PRACTICING FOR THE BIGLY DEBATE

by Wayne Scheer

No one ever saw a debate like this.

They tell me seven billion people

will watch me,

maybe more.

So I have to prepare bigly.

First, I’ll mispronounce her name.

Ka-MAL-a, 

Then I’ll call her 

Kamrade.

She’ll try to laugh 

And I’ll remind people how only low IQ people

laugh like that. 

I never laugh.

I smirk, sometimes I sneer.  Mostly, I grimace.

That’s manly.

She opens her mouth when she laughs.

That’s a girlie thing.  

My father once hit me in the mouth for laughing.

I hate people who are happy.

I have more money.  Money makes a person happy.

My father taught me that, too.  

Ka-MAL-a doesn’t have as much money as I have,

so her laugh is a lie.

It has to be.

My father said.

And stop feeding me all those facts and statistises.

No one wants to hear that.

My rating will drop with my followers if I spout facts.

They want red meat, not kale salad.

Do you know how much red meat has gone up

since Komrade Ka-MAL-a and Obama have been in power?

Neither do I.

But people tell me it tripled, quadrupled.

People have to feed their children sawdust 

because they can’t afford

prime rib for their babies.  I hear that all the time.

I teethed on filet mignon and lobster,

(this was pre McDonald’s) 

but children today suck on little plastic thingies.

It’s all Obama’s fault.  And Hillary’s.

Lock them up! Lock them up?

What’s that?  I’m going to debate Kamala Harris, not Obama or Hillary.

Since when?

Oh, that’s right, Ka-MAL-a.  

I get them mixed up.  Ka-MAL-a. O-BAM-a. Frederick Douglass.

Ka-Mal-a? Isn’t she the one who sat in the front of the bus

when she isn’t even black?

What? Why should keep that to myself?

You don’t know anything about ratings.  

It’s time to let me be me.

I’m President of the World and a black belt in Karate.

I trained as a Navy Seal, you know.

They say I was the best recruit they ever saw.

I would have gone to Vietnam and stopped that war in one day,

but my father had bone spurs... 

Wayne Scheer lives with his wife in Atlanta. After twenty-five years of teaching writing and literature in college, he is trying to follow his own advice and write. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his stories have appeared in such varied publications as The Christian Science Monitor, Sex and Laughter, The Pedestal, Flash Me Magazine, Cezanne’s Carrot, The Binnacle and The Better Drink.

BETWEEN THE LINES

by Paul Smith

The Trump administration last Thursday announced the repeal of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other bodies of water. The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past two and a half years. … An immediate effect of the clean water repeal is that polluters will no longer need a permit to discharge potentially harmful substances into many streams and wetlands. Photo: An oil rig docked in Sabine Pass, Tex. The repeal means industrial pollution will be able to flow more freely into waterways. Credit: Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times, September 12, 2019

Overturning the US Waters rule of 2015
Betrays our country’s best instincts to preserve our
Assets – streams, creeks, rivers, waterways, but
Many of us believe this is a smokescreen, a hidden
Agenda to repeal everything that came before 2016

Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has traveled all over the place and met lots of people. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. His poetry and fiction have been published in Convergence, Packingtown Review, Literary Orphans, TheNewVerse.News, and other lit mags.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I SPOKE LIKE A CHILD . . .

by Marsha Owens

When did he have an epiphany? she asked
unclear about how one is racist and then is not.

I know how life meanders, doesn’t march
in straight lines like VMI cadets stepping
around Stonewall Jackson’s horse, its body
stained with white and black blood before it
was stuffed and saluted, forever revered.

Her name was LaVinia, her body stout,
her words few, her work for my Mama—
clean toilets and stiffly pressed sheets,
her days long, two bus rides from Richmond
to the freshly coifed suburbs, all-white.

I didn’t know why LaVinia fixed sandwiches
for my brother and me but none for herself.

His name was Pete, lanky and dark, head bowed
to say, Mornin’ Ma’am to my Mama, Mornin’ Missy
to me, a five-year-old. His work for my Daddy—
boards nailed, shingles hauled up the ladder, laid
out just so—a few dollars at day’s end.

I didn’t know why Pete sat outside on the stoop
at lunchtime, eating his hot dog on a paper plate.

I swam in the culture into which I was born,
1950s, somewhere between slavery’s end
and the Act called Civil Rights.

I stumbled with other white people away
from horrible injustices and strode towards
desegregated neighborhoods, integrated schools,
JFK, MLK, Trayvon Martin, President Obama.

I listened and learned, read and reflected,
laughed and cried with new friends whose
memories were not mine, nor mine theirs.
No epiphany, just life. And I voted

“for the person who cares about all people,”
Daddy said in his old age, simplistic political
advice that had evolved over a lifetime
and became the politics I chose to follow.

Marsha Owens is a retired educator who still lives and writes in Richmond, VA. She voted for Ralph Northam and Mark Herring, not because they are perfect, but because their policies support "all people."

LIANG XIANGI AND I

by Devon Balwit

She rolled her eyes, and then she was gone. Liang Xiangyi, who raised her eyebrows and turned away from a fellow journalist who was asking a servile question during China’s choreographed National People’s Congress on Tuesday, has not been seen or heard from since. —The Sunday Times, March 17, 2018

Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young lady!

my grandmother would thunder, underscoring

her message with a smack of a firm palm

against my cheek. Fake-meek, I lowered lids

against hot embers and dumped my dirty dishes

in the sink. I’ve still not learned, giving in

to the eye roll just the other day when confiscating

the exam of a young man who swore

he wasn’t cheating even though his phone screen

glowed with the very words being tested.

Or when Rubio faulted Obama’s relaxing

of discipline for our most recent spate

of school shootings. I wasn’t alone

in registering disbelief at the bad faith,

eyes looping like memes. It’s hard to give

nothing away, disgust ripe in one’s nostrils.

Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

ISIL OR ISIS OR ISLAMIC STATE

by Patsy Asuncion

Image source: Aljazeera

One can be a brother only in something.

Where there is no tie that binds men,

men are not united but merely lined up.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

no matter the tag, they’re Sunnis who hate  
Shiites who dominate the Iraqi state
since Hussein departed in ‘03
"helped" by US-defined democracy.

Concerns from Mid-East neighbors,
resistance a flop since US departure –
weapons seized from fleeing soldiers,
relics smashed in the promised land
oil fields reclaimed in beat-up Iran.

ISIS eyes Syria since Assad is Alawite,
a heretic because of his ties to Shiites.
Syrian Sunnis fight to oust him
with money from Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
Emirates, Egypt, even Bahrain.

Assad fights back with his mob of brothers,
Hezbollah – holy Shiite terrorists and others.
Yes, Lebanon’s faithful kill one Sunni, another.
Then Shiite Iran’s top weapons are given
for Iraq is seen as birthplace of religion.

Are you getting this straight? Do I need to conjugate?
And what’s official position of the United States?
Obama, now Trump, decries weapons of mass destruction
(seems we’ve heard this in yet another’s election).
He wants no nukes and stable oil production,

no threats to Jews or Christians with destruction
despite Republicans heating Israeli relations.
Netanyahu came to curse nuke negotiations
with Iran, much to Obama’s aggravation.
Is fight in our nation like Islamic coalitions?

Weighing terrorist bloodshed of innocents,
what can be done to prevent more incidents?
Seeing more inter-Muslim murders a day,
should we let Allah sort it out his way
as Palin retorted, and stay out of the fray?


Patsy Asuncion’s 2016 debut poetry collection Cut on the Bias depicts her world from the slant of a bi-racial child raised by an immigrant father and WWII vet. Indiana University’s Spirit this spring, The New York Times, Prevention Magazine, vox poetica, Cutthroat Journal, Snapdragon, Loyola’s The Truth About the Fact, Reckless Writing and others feature Patsy’s writings. The only local female emcee, Patsy promotes diversity through her open mic (6900+ YouTube views) and local initiatives, e.g., Women of Color, International Mother Language Day and International Women’s Day events.

NEW DEAL

by George Held

Image source: DonkeyHotey

The Thirties, the Honest Decade,
When the Depression made the US nation
Face its ragged heart and wretched soul.

The Obama Era, the rotten eight years
When the US nation let racism,
The feral cat, out of the bag again

And refused to face its ragged heart
And wretched soul, and let them fester
Like a million dreams deferred so long

They colored the land with blood
Spurting from myriad wounds inflicted
By AK-47 or Glock 9,

And now it’s time to choose whose
Name will label the next four or eight
Years, which flawed candidate

Is toxic enough to scare the US
Nation into facing its wounded fate,
Its ragged heart, its wretched soul.


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

CLIMATE

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

At last and quite suddenly autumn has arrived. From one day to the next foliage of the many deciduous trees hereabouts has turned from various shades of green to bright yellows, oranges, and reds. Temperatures have dropped so quickly our bodies are having trouble adjusting to the cold that is not truly cold by an reasonable standards but cold for here in our Mediterranean climate, especially in the nighttime when we pile on the layers for our after-dinner walks under the bright brittle stars. Long-awaited rains have come to town, not in ample amounts so far but delivering enough water to refresh the dry throats of the streams we visit several times a week. After a long hot season of silence they murmur contentedly and sound quite pleased with themselves. Today as we hiked around the lake we saw a few orange-bellied newts venturing from their hideouts and sashaying across the duff, full of hope no doubt like the rest of us that there will be a rainy rainy season to keep their skins moist while they forage the forest floor for bits of lichen and mushroom. Meteorologists are predicting a big one, a whiz-bang El Niño year with deluge after deluge, bound to shift our attentions from the summer of unprecedented heat we have just endured to the possibility that those quietly contented creeks will turn raucous and ornery, overflowing their banks as they are wont to do in monsoon years. But just now we can do little besides wait with a certain amount of excitement about the possible end of our drought and some trepidation that we could be leaping out of the frying pan into the flood. So sweatering up we walk the neighborhoods and the woods collecting big leaf maple and liquid amber and sycamore leaves to place in a bowl on the coffee table as we did with our children when they were small. And with my hands full of colors and my heart full of children and my head full of weather I think about the worsening climate crisis that threatens to do us in and I wonder about the sapience and sanity of those of our species who seem willing to risk the future of our young and of all our fellow beings rather than kick their addiction to dead dinosaurs.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday and others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

SUPPOSE

by Carolyn Dack Maki 

A Kalamazoo woman facing a deportation to war torn Nigeria breathed a sigh of relief Monday as immigration officials decided to extend her order of supervision until May 4, 2016. The hearing in Detroit was the last chance for Rejoice Musa and Frederick, her 3 year old, American-born son. She had exhausted every other appeal to stay in the country, but this time came with the names of hundreds of people who signed a petition over the weekend and the support of Michigan Senators Peters and Stabenow. Now Musa will wait with millions of other undocumented parents in the US as the Supreme Court rules on the President’s action to help immigrants in her position. —Michigan United, Nov. 24, 2015

Suppose
that Rejoice didn’t have an electronic tether slapped on
by immigration agents whose best advice was to get married
and prevent deportation to Nigeria.
Her family’s arms are not open to her.

What if
three-year-old son Frederick born out of wedlock wasn’t a US citizen.
Nothing about him resembles “anchor baby.”
This gregarious child loved by all carries a death sentence.
Mother’s indiscretion and Western education are condemned.

And
that Rejoice wasn’t admitted to a graduate aviation program
that she didn’t have family-supporting employment
that the job anticipated through her high-ranking uncle now comes
with a calling card from Boko Haram’s midnight murder squads.

Suppose
that she wasn’t trying to abide by US law pleading for asylum.
Now she must report for detention and deportation
rampant under US policy she’s dispassionately told.
Tonight she sits with a bottle of Tylenol wondering is this is an answer.

Consider
that tomorrow she might approach a casual acquaintance
with a marriage proposal. Please, she will beg, I’ll support you.
Yes, I am using you. You can use me.
So contrary to her Christian faith.

Suppose
that she would be successful in saving their lives,
that her birth name is prophetic,
that their future could mean joy.
Just suppose.


Carolyn Dack Maki is a resident of Southwest Michigan.  A retired speech/language pathologist she is passionate about politics and public discourse.  She studies poetry at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art.

THE PRESIDENT ARRIVES IN OREGON

by Alejandro Escudé

Gary Shamblin of Winston, Ore., prepares to leave a parking lot in Roseburg in his truck displaying a sign he made reflecting his views on President Obama's planned visit to the area. (Michael Sullivan / The News-Review) via LA Times, October 9, 2015

To express the grief of a nation,
A ghost in imperial high heels.

I will not be taxed. Join or Die.
Franklin’s snake, let it fly.

Distrust trickles like water
Over the pebbles of legislation.

My musket fires hundreds
Of deadly rounds per minute.

One hears the sobbing of men
Who let the reptiles in.

Many of us believe the cross is
The cross in the crosshairs.

Here’s the split between free will
And determinism, still.

Take this box full of heads.
It is gift, from us to all of you.

The sun, in the yellow hue
Of light, over the earth treads.


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.

A COMPLEX (AMERICAN) STORY PROBLEM

by Lylanne Musselman

America has 2 many guns + 2 many assault rifles - respect for education + underpaid educators ÷ by students without discipline + a too “selfie” centered populace 2 pay attention - respect for President Obama [or anyone in authority] × a biased news media + more guns × Trump + (another) Bush + Huckabee ÷ by organized religion + climate change doubters × a polar-

ized climate + deep corporate greed - creativity in schools - critical thinking skills + more stress - genuine laughter × Reaganomics ÷ by class wars + financial stress - the middle class × mounting student debt × the working poor + prescription drugged zombies + unaffordable health care (for some) + even more guns (for more) × pro-life + votes against women’s issues ÷ by Planned Parenthood (pro-choice) - compassion - common sense - empathy for others + more and more guns × gay marriage ÷ by God + Kim Davis ÷ by Pope Francis’ U.S. visit × divisive social media threads × more social unrest + a targeted Hillary’s Bengasi + a torrid Tea Party × an un-

touchable NRA × multiple school shootings + daily drive-by shootings + theater shootings (not on the movie screen) + an anchor shot (dead) live on camera + children killing children (over a puppy) × 365 days of violence: giving even more Americans ammunition. How long will a divided (violent) country last when we keep multiplying these problems expecting an equal (safe) outcome for all?

                                                                                         
Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet, playwright, and artist. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Flying Island, The Rusty Nail, So it Goes, Issue 3, among others, and many anthologies.  One of her poems was selected for the Best of Flying Island, 2014.  In addition, Musselman has also been a Pushcart Nominee. Musselman is the author of three chapbooks and she co-authored Company of Women: New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013).

SONG FOR THE SHOOTERS

by Maryann Corbett

     

“Somehow this has become routine....”

                —Barack Obama

How this becomes routine, we cannot tell.
The bashful toddler’s ringlet-haloed head,
how early does it hear the songs of hell?

The nattering of talking heads, so shrill
it crawled inside the childish mind and bred?
How is this now routine? We cannot tell.

The silent, brooding boys who tripped and fell
down through the blacklight labyrinth of dread
whose only soundtrack is the song of hell?

We guess they held a hurt, its heft, its chill,
and gripped a fury till their fingers bled—
Routine, routine. This little we can tell:

Post office, movie theater, shopping mall,
and classrooms whence all understanding fled
ring with the screaming antiphons of hell.

What love, ringing its changes on the knell
of cell phones from the pockets of the dead,
must hear routine, routine? We cannot tell
how human ears unhear the songs of hell.


Maryann Corbett's third book, Mid Evil, won the 2014 Richard Wilbur Award. She lives in Saint Paul and works for the Minnesota Legislature.

UP CLOSE AND NUCLEAR

by Llyn Clague

Cagle Cartoons via The Tennessean

1

My heart leaps up and clangs
against a ceramic roof curved like the sky
and chunks fall down with loud bangs
when I read about the anti-’s willing to use any factoid or lie
as artillery, to shoot down
Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

I too was, and still am, at heart an anti- –
a gunner aiming at high-flying authority
since early childhood, when images of ack-ack against the bombers
flaking in the night sky
burned on my memory.  I became
an outright oppo, sometimes even frantic
over power, ever suspicious of the Bargain
made over my head, by Them, with muscularity.

But one thing my anti- was, and is – is
implacably (if belligerently) anti-war – is
never against reaching across the divide
to try, however hard, to make peace with the Enemy –
Communist or Cong, Chinese or Cheney –
who was, and is, also, always, inside.

In my heart as well (if paradoxically) I yearned,
and still yearn, to find
that, in the Other, beyond No –
a possible basis
for a collaborative Yes.

2

Tricky Dick to Beijing, Sunny Ronnie with Moscow,
but it’s Nervous Neville to Prague
that gives the anti’s their analogue.
The Iranians just might lie and cheat
like Hitler.

With their history    
of subterfuge about centrifuges,
of hiding and deceit,
I must admit
the obvious: not all pacts work out.

Adamantly I am anti- those anti-’s –
from the know-nothing yahoo
to mad Netanyahu
to the more reasoned (if political) oppo’s and sidewalk vigilantes –
who bluster, better no deal than this;
who insist, to compromise with Them is to appease;
who, if war we must – well, better sooner!

But there is, beyond rumor,
a chance they are right.

3

My heart leaps up and plinks
against a flat plaster ceiling
and flakes drift down, falling
silently as snow in sand bins.

The specter of my anti-
weakening … of losing certainty
haunts me.

Up close,
Obama’s nuclear maneuver
is not personal, like loss
of face, or fighting the self-crippling demons
you or I try to suppress, even (if dishonestly) deny.

But his, and Khamenei’s, willingness
to reach across ocean and mountain,
past each other’s “Great Satan,”
above their own intense, entrenched resistance,
to make a pact
over the defining radical of our epoch,
speaks to a personal belief, in each,
of, in the other, a humanity
that proclaims an affirming Yes.


Llyn Clague’s poems have been published widely, including in Ibbetson Street, Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, and other magazines.  His seventh book, Hard-Edged and Childlike, was published by Main Street Rag in September, 2014.

SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY

by Max Gutmann

A group of Confederate flag supporters gathered near the Oklahoma high school where President Obama is scheduled to speak Wednesday afternoon, claiming that the flag represents heritage–not racism.“We’re not gonna stand down from our heritage. You know, this flag’s not racist. And I know a lot of people think it is, but it’s really not. It’s just a southern thing, that’s it,” Trey Johnson told KFOR. Johnson drove three hours from Texas to join the protest.   —BUZZPO July 15, 2015; Photo by Steven Romo / Twitter

When I welcome you, it's the intent
That's important. If you get all bent
Out of shape with offense,
Then you ain't got good sense;
What you heard ain't the thing that I meant.

Ain't that sensible? Then let's agree:
As your host, I am perfectly free
To display one long digit
And call you an idjit,
'Cause those are endearments to me.


Max Gutmann has contributed to The American Drivel Review and other publications.

DECONSTRUCTING TEXAS

by James Penha

Jim Love’s homage to Texas, “Area Code” (1962) steel, cast iron and lead,
presently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX.

“The Texas takeover is like Obamacare death panels, or Sharia law coming to a court near you, or fluoride in the water supply. It doesn’t matter if the particular charge is proven to be completely false. Just getting the larger idea (don’t trust Obama’s feds, they want to un-cling you from your guns and religion) into the mainstream media is a victory. It validates the paranoia.” —Leslie Savan, The Nation, May 8, 2015

"Nearly every Republican in the Texas House is sponsoring a bill that would prohibit state and local officials from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples." —AP, May 13, 2015 

The every-which-wayness of tomahawking
oil drills, like Fred Astaire twerking against gravity
on walls and ceiling, does not surprise: Pan pipes after all
and the broad ten-gallon of a new Hermes
wings just above a bookend pedestal. Nor does a
chain-saw tumbleweed, nest of baby crankcases, wild
pig, arrowhead, milk bottle, longhorns and loblolly.
And at center stage a lone Rainmaker curries favor from his Lizzie;
it’s 110 in the shade on a stage a Broadway baby understands.

But that dour visage next to the lug wrench monstrance?
(Paul Frank’s simian Julius would worship a monkey wrench,
and snow monkeys swayed only briefly on Texas branches;
Iron Eyes Cody cried crocodiles for this land much later.)

No, within that overseeing mien
a Vitruvian wannabe struggles to set
his face and place the star on which
the whole of this sorry state depends.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

DEPORT YOURSELF, IT'S GREATER THAN YOU THINK

by Joseph Pacheco

A decision from the federal district court in Brownsville, Texas, has thrown the U.S. immigration system into chaos. As the Obama administration prepares an appeal in order to carry out its plan to grant a legal status to some four million undocumented immigrants, a close look at the opinion by Judge Andrew S. Hanen reveals some ... misleading or ill-informed passages. These might not have much bearing on the legal dispute in court, but they're worth addressing. If a federal judge has these misconceptions about immigration, plenty of ordinary Americans probably do too. --Max Ehrenfreund, “Wonkblog,” The Washington Post, February 19, 2015

to the tune of:




Deport yourself, it’s greater than you think,
Deport yourself, or you’ll end up in the clink.
The year’s gone by, economy’s on the blink
Deport yourself, deport yourself, it’s greater than you think.

You’ve worked at jobs no gringos want, you’re always on the go,
To make enough for your family here and the one in Mexico,
But every time you settle down and think you’ve got it made,
You lose your latest job again to another Migra* raid.

Deport yourself, it’s easier than you think,
Deport yourself, stop standing on the brink,
When you’re back home, your life will be in synch,
Deport yourself, deport yourself, have a tequila drink.

You’ll let our tomatoes go unpicked and rot upon the vine,
There won’t be places cheap enough where we can sit and dine,
Our lawns and grounds will go ungroomed, our beds will be unmade,
But you’ll be rich in your home town where no one’s ever paid.

Deport yourself, your green card’s long extinct,
Deport yourself, get back into the pink,
Your wife and kids will either swim or sink,
Deport yourself, deport yourself, it’s greater than you think.
                                               
*Immigration authorities


Joseph Pacheco is a retired New York City superintendent  living on Sanibel Island.  His  poetry has been featured several times on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Latino USA and WGCU. He has performed his poetry with David Amram’s jazz quartet at the Bowery Poets Café and Cornelia Street Café in New York City.  He writes a poetry column for the Sanibel Islander and his poetry has appeared in English and Spanish in the News-Press.  In 2008 he received the Literary Artist of the  Year award from Alliance for the Arts.  He has published three books of poetry, The First of the Nuyoricans/Sailing to  Sanibel, Alligator in the Sky and most recently in June, Sanibel Joe’s Songbook.

MEMO FROM BUSHEHR

by Paul Smith

(Reuters, February 7, 2015) - Iran's foreign minister has warned the United States that failure to agree a nuclear deal would likely herald the political demise of pragmatist President Hassan Rouhani, Iranian officials said, raising the stakes as the decade-old stand-off nears its end-game. 

The card game here
Was rigged, they said
But all paid to get in
And ante up for the small blind
Or the big one
It was the Jakarta Kid
Who said
‘Watch out for whoever’s not here’
When the turbaned gentleman
Dealt the only hand
It was aces and eights
The gents in smocks guffawed
The Jakarta Kid haw-hawed
The Brussels Sprouts all shouted
But it was the turbaned gent
Who just stared
At the two pairs
In front of him
Dealt by someone behind
Who wasn’t there
There were no winners
They all went to play
Another game somewhere
Save the turbaned gentleman
Who vanished in thin air


Paul Smith lives near Chicago.  He writes fiction & poetry.  He likes Hemingway, really likes Bukowski, the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks and Slim Harpo.  He can play James Jamerson's bass solo for 'Home Cookin' by Junior Walker & the Allstars.

FACING IGNORANCE

by Erle Kelly

“We reserve the right not to serve
anyone and I’m not serving you.”
The burly restaurant owner
points his finger at Aaron.
Three of us get belligerent,
stand up but Aaron quickly
steps in between us and the owner:
“Hey guys, let’s go; he’s just ignorant.”

In early 1963 I’m on a two-day military
pass in Mobile---a night-on-the-town---
with a group of cadet buddies.
We need a bathroom call
and find one in a public building.
“Hey Kelly, not that one, it’s Colored.”
I glance up: Men, Women and Colored
marked boldly over the bathrooms.

In the mid-Sixties, while off duty
on flight patrol, a crew member
lends me To Kill A Mockingbird.
Reading it, I can’t help but recall
what Aaron endured a few years before.

Over fifty years have passed.
I’ve lost contact with Aaron.
I wonder what he’s thinking now?
I turn the TV on to a split screen.
On one President Obama pleads
for calm and peaceful demonstrations.
On the other, Ferguson is burning.


Erle Kelly lives in Long Beach California and graduated from CSU Long Beach. He has been published in The New Verse News, Chiron Review and Silver Birch Press.  For several years he has been in a local poetry workshop conducted by Donna Hilbert, noted writer and poet in the Southern California area.

PARTIAL CLEARING

by Judith Terzi

Oscar Alfaro embraces his wife Enriquta Juarez and his daughter Gelin Alfaro after Obama’s televised immigration speech. Photograph: Jose Luis Magana/AP via The Guardian

after President Obama's speech of 11/20/14

and Woody Guthrie's "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos"

Jesús and María,
step out of the shadows,
look up at the mountain,
the cedar, the pine.
Refresh in the streams
that line your palm,
your brow. Don't stoop
in the furrows, the rows.
Rise up in the orchards,
the vineyards, the fields.
The fruit, it is sweet,
the lettuce not rotting.
Crawl out of the caverns
that nurture tristeza,
despair. The skies
are clearing, relinquish
your fear at least for now.
Gather carnations
from earth that you've
plowed, from gardens
in cities you've loved
then left. The laughter
of children, it scatters
like petals, like leaves.
Oh Jesús y María,
Rosalita and Juan,
you are not deportees.


Judith Terzi is the author of Sharing Tabouli and Ghazal for a Chambermaid (Finishing Line). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BorderSenses, The Raintown Review, Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes), TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque), and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Web. 

MANDATORY PRESIDENTIAL VACATIONS

by Mark Danowsky

Parents are getting a lot of flack
for penciling structured down time
into otherwise jampacked schedules
for children barely able to walk.

Presidents are forever taken to task
for taking vacations in hard times
since times are always hard
for Americans who never get vacations.

We want to have a beer with the President
or play a game of golf with him
or see selfies of him with celebrities
or have him take a time out from national affairs
because there is a sinkhole in my backyard.

We are mad the President isn't working
through the night. How does he have time
to drink a beer. Why is he playing basketball
or shaking hands or hugging or smiling
in a photograph with that jackass? They stand for
everything I despise. And he has not fulfilled
his promises to me. Where is my change?

They explain the President needs time with his family.
Needs time to unwind. That he has not forgotten
his job, his country, your country, our world
or your wants and needs and fears and loves
the price of milk or American lives.


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. 

PRESIDENTIAL HAIKU

by Molly Redmond

by Fragmented Beethoven on DeviantART

We sang old folk songs,

bought folk art, ate folk cooking,

then tortured some folks.

Molly Redmond lives in St. Paul, MN. She thinks that shredding the Bill of Rights was a mistake the US should not have made. She heads a peace group at her church.