DANGEROUS

by Dana Yost

The Globe and Mail

Excuse me

but this is dangerous

work,

writing in a time like

this, a time when words

get twisted and torn,

not believed, turned

into political device.

U don’t mind being

a political device,

but with my own words

my way,

not picked up

by a politician

and run through

a damned 

microphone

in front of 4,000

flag-waving

believers

of non-belief.

There is a man

outside on the street

wearing a stocking hat

and long-sleeved shirt

blowing hard in the afternoon

wind. Is he spying 

on someone or just sitting

on the bench

waiting for his children

to come outside?

It is sights like

this that stoke 

paranoia, of course,

in the left and the right.

But damaging a man’s

skull is something 

no one should

accept or mock

or use to rally

the charges.

It’s sad

and sickening

and a crime

and that’s what

it is and, there,

I’ve said it—a crime

fueled by rhetoric,

and the grocery clerks

and taxi drivers

in this town will

either agree

or hate me.

This is dangerous

to be a writer

today, to say

what is ugly,

to say it

plain,

to walk

on downtown

sidewalks

books lunging

out of my coat

pockets

because there

are men with guns

who don’t know

how to use them

but think they do.

Dana Yost was an award-winning daily newspaper editor and writer for twenty-nine years. Since 2008, he has published eight books and been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in poetry. His poetry has appeared in several reviews, magazines and other publications, including previously in The New Verse News.

2020, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF RODNEY USHER

by Bob Bradshaw

I noticed a condemned property
posting on his door

when I rang his doorbell
but my old friend's appearance

jolted me more.
What's wrong?  I demanded.

"I can't sleep, I'm as restless
as a storm’s waves.”

He grabbed his chest.
A tightness was gripping him

like a vine's hold
on a rotten wall.

“Heart failure—
from that damn virus.”

His doctors had dismissed his worries.
There is no virus, I assured him.

It vanished in the spring.    
May even have been a hoax.  

He was manic.  He was sweating.
“It’s the coronavirus.”  His breathing

was heavy, choppy like surf.
“It’s gotten inside.”

Relax, I told him.  The plague
has vanished.  Gone.

You can leave your house now.
“Still, I can't help worrying:

at times my heart's
a wild flapping

like an osprey tangled
in fishing line.  The more I fight it,
     
the tighter my chest
becomes.”

Is your house safe?  
I noticed a crack splitting

the front wall. "This house,"
he sighed, "teeters on a sea cliff

that's crumbling.
Erosion causes the cracks."

Why don't you leave?
He shuddered. "I can't.

Outside isn’t safe.” Nonsense.
Sure, tests once showed

people were sick. But praise be
there are no more tests.

So, no more sick people!
It’s common sense.     

You’re just behind the times.
Time to go back to work, my friend.

But you should get a handyman
to fix up this house.

“No kidding,” Rodney says.
“At night the joists crack,

and my sense of balance
falters as the house leans.

I slip like a man on wet pavers,
my heart a bird thrashing

its wings against its cage." I nodded.
Clearly he couldn’t face

the “new normal,” a world
safe again.

He was hopeless.  
What could I do but go home?

I had business to attend to.
I could no more persuade him

to leave his sanctuary
than I could have convinced

a starfish to loosen its grip
on a rotten pier.

His last letters show
a man crazed, damned

by inexplicable fears,
slipping over the edge

like his mansion
which broke apart tumbling

into the Pacific—
nothing in the end

for my friend to hang onto,
even the sea washing
its hands of him.


Bob Bradshaw is a retired programmer living in California.  He is looking for the perfect hammock for his retirement.  Recent work of his can be found at Dodging the Rain, Eclectica, and Ekphrastic Review.

MAYBE IT STARTED WITH A HAMSTER

by Judith Terzi

and maybe the two albino rats
came next. And the rock collection.
Smooth oblong rocks he'd paint
faces on. And maybe shells came
next, and then stamps, though
he hardly knew where the countries
were on his globe. He liked
the biggest stamps the best, ones
with faces on them, faces of men
he could become. And maybe
the aquarium came next––red-tailed
sharks lurking behind rocks in his
bedroom with Jack Dempsey
cichlids and sucker fish. And maybe
the model building came next:
ocean liners with tiny people he'd
wave at, fighter planes with grounded
toy pilots. And tanks with soldiers
he would salute, but who never
saluted back. The tanks––stuck
between his childhood bed, with its
beige striped bedspread, and a shiny
maple highboy where he shoved
all of his desires, all of his heartache.
For later.

Judith Terzi is the author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay Books, 2018) as well as of five chapbooks including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus Press). Her poetry appears widely in literary journals and anthologies, has received nominations for Best of the Net and Web, and has been read on the BBC. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and is a former educator who taught high school French for many years as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

by Crystal Snoddon

“If police can execute an innocent man on video, none of us are safe.” 

—Buck Sexton, The Hill, December 11, 2017

Sweet Security, that phantasmal beauty, lies buried 6 feet under.

I saw the body-cam footage, how her sister,

Paranoia, shot her dead—

don’t watch

spiders scrawl warnings on flesh, listen:

Paranoia laughs, freed from cuffs

of assumed innocence.

Witness her lie on the motel bed, her bare,

thin lips exposed in a cavernous grin,

her adamantine teeth.

She bites hard, man.

Cops claim she’d hidden the rifle under the bed, but

no one dared lift the sham,

confirm the threat.

Paranoia, hungry cougar, prowls. Growls feed me.

Her cousin, Injustice, that crack whore,

trolls the subway,

steals candy from fatherless kid’s pockets,

feeds the family sugar power-drops,

lollipops on dirty sticks,

prefers home-baked shortbreads dipped

in ghetto chocolate, rich and dark.

They all sit on Daddy’s knee,

cuz Mama Liberty

drowned in the harbor, fascist bling chains round her neck,

her tablet cracked, her gown stained black

by pigeon shit.

Everyone runs blind.

Crystal Snoddon is a Canadian writer, whose forthcoming and previous poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and can be found in Figroot Press, Rat's Ass Review, Anti-Heroin Chick, among others.

READING HOUELLEBECQ THE NIGHT BEFORE EARLY VOTING BEGIINS

by Katherine Smith

If this emptiness were all that was left
I would spend the rest of my life reading
paranoid fantasies late into the night.

Instead of going out early to see the leaves
of the cherry trees turn a creamy peach
I would read every night till three the words of the hero

who rarely stepped out of the Sixth Arrondissement
of Paris, a place I happen to know quite well.
I would drink cocoa and fall under the spell of a clash

between fascists and the Muslim Brotherhood
the critics call satire. But I’m pretty sure
the writer believes far more in his dark story

of veiled women, cowardly professors, conspiracies,
than he believes in me, his American reader,
a middle-aged woman in the suburbs. This morning

I regret losing myself in his tale. Dew has already dried
from the late blooming roses. My face sags. I shower,
and accept that my thoughts are unlikely

to persuade anyone. Dependably sane
and despicably naïve, I start my car, drive
to the Frederick Senior Citizens’ Center

to cast my ballot during early voting.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003; her second Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, appeared in 2014.

MANHUNT

by George Held

A note with a caption "Have a nice day" left on an opening in a pipe by two inmates who escaped Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. (Source: New York Governor's Office)

Why do you always secretly root for the hunted?
Is it American love for the underdog,
your persecution complex, paranoia?

You feel sorry for the hunters, embedded
in uniforms and armed to the teeth
but terrified of ambush or sniper.

Why do you hope that the canniness
of the fox will outwit the nose of bloodhounds
and elude the mechanics and strategy          

of the men encased in uniforms
as they march strung out across a cornfield
in PA or file along a dry creek bed in CA?

You hear the experts on TV call the hunted
“psychopaths” and smugly speculate on whether
they’ll be brought to earth by the hunters

or by their twisted selves. It’s best if they
die in a televised shootout, to save the state
money for a trial and stem viewer sympathy.

And as the camera pans in on the front yard
you feel the sense of doom when the hunted
strolls through the gate in that picket fence

and lives are about to change forever …


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