CITY OF ANGELS

by Raymond Nat Turner

“There is no power greater than a community discovering what it  cares about.”  

—Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning to One Another

City Of Angels where

Camouflaged kidnappers; Fascist wrecking-crews rip

Seamstress, roofer, warehouse worker, dishwasher families

Apart. Apart for private prison-profiteers. Apart for a flash-

Bang-buffoon-king of chaos and cruelty. Whose strongman

Handler has him by the short-hairs— Dancing for dollars

City Of Angels where 

Folks know that masters of misdirection mix fantasy with

Fascism. Sprinkle spectacle in with torture.  And laugh

In teargas and rubber bullets—All the way to the bank—

Stealing SNAP; Medicaid; Social Security; and veterans’

Benefits 

City Of Angels ruled by devils

Reflecting fire and ICE.

City Of Angels where everyday 

Angelenos strap on resistance

Wings— And fly in solidarity

Formations through fog

City Of Angels where

Everyday Angelenos strap on mutual aid

Wings— And fly warp speed

Through blitzkrieg. Through hurricanes 

Of big lies. 

Through whirlwinds of racist rubbish

City Of Angels where

“To protect and serve” translates into sonic boom slogans

Bouncing off buildings! Ricocheting as linked arms.

Morphing shoulder-to-shoulder. Out from unlikely alliances.

Into united fronts ten toes down! Into militant movements

Organizing and building. Mastering pressure, mastering choke-points

City Of Angels where 

Everyday Angelenos know it’s no video game

On colorful screens. Know it’s soldiers on their streets

And Marines. Know “less lethal” is Pig Latin for Palestine—

On the down-low—Cookin’ slow … Know Gaza is Raza—

Writ large …

City Of Angels where 

The streets are universities of class struggle

Attended by allies, accomplices, comrades.

The streets are universities of class struggle paved with smoking tear-

Gas canisters; bloody, rubber-coated, steel bullets. And goose-steppers

Coming for Mexicans in the morning— And back for Blacks by noon 

City Of Angels where

Everyday Angelenos hate The Orange Age—

Its latest outrage of tilted table. Loaded dice.

Marked cards. Everyday Angelenos hate the

Capitalist decay—that must be swept Away

With 8.5-hour days of resistance!

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

ANITA BRYANT’S LAST CHRISTMAS WISH

by Chad Parenteau

The problem with wishes 

is that anyone can make them.

On her last day alive, she 

proclaims, I want the world

to become an orange, with skin

so hard nobody can access its

golden treasures by way of bit, 

blade or begging. A hard swallow.

She continues. But before that, 

a pie! I want a pie to strike 

this nation with a crust of fire

and a filling of ice. And every

child of God who ever stopped 

calling or writing their righteous

mothers will finally feel shame

we could never teach. 

A final gasp. And let my last

words before joining an eternal

choir of praise in paradise 

be a whisper in God’s ear, 

a show of appreciation and 

word of advice to His design.

With that, her soul departs so fast

it would have knocked Jesus’ 

family aside on their way to Egypt.

Then in the morning, from 

Christmas to New Year’s and

beyond, the grave dancers guild

develops restless leg syndrome,

kicking under tables and blankets,

unaware they’re missing their number.

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston’s long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Pocket Lint, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Crossroads, dadakuku, Nixes Mate Review and The Ugly Monster. He has also been published in anthologies such as French Connections, Sounds of Wind, Reimagine America, and The Vagabond Lunar Collection. His newest collections are All's Well Isn't You and Cant Republic: Erasures and Blackouts. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine and co-organizer of the annual Boston Poetry Marathon. He lives and works in Boston.

MUSEUM OF CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY

by Kenneth Arthur

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

When we paid the entrance fee

the sign promised “a glimpse

into the stable genius of our future”

but when the tour guide

led us into a room

dreary, dark and a little damp,

brushed away giant cobwebs,

expounded upon the macabre exhibit,

Kitty For Dinner in water colors,

I had my doubts.

When we were issued

rubber gloves

raincoats

knee-high boots

led deep down into the building’s bowels

I knew we’d been swindled.

As tour progressed through gallery

of beautiful asses and large breasts

with interactive display

a soft mewl crept into awareness.

Before I could discover its source

we were whisked away

to view the prison full of Mexicans,

then film of disabled with full laugh track

I wanted to cry

masked people shooting up disinfectant,

forest rangers raking leaves

I wanted to cackle

golden throne atop a hill of green land,

orange statue straddling a canal

I wanted to scream

then that sound again, a whimpering,

young boy crying 

chained to the wall

just beyond his reach a door and sign:

Now leaving Trump’s brain.

Sorry, Donny. I have to save myself.

I ran for the exit.

Kenneth Arthur is a queer minister with a background in computer science and who dabbles in poetry. Several of his poems have been published in journals including The New Verse News, The Skinny Poetry Journal, and Pensive. He is also the author of Out of the Ashes: Constructive Theology for Those Burned Out on Christianity and blogs at kenarthur.substack.com. 

AMERICA’S TRUE FACE

by Jon Wesick

is orange. It is gallows on the Capitol Mall,

a pile of shit on Nancy Pelosi’s desk,

a hammer to her husband’s skull.

It wears a red tie hanging below its knees

and stores the nation's secrets

in Putin’s bathroom. It is one set of laws

for the rich and heads slammed 

into police car roofs for the rest of us.

To the snobs who suggest plastic surgery

or even a little concealer, we say

Hell No! We like America’s face just fine! 

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, I-70 Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Unlikely Stories Mark V. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception.

INCIDENT ON SALISBURY PLAIN

by Susan J. Wurtzburg

 

An orange mist; the towering rocks cried, wept 
liquid marmalade down their ancient faces.
Such desecration. For more than three-and-a-half thousand years, 
the henge has stood strong, an important place 
in the past, and for many, today. 
 
Grey pitted sarsen stones, silent above 
modern protestors, who spray orange dye
across this British site. Who are you,
puny people to destroy our heritage?

 
Susan J. Wurtzburg received 1st place in the Land of Enchantment Award, 2024, the Save Our Earth Award, 2024, and the Elizabeth M. Campbell Poetry Award, 2022, and was a semi-finalist in the Crab Creek Review Poetry Competition 2022, and in the Naugatuck River Review's 14th Narrative Poetry Contest, 2022. She was a Community Poet in the Spring 2023 Poetry Workshop, Westminster College, Salt Lake City. Wurtzburg is a Commissioned Artist in Sidewalk Poetry: Senses of Salt Lake City, 2024. Her poetry book, Ravenous Words, with Lisa Lucas will appear in spring, 2025.

THE TALE OF THE HORSE'S ASS

by Samantha Pious

In times of old (but not so old

as Greece or Rome, nor yet, I’m told,

so recent as the Renaissance)

disaster struck the realm of France:

war with England, war with Flanders,

the king’s own family prone to scandals,

mounting deficits, inflation,

civil strife, unjust taxation,

the summary burning at the stake

of enemies of church and state,

the persecution of the Jews... 

in short, the usual abuse.

But, worst of all, the royal court

was currying favor with—a horse!

This horse’s coat, it’s strange to say,

was neither chestnut, brown, nor bay,

sorrel, black, white, brindled, gray,

nor any color known today

in France or the U. S. of A.

From head to hoof, this horse was orange.

Most people viewed it with abhorrence

but some decided (whether they

grew foolish or were born that way)

to fatten it on oats and hay,

to pander to its every neigh, 

to stroke its coat with brush and comb,

to let it make itself at home 

behind the lofty palace walls,

to clean its hooves, muck out its stall... 

all in the hopes that it would give

its friends a handout. Which it did!

Sporadically, it would provide

good luck in spades. It also lied.
It lied about the coming plague.

It promised it would never raise

our taxes. It would drain the swamp.

With utmost circumstance and pomp,

it would transform mice into men.

The nation would be great again.

Ah, what a gallant, noble steed!

And it was lying through its teeth.

This orange horse (of yellow mane)—

tell us, Muse, what was its name?

Was it Fauvel, the word for “fable”?

Was there a placard for the stable

genius? Come Judgment Day,

when every horse is called to pay

its debts, say, when they sound the trump,

who will be driven by the rump

down to the fiery pits of Hell?

Say, who but Tr——I mean, Fauvel?

Samantha Pious is a poet, translator, editor, and medievalist with a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. "The Tale of the Horse's Ass" is inspired by a  14th-century French and Latin satire, the Roman de Fauvel, which really does feature an orange horse as its anti-hero.

BLOOM

by Annie Cowell

Songul Yucesoy's home in Samandag, southern Turkey was destroyed when a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck a month ago. —BBC, March 6, 2023

She raises soap sudded hands

from the washing bowl,

places them on her hips

and stretches out her aching back.

Behind her the house tilts,

crippled, less solid than its shadow, 

window frames sagging 

between cracks like craters.

On the table, rescued, somehow

unscathed, is a picture.

It is a shell-framed souvenir of life before,

when the table wasn’t orphaned

to the street. 

Now, the fruit bowl she hates

for its dull colours and chipped rim

sits beside the picture, uncomfortable,

with its solitary orange.

A white mould is beginning to blossom

on its skin.

She lifts the dying orange, 

cups it in her hands like a stunned bird

and walks the short distance 

to where her neighbours’ family inhabit

two makeshift tents, cobbled together

near the rubble of their home.

Her daughter’s friend, he of the wild eyes

and cheeky tongue, lowers his head

as she approaches, tamed and silenced

by the shame of survival.

The lump in her throat prevents speech,

so she dusts the orange 

bloom 

with her finger, takes the young boy’s hand

places the orange there. 

Squeezes. 

It’s the least, and the most, she can do.

Author’s note: Some of the events in this poem are imagined, but they were suggested by the facts in the BBC’s March 6 article “Turkey Earthquake: Survivors living in fear on the streets.” The suffering continues, even as the earthquake’s aftermath slips from the headlines.

Annie Cowell lives by the sea in Cyprus with her husband and rescue dogs. She has been published by Popshot Quarterly, Gastropoda Lit, The Milk House, and many others. She is a BOTN nominee. Her debut pamphlet Birth Mote(s) was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2022. Splashing Pink from Hedgehog Press is forthcoming later this year. @AnnieCowell3

THE FISH ROTS

by Bruce Bennett

“Since when do Republicans care more about criminals in jail than the cops who put them there? Since when do they coddle domestic terrorists? Since Donald T***p. A new report in The Daily Beast shows how the fish rots from the big orange head.” —Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, July 31, 2021

How many hurt? How many dead? 

How many at that rotten core? 

The fish rots from the big orange head. 

 

How many let themselves be led 

by what they rightly should abhor? 

How many hurt? How many dead? 

 

What was it that he did and said? 

What is it that they now ignore? 

The fish rots from the big orange head. 

 

Who should have been in jail instead 

of causing riots most deplore? 

How many hurt? How many dead? 

 

How long are we to suffer dread 

as he pursues his sick, sick war? 

The fish rots from the big orange head 

 

Whose stink continues still to spread 

through regions none can now restore. 

How many hurt? How many dead? 

The fish rots from the big orange head! 

Bruce Bennett is the author of ten books of poetry and more than thirty poetry chapbooks. His most recent full-length book is Just Another Day in Just Our Town: Poems New and Selected, 2000-2016 (Orchises Press, 2017). He was a co-founder and served as an editor of the literary journals Field and Ploughshares. From 1973 until his retirement in 2014, he taught Literature and Creative Writing at Wells College, and is now Emeritus Professor of English. In 2012 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize.

ODE TO THE OCTOBER PUMPKIN

Earl Wilcox is a regular reader and contributor to The New Verse News.

THE YEAR 2020 WEST COAST FIRES

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman 

An orange sky filled with wildfire smoke hangs above hiking trails at the Limeridge Open Space in Concord, California, on Wednesday. Photograph: Brittany Hosea-Small/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian, September 9, 2020

Sister Lou Ella is a former teacher and librarian. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker, and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015. (Press 53.)