PRESIDENTS' DAY 2025

a villanelle

by Susan J. Wurtzburg

 

I sit, eyes wide-open, blank gaze,
Slow-panting dog at my back,
Ssh, ssh, soft breeze brushes hair.

 

Newsprint on the breakfast table,

Flaming pain bleeds white-and-black,

I sit, eyes wide-open, blank gaze.

WWII 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯 revival, a font label,                           

Brutal as “heil,” a trigger pull’s whack,

Ssh, ssh, soft breeze brushes hair.

 

Dog paw pastiches toes, under table,

Brings heart into mind’s teared track,

I sit, eyes wide-open, blank gaze.

Incomers, like me, toes under tables,

No papers safeguarding their backs,

Ssh, ssh, soft breeze brushes hair.

 

Blitzkrieg anew, focus: all of our vulnerable,

Let strong voices rise, we need to roar back,

I sit, eyes wide-open, blank gaze,

Ssh, ssh, soft breeze brushes hair.

Susan J. Wurtzburg has won or placed in several poetry competitions. She is a Commissioned Artist in Sidewalk Poetry: Senses of Salt Lake City, 2024, and an Associate Poetry Editor at Poets Reading the News. Her book, Ravenous Words, with Lisa Lucas will appear in spring, 2025.

ROTATED

by Richard Garcia

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

You will be rotated. You will be rotated in ways you did not foresee. You will be walking casually away in one direction and then find yourself walking casually away in the opposite direction. Do not be alarmed this will only be a test. If this were the real rotation you would not be able to read this because your eyes would be rotated. Do not attempt to curry favor by accepting your rotation—your acceptance will be rotated. You will find yourself in a line of concentric circles that spiral along the border. You will be rotated toward checkpoints where tall, broad-shouldered men wearing military caps and mirrored aviator sunglasses, with belts cinched below their bellies and pistols strapped to their hips are waiting to inspect your papers. You will be rotated into newly constructed barriers where bullhorns will declare, Y'all git along now, you folks gonna be rotated and all your people gonna be rotated, your children gonna be rotated and that's how it's gonna be now and forever. 

Richard Garcia's poetry books include The Other Odyssey (Dream Horse Press, 2014), The Chair (BOA 2015), and Porridge (Press 53, 2016). He has received a Pushcart Prize and been in Best American Poetry.

WHITE PAPER

by Alexis Krasilovsky

Photocollage by the poet.

Blank sheets of white paper were a symbol of defiance over the weekend as Chinese protesters braved likely prosecution to openly oppose the government's policy of zero tolerance for COVID and public dissent. —Newsweek, November 28, 2022.  China has rolled back its most severe Covid policies—including forcing people into quarantine camps—just a week after landmark protests against the strict controls. —BBC, December 7, 2022

the white hibiscus

moves in solidarity

with the protesters

who hoist white posters

of invisible slogans

perfumed with freedom.

Alexis Krasilovsky was born in Alaska, survived sexual assault at gunpoint, knows what it’s like to be completely deaf, and has traveled to over twenty countries. Educated at Yale and CalArts (MFA Film/Video), Krasilovsky is the author of “Watermelon Linguistics: New and Selected Poems” (Cyberwit – finalist, 2022 International Book Awards) and other books. Her award-winning poetry film, "The Parking Lot of Dreams" (2021) has screened in over a dozen festivals worldwide.

THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HOUSE LAVATORY

by Peter Nohrnberg

Now gather round, and ye shall hear

A tale of epic daring

About a King who tweeted lots  

But wasn’t into sharing.   

 

Forsooth it was a vile Act

That drove him into battle:

“Preserve all Records” Congress bade;

But records are known to tattle. 

 

At first he simply tore them up

But a Northern Plot took shape.

Foul thanes restored his mangled foes,

mended with Scotch tape. 

 

A vision came to aid the King

—O I fear my rhyme shall spoil it!—

To gather up his papers dear 

And take them to the toilet.

 

Now he himself sat on a throne

Of 24 karat gold,

But in the White House was installed

A porcelain commode. 

 

Notes, memos, logs, and Post-its too

In basin he did pitch.

A smirk upon his face, quoth he:

“Toilets never snitch!”

                                   

He flushed it once, he flushed it twice,

He cursed the gods above!

And with his little stubby hands

He gave a forceful shove.

 

Who knows what knowledge then was lost?

A proof of Fermat’s theorem?

Evidence of Electoral Fraud?

A Covid-19 serum? 

 

What was wiped out I cannot tell:

Mum’s the Orange Mandarin.

Destruction worse than what befell

The Library Alexandrian! 

 

The doughty deed now done he left

The toilet overflowing.

He soared above the effluvia,

POTUS the All-Knowing.

 

And yet he did not know when he

Flushed it all down the crapper,

That squatting in the stall next door

Was CNN’s Jake Tapper! 

 

Out burst the newsman, overwhelmed

By fast approaching flood,

He saw the thickening of the tide

And sensed it was not mud!

 

“Who brought on this catastrophe,

Who took this massive dump?” 

The scales then fell from Jacob’s eyes:

It only could be T***p.

 

For clinging to the leather sole

Of the shoe of Squire Tapper:

A doodle of two giant boobs

On a McDonalds wrapper.

 

It was the flush heard round the world,

Except in Mar-a-Lago.

About his deed he’ll tell no tales

Just like good old Iago.    

 

‘Tis true, ‘tis true the Don is dumb,

But everyone else is dumber;

He even one-upped Tricky Dick

By being his own Plumber!

A scholar of literary modernism, cultural critic, and poet, Peter Nohrnberg’s poems and essays have appeared in Southwest Review, Notre Dame Review, The Wisconsin Review, Oxford Poetry, and Public Seminar. His poem “Pantoum After a School Shooting” was awarded second place in the 2020 Morton Marr Poetry Prize. His essay “Joyce, Irish Photography, and the Making and Publicizing of National, Familial, and Authorial Images" is forthcoming in Joyce Studies Annual 2021.

DISTANCE LEARNING

by Scot Ehrhardt

To my seniors in Literature and Composition class, Spring 2020

You aren’t alone in missing milestones.
I had a kickass poetry unit planned for April
that might have changed the way you existed
in the world--at least, the world before.

I’m not sure what you did learn. Maybe
that rites-of-passage bend and blear,
walking an evening labyrinth in
a poorly-made gown. Maybe
that Patience is too timid a virtue,
that you should have held prom early—
on the driveway of your first love,
something acoustic on Bluetooth—
and danced in the bursting light of forsythia.
You could have touched someone longer,
when people touched.

Bluetooth is the opposite of poetry.
You would have learned that in April.

I’m afraid to open the door again,
to a preserved mid-March classroom—
what papers I left, the withered
potted plants, the perfunctory chalk
message that was supposed to be read
by you, who have long since moved on
and maybe understood something new
this April, though it won’t be poetry,
not like it would have been from me.

Scot Ehrhardt writes and teaches in Baltimore, MD. His first collection of poetry One of Us Is Real was published in 2016. He has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Tidal Basin Review, Switchgrass Review, and Lines + Stars. He supervises two journals for young writers: The Mill and Lexophilia.

ROOSTER

by Richard Garcia

Hand carved & hand painted rooster by Avelino Perez from Oaxaca, Mexico

Ricardo the rooster
only crows at dawn
or at 3 a.m. or noon.
So you never know.
Tonight he might crow
especially loud at the full moon.
Really loud.

             Ricardo
              the rooster  lives on the border.
so his papers, passports, birth certificate
                         like his crowing skills
are quite in order.
 For first he climbs
                         the fence of Colossal
& from thence
                         greets El Sol in Spanish,
Then he bows & greets
                         the sun in English:
 Coo-coo-rico!
                         Cock-a-doddle-do!
Coo-coo-rico!
                         Cock-a-doddle-do!
 Ola, Señor Sol,
                                    How are you?


Richard Garcia is the author of The Other Odyssey from Dream Horse Press, The Chair from BOA, and Porridge from Press 53. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart prize and has been in Best American Poetry. He lives in Charleston, S.C.

CUSTOMS AND CONCENTRATION

by Peleg Held

Child migrants sleeping on the ground at the McAllen, Texas Border Patrol station. —NowThis, May 19 2019

A scapegoat tkhine, the sound of the note
thinned into air, red string at the throat—
its knot sung to sleep in a clavicled swale—
marking her, keeping her, outside the Pale,
the deep-drumming pigment that lodged in the heart
the night that she drank down the well of their art,
the dregs of the umbra that darkened the mat
Tenemos preguntas, the click of the latch,
the last strand of horse-hair plucked from a bow
sung out through rosin, then cinder, then snow,
salt dropped like breadcrumbs while good people slept
in the town with a desk where papers are checked
and cages of souls who once dreamed across fire
covered on stone as the cold law requires.


Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

TEACHER MINERS OF WEST VIRGINIA

by Alejandro Escudé

The victorious strike by teachers in West Virginia did not only result in a long overdue pay raise. With the exuberance of a nine-day teach-in, the teachers and their supporters have taught the nation a compelling lesson on the historical role of a true resistance. Taking to the streets, picketing on the sidewalks, and charging into the Capitol itself, the strike turned the public commons into a counter space for “we the people.” One by one, the roughly 20,000 teachers in West Virginia essentially forced lawmakers – and the nation – to stop our daily routine and address the growing education crisis on the terms of those most devoted to ensuring the best outcomes for our children: our teachers. —The Guardian, March 10, 2018

The teachers are digging for coal;
They pour out of the mines, dark-drenched,
Unimpressed by the earth’s time tables,
The maps colored outside the lines.
They are heading home from the mines.

The teachers have received the cables
That mark their pay; their fists are clenched
Even grading papers, their precious ore
A losing industry. As the work clock chimes
Apocalypse, for health they pay the fines.

The teachers breathe fumes of a Stygian shoal
As they sail on—confused, wrecked and bled,
Their career an entanglement of labels.
Of their day’s take nothing survives.
They’re servants to the ironies and declines.

Like prophets, they cluster countless Babels,
Their clothes contain the prints of our kindred.
Yet, where gratitude should be, there’s a hole.
A relentless grind, their minds like stripped mines,
For expenses overdue, for quarrying lives.


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.