WEDDING IN ISRAEL

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

The green cotton nightgown—clean, 

stuffed next to sweaty 

T-shirts—is going home.

I hope not to hear again

the phone alert go off

in my gut, a morbid tuning fork.

I thank the cousins—sojourners 

with me to this fête—who,

bent over phones, found 

the fixer, the vans, the flights.

Thank the lover back home—pounding

head, twisted stomach—who pleaded,

Keep going.  

On the road to Amman, another siren.

We enter a concrete capsule

by a gas station.

Close the door.

 

 

Author’s note: Recently I traveled to Israel for a family wedding. Just hours after the last dance, Israel and Iran began attacking each other. Israel’s airport closed, trapping me, and the whole country, under barrages of missiles and drones. On the road to Jordan, and a flight out, I endured one final air raid siren and shelter. Even escaping, there was no escape.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, Sheila-Na-Gig, Nixes Mate, and Streetlight Magazine.

DEBATE PANTOUM

by Dion O’Reilly

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News

Nothing's quite right—
ziggurats are toppling, the president’s stuttering, 
the courts are rigged, and it's too damn hot.
Buckle up baby... this shit's happening

—ziggurats, toppling. The president stuttering, 
millennials hating him ‘cause he won't stop a war.
Buckle up baby...this shit's happening. 
—a war that’s been raging for a million years.

Millennials hate him ‘cause he won't stop the war,
they can't buy a house, and they're paying back loans,
—this war’s been raging for a million years,
but now it’s thumb-tapped on our own little phones.

We can't buy a house, we’re paying back loans.
The problem’s too big to even begin,
thank god we can thumb-tap our own little phones.
There are just two choices, and they both look grim,

like problems too big to even begin—
The courts are rigged, and it's too damn hot.
There are just two choices and they both look grim.
Whom to vote for? Nothing feels right. 

Dion O'Reilly is the author of three poetry collections: Sadness of the Apex Predator, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize; Ghost Dogs, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award; and Limerence, a finalist for the John Pierce Chapbook Competition, forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

DESCANT ON OUR DEFORMITY

by Rachel Voss

Richard III's skeleton as found in the grave beneath a parking lot. The remains of the King who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485 were reburied in a tomb in Leicester's Anglican cathedral on March 26, 2015.

What’s more naked
than bones?  The whitewashing
of history, a ghostly rose

to honor the dead.  Which
dead?  “It doesn’t look like
the face of a tyrant,” a woman

said.  Hasn’t she heard
of Shakespeare (who couldn’t
have written a better ending),

or known any real sons of bitches?
It costs a lot of money
to look this immortal.

The onlookers point their thousand several phones,
and every phone takes several similar pictures,
and every picture condemns us all for vanity.

Now is the spring of our
reinterment.  Despite
the line of worshippers

and the royal craze, I, for one,
am determined to hate
the idle pleasures of these days.


Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher and lives in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, Borderline, WORK, Blast Furnace, and The Prompt Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Newtown Literary and the Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology.