TROMPE-L’OEIL

by Suzanne Morris

Whenever I look at the

portrait of him 50 years ago

peering out from beneath

the smart billed cap

of his U.S. Army

dress uniform,

his eyes seem fixed on

grim reality:

he was drafted just before

his 25th birthday

during a war that he

already suspected

we should not be fighting,

and the casualties were

mounting at an alarming rate.

What a relief when he was made

a levee clerk in the Medical Corps,

posted at Fort Lewis, Washington.

Yet... sending others into action

while remaining safely behind

left its own set of scars.

Long after the war was over,

he suffered nightmares

of being under fire in Viet Nam.

I would lay beside him in the dark,

transfixed as he described

in terrifying detail

the first-hand experience of

a combat veteran.

This year I watched the

Memorial Day Concert on PBS,

with patriotic music and

stories of valor—

a resounding tribute to all who had died

defending American ideals

over the last 250 years.

By the time the show closed

with a haunting rendition of Taps

I was clutching his picture

against my heart,

knowing how grim

his face would be

had he lived long enough to see

the abdication of those ideals

by a President afflicted with

gilded bone spurs,

and thinking ahead to the

taxpayer-financed military parade

scheduled in Washington, D.C.

on June 14th,

a faux tribute to the U.S. Army that is

sure to make Trump’s pal Vladimir

red-faced with envy.

Anyone who dares to crash Trump’s

45-million-dollar birthday party

will be met with great force

as in the case of the protests

against his immigration raids in L.A.,

drafting U.S. troops

to engage in a war

they should not be fighting.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, and a poet. Her poems have appeared in online journals including The New Verse News and Texas Poetry Assignment, and anthologies including The Senior Class - 100 Poets on Aging (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024). A native Houstonian, she has resided in Cherokee County, Texas, since 2008. 

FOR GEORGE FLOYD

by Donna Katzin

In the streets of Minneapolis                                                            
fires, flashbangs rip night from slumber
as marchers breach barriers,
swell down 27th Avenue
to the Third Precinct.

From its roof, gas wrings tears
from eyes that thought
they’d cried themselves dry,
chokes lungs that burn for breath
in memory of George Floyd—
unarmed, pinned like a sacrificial lamb
by four white men in uniform                                            
for seven never-ending minutes            
while a knee to his neck slowly squeezed
the last air from lips pleading for his life,
gasping Eric Garner’s last words—
I can’t breathe.

While he worked, the cold killer stared into the camera      
of a seventeen-year old brown-skinned girl
who may never graduate from nightmares.

For black mothers, fathers, sons, daughters
terror hangs like a hungry noose.                                                                  
Never takes a vacation.
Refuses to sleep.

It’s not that every officer is a murderer.
It’s just—you never know.


Donna Katzin is the founding executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa. A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing. Published in journals and sites including TheNewVerse.News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

A RUMOR OF GHOSTS

by Howie Good

Hundreds of protestors gathered outside the Ohio Statehouse on Saturday, April 18, 2020, calling for state officials to lift restrictions now, including this car with an anti-Semitic sign. (Laura Hancock / cleveland.com)

They seized you at your home
and dragged you away,
and though we searched for you in the after years,
we found no trail or trace.
It was as if you had never really existed
but were always only a false memory,
a rumored ghost.

I also am as nothing,
and whether I shamble along the street
or stumble up the staircase,
whether I pray to God for preservation
or curse him for the inventiveness of his cruelties,
the same ancestral nightmares repeat –
swastikas smeared on synagogues,
bearded Jews harried through the streets,
hearts shoveled like coal into the fire.


Editor's Note: Today, April 21, 2020 is Holocaust Remembrance Day—Yom Hashoah—in the United States. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.


Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

MIDDLE-SCHOOL HALLOWEEN PARTY, 1978

by Melissa Balmain

"Millions of kids haven’t lived through a school shooting but fear that they will" —The Washington Post, March 1, 2018 Photo: Students decry gun violence outside the White House on Feb. 21, 2018. (Alex Wong/Getty Images via The Washington Post)

"Absolutely no costumes with weapons, including plastic ones. Masks and fake blood are not allowed. Carefully consider the appropriateness of your costume in a school setting."

—2018 email to Brighton, NY parents about middle-school Halloween parties.

We were vampires, ghosts, and devils,
squeaking Nikes on the floor,
vying with the Hulks and Batmans
over who could drip more gore.
Masks and weapons? How we loved them—
cowboys, Jimmy Carters, clowns,
dancing as we downed Doritos,
relishing the night our town’s
ever-mortifying fishbowl
dimmed for once—our parents’ laws
powerless to keep grape soda
from our orthodontic jaws,
powerless to stop our noisy
bouts of gleeful mimicry
while we battled like Darth Vader
or the ChiPs from NBC. . . .
Home in bed, our darkest nightmares
never hinted at the ways
Halloween would free our children
from their ordinary days.


Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award) is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

THE BORDER FAR AWAY

by Jennifer Davis Michael





My son is white like me, the border far away.
According to his papers and my scar
where forceps dragged him earthward, he is mine.
We don’t discuss what’s happening down there
—I mean, down at the border. He’s just six.
He’s learning how to swim. A patient guard
shapes his flailing dog-paddle to a stroke
that might cross rivers. She lightly pins his feet
to bend his body to a diving arc.

“Far away from home, it looks like darkness”:
his random comment on the vegetation
we speed past on the way back from the pool.
He sleeps that night, surfacing only once
from nightmares of the house crumbling around us.
I guard the borders of his innocence,
my trigger-finger on the remote control.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Professor and Chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Her poems have appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News and also in Mezzo Cammin, Literary Mama, Cumberland River Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. 

SMOKE SIGNALS

by Betsy Mars

In the town where the Pilgrims settled, members of Native American tribes from around New England gathered for a solemn National Day of Mourning observance. Thursday’s noon gathering in downtown Plymouth, Massachusetts,  recalled the disease, racism and oppression that European settlers brought. It’s the 48th year that the United American Indians of New England have organized the event on Thanksgiving Day. —boston.com, November 23, 2017

Released, the dream where the pipe broke,
dumping oil into the water table.
Oil and water don't mix.
In another, the peace pipe
is passed, but one person,
or even a whole class,
refuses to share

or worse still—
turns it into a war drum.
Sticks and stones might break
my bones but names will be
thrown around haphazardly

igniting flames, festering old wounds,
clouding the discussion.
Run interference and divert.
Take up the cross. Toss that medicine,
man, unless you can afford it.

When you're on the trail
of tears, rub salt in the wounded.
Kneeling is a sin before football,
but not before God.

In God we trust, unless we're native
American, or any “other.”
The dreamcatcher is broken;
nightmares run rampant.

Betsy Mars is a poet, educator, mother and animal lover who spent part of her early childhood in Brazil. This experience led to an early awareness of income disparity, linguistic and cultural differences, as well as a love for travel and language. Her work has appeared in The Rise Up Review, The California Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among others. 

IN THESE DESPERATE TIMES

by Joan Mazza 

Image source: WikiHow

I’ve taken desperate measures.
In my bedroom, I’ve hung a horseshoe
to prevent nightmares. Perhaps
I should take down the feathered
dreamcatcher gifted by a right-winged

lover. In these times, I say rabbit each day
on waking, consult the oracle
at the east end of the pond. It hops
away on Basho’s splash. I’ve taken up
a forked stick to walk the property
and search for water. It dips

everywhere. Pointing to the four directions,
I’ve drawn the number 8 in the ground,
added pebbles to the grooves—insurance
of good luck. Time to replenish my stock
of supplies. I’ve eaten through

my stash of dry and canned goods bought
when I feared Ebola, used up the sprays
for killer bees. I’ve dumped all the pots
with collected water for mosquitoes
breeding Zika. On my head, I plan

to make a nest to wear a ferret or a rat,
train it to defend my chastity and sacred
honor. I wear clothes inside out, careful
not to break a mirror, know empty vessels
rattle loudest. I drink quiet to calm down.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Slipstream, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.