRose is Professor Emerita of English from Aquinas College. She lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

SUPER BOWL LVII: A MEDITATION

by Greg Friedmann

“The NFL Operates Like. Monopoly Which Fortifies Systemic Racism”—Choice, February 9, 2023 

Roman numerals: so perfect to enumerate 
our annual festival of gladiators. Modern pads 
and helmets make a man’s body a lethal spear; 
and yes, Roman coliseums also had luxury boxes.  
As ever, spectators make book on the combatants
under their aegis, just as owners once wagered
on dark-skinned men compelled to box each other,
hate each other, on hot Sunday afternoons. 
Imagine, afterwards: the plantation owner,
rotund, pink-flushed from heat, bourbon, and 
bloodlust, making his happy stumbling way 
to the barn, where Missy waits, as she must. 
He says he won’t sell her if she behaves; 
she waits, prays to be good. God must be in
His heaven, he thinks, to have made the process
of creating property so damned pleasurable.

Greg Friedmann's poetry has appeared in Sky Island Journal, The Northern Virginia Review, The Poetry Society of Virginia, Cagibi, Panoplyzine, Beyond Words, and other journals.

GLADIATORS REIMAGINED

by Katie Chicquette Adams

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers suffered a broken collarbone on Sunday and may miss the rest of the season. Credit Bruce Kluckhohn AP via The Charlotte Observer, October 17, 2017.

Though the Roman Empire is long
behind us, cultural remnants survive:
we still gorge on gladiators, groomed
for maybe not death, but a definite
kind of destruction
for our distraction.
We are still the Romans
paying the gross
ticket price, shaking our heads
in something like sadness
or shock when men trained to be tough
fail to be gentle enough.



We slaver with feigned concern, 

fans susceptible to the schadenfreude
of modern athletics, anxiously
awaiting the next agile, brawny feats
performed by men of a singular will
who know that in this world,
competing is what they can do well.
They push on, pawns of passion, paid
in glory and more,
hoping for less possessive,
more benevolent owners
who will mete out compassion
over control, respect over derision
for fighters choosing feet,
knees, or absenteeism as the
musical ode to past bloody battles
unnecessarily peals, and viewers believe
theirs to be the worthiest appeals--
because who are these gladiators
to dare to think, to speak, to feel?

These 21st century warriors
we parade and glorify,
degrade and deconstruct. 

We are fiercely invested
in players whose pockets we line,
personally disappointed (though
generally unaffected)
by their platform management
by their life-changing injuries,
disrupting our coveted consumption
of physical prowess
we neither possess nor deserve,
hollering, grumbling, reminding them
it is our needs, our bloodlust
these battered and battering
contenders serve.

Katie Chicquette Adams is an educator and writer in Appleton, WI.  She is a live storyteller with Storycatchers, Inc.; she has appeared or is forthcoming in River + Bay, Mothers Always Write, Heavy Feather Review, the regional radio segment “Soul of the Cities,” and on the regional blog, Storycatchers. She works as an English teacher for at-risk young adults at a public alternative high school, with hopes they will remake their own stories. She can be reached at k.chicquette.adams[at]gmail.com

WHEN JESUS TOOK A KNEE

by Alejandro Escudé

When Jesus took a knee
beside the palm tree
and the Romans there
paused, gulped the air,
no one could believe
Pontius Pilate’s decree
that all those who
did the same, who
took a knee as Jesus
did, those dividing us,
meaning the Romans,
should be treated as
traitors to the empire
and be set on fire
or hung upon a cross
which is cut of cypress.

A vision was bestowed
to those alive, glowed
a white H upon a field,
with a ball, oval-shaped,
alighting over the center
emitted by a gladiator
below, a ball or a skull,
one couldn’t really tell
but watched it soar high
as a crowd sprang nigh
to cheer the spectacle,
the human-like tentacle,
a wingspan to the bars
and then the long limbs,
finally the head, eyes
like blackened starlight,
the man hanging there
for all to witness, bare
save for a shoulder pad
nimble and heavy, a hood
red-gold, an eagle spread,
a man who cried, bled.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

FLAG FOOTBALL

by Ed Werstein

Randall Enos / Cagle Cartoons

The president tweeted
his little whistle and threw the flag
in front of the protesting players.

For once the players weren’t
trying to call attention to themselves.
For once they weren’t stomping
or goose-stepping around the field
beating their chests with their
“I’m number one” finger
pointing toward the heavens,
or jumping into the laps of joyous fans.
They were kneeling.
Simply kneeling, to call attention
to an injustice suffered by others,
and to call attention to the fact
that they saw this as an American problem.
The problem for the president
was that they weren’t kneeling to him.
So he tweeted his whistle
as referee-in-chief, and threw the flag.
The call was unpatriotic conduct.
The president wanted the NFL renamed
The National Flag League. He wanted
the ball replaced, and a flag marched
up and down the field
in an even more war-like game
to match the militaristic fever
he wanted to stir up in the country.
Most of all, he wanted the players penalized.
He was used to people kneeling,
but right in front of him
and for a different reason.

Ed Werstein, Milwaukee, a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, was 60 before his muse awoke and dragged herself out of bed. He advocates for peace and against corporate power. His poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Blue Collar Review, Gyroscope Review, and several others. His chapbook Who Are We Then? was published by Partisan Press.

A SACRED RITE: WHEN ATHLETES KNEEL

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

                                it could have been genuflections in a church
                                but there was no stained glass    no pews
                                yet they knelt in a presence greater themselves
                                a silence    a sanctuary    on a field  
                               now a battle wages using words that pelt like stones
                                that cannot comprehend
this sacred moment   this most protected of all rights
                                to dissent     to kneel    to stand    to risk it all

Sister Lou Ella Hickman has been an all-level teacher and a librarian. Presently she is a freelance writer and a spiritual director. Her poems and articles have been widely published in numerous magazines. One of her poems was published in the anthology After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. Her first book of poetry she: robed and wordless, published by Press 53, was released in the fall of 2015.

A PANTOUM MORASS OF SOCIAL MORES

by Joe Amaral 

“He’s winning this. His critics are losing. We’re better for it.” —Tim Kawakami, The (San Jose) Mercury News, September 7, 2016. KHARTOON! by Khalid.

                                                for Colin Kaepernick


They sack their own hypocritical souls,
judging a biracial man sitting down between
Gatorade coolers, bench warmer, while
standing in safe zones chanting anthems.

Character assassinating a person-
hostile when their comfortable tedium
is knelt upon during an incomplete poem,
overheated, entwined in symbolic confliction.

Dislodged from routine surroundings, habits
of public conformity become glare and troll;
despite loafing when the flag waves on private
TV: bloviating from couches about abstract duty.

In my Catholic days I swung suffocating incense
before hearing the priest who married my parents
molested little boys. We spurned the cross in peace.
Pleas from true patriots are treated with violence.

Some only meme, righteous as sacramental fire
while buying foreign cars, clothes and smartphones
made by slave labor, then pout: THANKS OBAMA!
Colin audibles brave; to Hail Mary the fallow loam

of this country, as American as freedom can be, calling
to the knee-jerks and neutrals, even to the haters,
for a healing conversation amongst culpable toxicity—
warming a bench for enemies to connect, sit,
and see.

Joe Amaral likes to spelunk around the California central coast as a paramedic and stay-at-home dad. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in 3Elements Review, Arcadia Magazine, Crow Hollow 19, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora, Zingara Poet and other awesome places. Joe won the 2014 Ingrid Reti Literary Award. He also hiked Mount Kilimanjaro. It was epic.

GREEN EGGS & MICHAEL SAM

by Chris O’Carroll

They do not like you on the right.
You get their panties bunched real tight.

They do not like you in the game,
But you got drafted all the same.

You’re gay, and hey, you’re now a Ram,
You’re NFL, you’re Sam I Am.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in Angle, Light, Lighten Up Online, Free Inquiry, and The Rotary Dial, among other print and online journals.

CNN UNIVERSE

by Don Kingfisher Campbell

Beirut car bomb kills 8
Charred buildings, smoke in air
Chaos in the streets
Photos: aftermath of the blast
Rover spots shiny objects on Mars
Meteor lights up sky in California
Taliban threaten reporters
Beheaded for refusing to be prostitute
Dad in disbelief over son's terror arrest
U.S. contractors drunk on tape
Four women shot at Florida hair salon
Parents: man mocked disabled kid
Will Cain: Room for GOP at colleges?
Court: Fort hood suspect can be shaved
Elephant crushes Australian zookeeper
Man dumped, wins $30.5M lottery
Two-time rape victim fights for justice
Justin Bieber's mom on raising the star
McJordan BBQ sauce sells for $10K
Youth coach hits ref in face
Coroner: Heroin killed son of NFL coach
Duck lives with arrow in head
Cheerleaders OK'd to cheer God


Don Kingfisher Campbell has recently been published in Crack The Spine,
Lummox, Poetic Diversity, The Sun Runner, Poetry Breakfast, Pink Litter and
the Inner Child Press’ Hot Summer Nights anthology.  He is currently working
on an MFA in Creative Writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles.