STAYIN’ ALIVE: NO KINGS

by Roderick Deacey

Cumulonimbus clouds jostle & dominate
the dark side of the sky.
             They have gathered in towering, glowering stacks,
as ominous grumbles of thunder announce
the storm is upon us.

             Of course we ignored the signs—
we have long learned to ignore warning signs
             here at the far end of democracy,
lest one of the regime’s masked rib-breaking squads
             single us out somehow,
& fling us to the ground & kick us until our ribs break.

              So, we simply accept,
that under the hard rain that’s gonna fall,
             we will, as usual, get soaking wet.

             How did we become so sad & beaten down?
Isn’t it true that, en masse, Americans are good people?

             Perhaps racist & prejudiced, but with good hearts?

             Maybe short on critical thinking, but mostly meaning well?

Whatever—this is still America—
                          supposedly no kings allowed.

            We can put on raincoats & resistance yellow hats.
            We can wear red knitted hats like WWII Norwegians.
            We can wear turquoise knitted hats, or teal—
& many of us will wear those bright rainbow hats—
            because that’s where we stand—
& some ladies among us will dig out their old pink pussy hats
            from back when
                       the country was another country.

What we seemingly can’t do
            is decide on a single unifying hat color—
                      not a good omen.


Roderick Deacey writes many poems and is rejected a lot. James is always very nice about it, though.

PUMPKIN MAN

by David Spicer

Portrait pumpkin by Hugh McMahon

His name alone is an October
cartoon, but he’s an omen
that warns us like a hawk
swooping above black snakes
unluckier than the thirteenth
disciple who hovers like a specter.

Infamous Pumpkin Man isn’t a specter,
but he’s full of the famed October
surprises that fall on Friday the 13th,
standing in cornfields, yelling, Oh men,
oh women, kill all the snakes,
hang any women who hawk

their wares at nights and seek to hock
their babies’ souls. No, he isn’t a specter,
but real as a crawling king snake
that strikes on the last day of October.
Pumpkin Man’s more than an omen:
he’s the personification of the number 13,

betrays friends with his straw heart, as the thirteenth
disciple did at the last supper. He’s the hawk’s
nemesis, the hawk unafraid of human omens,
fearless of pumpkin men fearful of specters,
especially on the last day of golden October,
the day of lizards, of alligators, of orange snakes.

One day, it’s foretold, a ghostly stranger will snake
with a plumber’s auger the second to the thirteenth
straw in Pumpkin Man’s brain, October-
colored, like his hair that barkers have hawked
as a brand, as immortal as a specter’s
mastery of spells, sacrifices, and omens

to belie the trust of women and men.
And Pumpkin Man, alone in the field, will sneak,
or try to sneak, away in his final days like a specter
from a graveyard, and the twelfth and thirteenth
members of a boil of spiraling hawks will
grab his long red tie on the last day of golden October,

strangling him as no omen can, the thirteenth
and last time specters roam the days of October,
celebrating with the world, the snakes, the hawks.

David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, TheNewVerse.News, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, Santa Clara Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Yellow Mama,  Midnight Lane Boutique, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks, he’s the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. His latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree available from Flutter Press.

AFTER THE INAUGURATION, EVERYTHING IS PORTENTOUS

by Allison Blevins

Photo by Fletcher Gravy

I think about the absolutes of motion when I’m naked,
how a pendulum swings, how a scale unbalanced
must wobble, how my skin ripples, weight unsteadies.

Something alive is buzzing in the kitchen, leg
against leg, string against bow, the sound
of nothing, boxed and electrified.  A blackness

circles in the sky above my son’s school most afternoons.
I could say blackness as if dawn or sleep
or blood rising to air were sinister, but the feeling

on my skin is more like dust, fine and granular, settling
even in my throat.  I could say the circling and flapping
and cawing will alight as sediment, in the corners,

in the morning, after God has closed his eyes,
after God has opened them again.  My children
cannot see my body unclothed.  When I walk naked,

I am emperor.  I parade the living room, parade
an ocean of blind children.  The images they steep in
invisible.  On the playground at my son’s school

children in puffed and quilted jackets gather and ring
around a solitary boy.  The children silent, the boy’s mouth
buzzes, all the feathers, dark and rustling, fall from above.

Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte and is a Lecturer for the Women's Studies Program at Pittsburg State University and the Department of English and Philosophy at Missouri Southern State University.  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as the minnesota review, Sinister Wisdom, Pilgrimage, and Josephine Quarterly.  She lives in Joplin, Missouri, with her wife and two children.

SUNSET COMMENT ON THE NEW YEAR

by George Held

29 December 2016

It’s one of those glorious sunsets,
Like an ad for New Mexico, that makes
You feel blessed to be alive even as
Authoritarianism leaks over the horizon –
Orange and gold flames with a purple core
Over New Jersey without the seasonal
Obstruction of leaves on the trees –
What might it presage, what tacit
Message doth it bring, this dynamic neon
Peach Melba of a twilit sky? Not the Orange
Man risen from New York City towers
To loom Kong-like over even the sunset,
The sky, the compliant Universe,
The galactic figure of our tabloid
Imaginations?
And now the fire in the sky
Deepens like a Roman omen, the night
Rushes in to drape dark auguries
About the perishing republic, and we brace
For the inevitable inauguration, the sunset
A mere glowing ember in the charred evening.

George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, has received ten Pushcart nominations, including ones for both poetry and fiction in 2016. His new poetry chapbook is Phased II (Poets Wear Prada, 2016).