HOPE FOR THE NEW YEAR

by Barbara Schweitzer

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

There is no rodeo feat to lift history.

History is the slain bull bloodied for sport 

with his blood scoured into the concrete.

 

It is obscene to pick up a pen

on the day disaster flies in

but if not, the next day and the next 

days will keep us dumb to our ways.

 

We have physics and light: we know 

dark cannot exist when filled with light,

that speaking corrals our common plights

and even pigeons know how to take flight

and we are not night. We will not be night.

Barbara Schweitzer writes poems and plays and sundry fiction from upstate RI. She is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets. She is the creator of Cyjoe Barker, detective extraordinaire of stage and flash fiction. Feeling Plankton, a 10-minute play can still be viewed in its entirety here.

BASHAR’S BOUDOIR

by Salma Amrou

Physicists are born when bombs fall 

on heads like apples. According to the law of inertia,

once a dictator falls he never stops falling

flat on his face in Homs and Aleppo and Damascus

and Deraa, on graffitied walls invoking broken Hippocratic oaths

and stripped bare down to his underwear in a leaked

boudoir shoot and photos by the pool, 

skin draped taut across collar bones like tent poles,

albums showing all the skin where the sun never shone:

girls raped and children raised in prison cells

and corpses crushed between metal, dead rose

pressed between the pages of a ledger, each pose

for the camera a little sassier than the other. In the second law

of motion, the greater the suffering, the greater

the force needed to suppress it. Sednaya’s red wing walls 

varnished in the most sensual shade of blood

a shrine where the mouths of praying prisoners

are forced to swallow his name in place of God’s. Starving 

for some form of salvation, a country cannibalizes itself,

a dietary regimen to sate the appetite of the regime: detainees

swallowed and digested in the guts beneath ground.

In the third law of motion, revolt is regurgitation, 

bowels of bloodlust rising in an upchuck reflex, 

streaked across his tongue like the sweet nothings 

and the blush in his wedding pictures, too shy to look his bride 

or his people in the eye, fleeing from the gravity of his vows,

from the fact that he’s been falling 

and falling–

One of the photos of Bashar Assad discovered by rebels and posted on social media.

Editor's note: You can help the White Helmets rebuild lives and hope in Syria.

Salma Amrou is a former Youth Poet Laureate of Southeastern Virginia and an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. An Egyptian-American poet and aspiring novelist, her work explores themes of identity, belonging, and the experiences of the Arab and Muslim diaspora. Her work will be featured in the forthcoming issue of Zhagaram Literary.

A SINGLE SPECK OF STARDUST

by David James Olsen

inspired by the film The Theory of Everything and dedicated to Stephen Hawking ... "who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed." (Allen Ginsberg, "Howl")

what twists and turns create the burn that makes the heart’s intones?

what organizing force infuses courage in our bones?

what questions help us quest to truths of how we do exist?

what answers satisfy the dark allowing light, sun-kissed?

a single speck of stardust that comprised him from the start

gave Hawking humble genius-sparks endorsing his own chart

of new galactic concepts none before had dared to breach,

of how the seasons stretch in space defying standard speech.

and facing such a fatal future from an early age,

he forced himself to move his mind to think outside the cage

impounding human theories bound by knowledge found on Earth.

he broke the mold of sanctioned mass, thus causing a rebirth

inside the field of physics where professors marveled more

at how his bright endurance conquered paralyzing odds

than at his hot hypotheses that came at last to bore

through scientific lenses lacking stabilized tripods.

deteriorating muscle strength could hardly stop his flow

of fiery radiation-thoughts and populated spheres

outside our milky, wayward mindsets curbed by what we know,

of places past the brink of time, beyond our pointless fears.

determined, clear persistence reigned till, sev’nty-six, he passed,

his focus never quitting quantum gravity at all,

his wit most sharp, intact until his heartbeat played its last.

study his work for ages so his star shall never fall.

Author’s Note: This elegy is specifically structured with seven rhythmic feet per line and six stanzas so as to represent the awe-inspiring age of 76 to which Hawking lived.

David James Olsen’s iconoclastic and encrypted poetry has been published in various sources including Instigatorzine, The South Townsville micro poetry journal, and three previous times here on TheNewVerse.News. A New Yorker juggling myriad passions, he is currently most focused on intensive poetic study and writing while gracefully diving into increasing vegan activism.

FOR THE 2013 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS

by Eric A. Weil

Neutrino, quark, lepton, superstring;
The “God Particle” is a Theory of Everything.

Some physicists used the Large Hadron Collider
To make Einstein’s theories just a bit tidier.

Infinitesimally smaller than infinitesimal,
The boson named Higgs flies faintly recognizimal;

So now that we know Higgs bosons exist,
The question remains:  Of what do they consist?


Eric A. Weil teaches at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina.  He has two chapbooks:  A Horse at the Hirshhorn (Finishing Line, 2002) and Returning from Mars (Main Street Rag, 2009).