OH BEAUTIFUL

by Chris Reed

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

For the country’s 250th birthday celebration

my sister texts a collage of photos of our mother

in her last years before dying at 100.

At first it seems a strange birthday message

for the nation, until I start looking at the photos.

In my mother’s face, her seated posture, 

often holding flowers or her cat on her lap,

I see the inevitable wear of years, time’s destruction,

a loss of elasticity and nimbleness, 

a loss of focus, purpose and endless energy,

a loss of fitting in to how things work and get done.

 

Yet in her eyes and smile in photo after photo,

I see acceptance and memories of past joys

and loves, her ocean sailings, mountain climbs, 

her shore walks, and dance among multitudes.

I see a hint of denial, pretending that her place

in the family of things is not coming to an end,

only her eyes betraying her knowledge 

that the journey has already started.

Her face tells me all this, but also tells me 

that amid her brokenness and joys and losses,

ever courageous, she is finding new love

and meaning in this, her season of endings.

 

With no flowers for you, let me still say,

Happy Birthday America.

Chris Reed cared for her mother in her last two years of life and found beauty in her mother's decline in health and purpose.  Finishing Line Press recently published a chapbook of Reed's poems about this time, Two Years and Two Months.

WHERE NOW

by Lynn White

Photos of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor crouching over a woman were taken in Jeffrey Epstein's New York City mansion, while an image of Peter Mandelson in his underwear was taken in the paedophile financier's Paris flat, a Sky News analysis has found.

Where do we go now

after we’ve seen a lord

in his knickers

and a prince

on his knees,

where now 

from that place

where no crimes 

were committed,

“don’t you know.”

Do you know

where now?

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.

BIRD BY BIRD BENEATH THE LIGHT OF A NEW MOON

a Haibun

by Laurie Rosen

  After Anne Lamott 

My son would come home from college, pull out the dozens of photo albums I assembled

over the years. Together we’d laugh at how young we all were, remember our trips, 

our adventures, the birthday parties. My more recent photos are stuck in my phone, 

no longer easily available to share or reminisce as though life ended in 2005. 

I hear myself saying things like,  I miss the old days, before drones and internet,

when cameras had film, and a day at the beach meant lying supine in the sun 

as we swatted the flies and bees.

Yet, every family has their catastrophes, every era, its own crises to contend with. 

Our family still grieves a devastating plane crash, life-changing diagnoses, family 

estrangements all set against the crashing of the World Trade Center, horrendous 

school shootings, racial strife, and endless war. 

I sit on a beach and the buzzing above isn’t a mosquito, while my photos float 

up to the clouds, and our government catapults us back to vaccination-free days, cuts 

money for research, erases history and people, sends women to the alleys and even to jail. 

I’m left speechless and hopeless, when for so long, despite it all, I felt hopeful, 

that we were moving forward if ever so slowly. 

Maybe I’ll scroll through each photo, choose favorites, send them out 

to be printed, organize them in albums labeled by years. 

It’s overwhelming and tedious; but I can’t sit back and watch 

our story end here.

A sliver of moon

reclaims the star-studded sky,

waxing resilience 

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in Gyroscope Review, Zig Zag Lit Mag, Oddball Magazine, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food, One Art: a journal of poetry, Nick Virgillio’s Haiku in Action, Pure Haiku, and elsewhere. Laurie won first place in poetry at the 2023 Marblehead, MA Festival of the Arts.

LIKE GOLD

by Karen Olshansky

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records on Dec. 7, 2021, in a storage room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that had fallen over with contents spilling onto the floor. Justice Department/AP via TIME.

In front of deep yellow drapes

on the stage of the gilded ballroom

stacked in haphazard rows

in the marbled powder room

under the crystal chandelier

behind the commode

piled high like cardboard towers

in a storage closet near clothing 

wrapped in cleaner’s plastic

spilled like a garbage can ransacked 

by raccoons in cartons overturned

with scattered yellowed 

newspapers and photos:

precious papers,

secrets that protect, that keep 

us safe, that the braggadocio

hordes for his own pleasure and profit,

a man protected by

slavish minions

and deplorable citizens 

in thrall to an UnAmerica.

Karen Olshansky lives in Marin County, California with her husband and a well fed Koi named Pickle Face. She writes poetry in order to maintain her sanity. Her work has appeared in The Literary Nest, Tuck magazine, The News Verse News and the anthologies Lingering in the Margins, Unsealing Our Secrets, and Unspoken.

THE PERSONA POEM HOLDS AN EMERGENCY PRESS CONFERENCE REGARDING ITS LEAKED NUDES

by J. Bradley

Male Nude by Roz McQuillan

You’re jealous of the way I make
an empty bottle of merlot a bearskin rug,
how the crook of my tongue incites stampedes.

You’re designed for, fueled by pollution.
You require the excuse of a god to shed sin,
then wag your fingers like thrown stones.

Please, pick up your jaws.
You’ll catch open jean flies that way.


J. Bradley is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals including decomP, Hobart, and Prairie Schooner. He was the Interviews Editor of PANK, the Flash Fiction Editor of NAP, and the Web Editor of Monkeybicycle. He is the author of the poetry collection Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books, 2009), the novella Bodies Made of Smoke (HOUSEFIRE, 2012), and the graphic poetry collection The Bones of Us (YesYes Books, 2014), illustrated by Adam Scott Mazer. He is the curator of the Central Florida reading series There Will Be Words.