RED, WHITE, & STORMY

by Scott C. Kaestner

Presidential porn star spangled banner
apple pie, boner pills to manifest destiny
fake news erected in pleated khaki pants
fat cats and skinny puppies do the electric slide
in the land of semi-automatic gunfire and fentanyl laced dreams.


Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, husband, dad, and good mojo seeker. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings and doings.

PORN AND POLITICS

by Alejandro Escudé

Judith Bernstein, “President” (2017), acrylic and oil on canvas, 90 x 89 1/2 inches at the Paul Kasmin Gallery via Hyperallergic.

You mustn’t mean what you say, in the sex biz.
If you say, “ooh,” then it isn’t really an “ooh.”
If you say, “We have to keep our schools safe.”
You don’t mean, “We have to keep our schools safe.”
There’s no safety in numbers; just one svelte set
Of impregnable laugh lines—and the strength
To sweat out the entire scene, bulbous and sharp.
So the masters meet the masters in Las Vegas,
And, secretly, who could possibly avoid to watch?
The search tallies her hits to a million a month.
The money rolls in for being sexy in a certain way.
Oh to be Evita Peron’s corpse, whom the general
Was hired to guard! One might hear the squelch
Of the dictator’s hands being sawn off, the splash
As Hart Crane’s body in the steely Caribbean.
She made it her own; she says her name is Stormy
For a reason. There are many reasons I suppose.

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.

TO EAT AND LEAVE THE NIGHT AN EMPTY PLATE

by Alejandro Escudé

A Donald Trump mural painted by street artist Hanksy on Orchard St. between Canal and Division Sts. on the Lower East Side. —NY Daily News Photo by SHAWN INGLIMA

In the blonde hair-skunk, in the barbershop of the mind
where the scissors raise hairs and pat them down
to demand what one wants not needs, the patience of a lion,
ingenuity of a roach, America with a Trump at its head,
the roach motel of the world, on his knees, a nice picture…
what he said to the young woman on t.v.,
a working class woman, it’s a nice picture, you
on your knees. Walled off in the mind, the soul
a mountain range of rage and nowhere to go but
to the streets where a young man bears the likeness
of North America on his bloodied face.
Do we recall the ISIS terrorist in his jeep
happy to drag five corpses? Five corpses
hanging from the moon, five corpses loaded like bullets
into the chamber of a gun, you fire-walker, you brandist,
you woman-basher, you human torture chamber,
you radioactive toad, you lacquered manipulator,
you burnt toast anachronism, you oversexed missile,
you Roman fop, you Towers burning, one man leaps
from a window of the World Trade, martyr man,
L-man, J-woman, moon feces in the shape of Trump,
in the shape of Mar-a-Lago, in the shape of Chris Christie,
piles in the cemetery where Lorca’s body lies forever
falling, never forgetting the artists’ Golgotha
in the rainstorm of human history where Trump’s foot soldiers
come to take Federico away at dawn as the rooster crows
as the apostle drowns his only son as George Washington
steps on the muddy bank as Hamilton takes aim at Burr
as Burr is borne again as the harrowing present grows wings
as the Star-Spangled Banner itself sings as the baseball field
turns to boner flowers or red licorice for wealthy trophy wives
as the hives of the rich enlarge as the states pronounce
themselves more significant than the next. Who comes
in the name of business rats? Who’s driven in Picasso
limousines? Who comes in chariots of designer
water bottles? Who comes in light-clouds Wall Street?
Who comes wagging an Arizona finger? Who comes
riding a marble horse? To eat and leave the night
an empty plate for children to weep, for the landlord
to tie our wrists down in the apex of our city streets
where the thief is arrested, shouting in stressed vowels,
as the helicopter shakes our house out of its safe slumber
and into another broken eight years of politicos and bankers,
eight years of sourceless regrets, eight years of teachers
blamed like communists, eight years of flogging
middlemen, eight years of clown-hog campaigns,
eight years of pornographic magazine covers, eight years
of cigars and neon caviar, eight years of swimming in pools
full of sheep semen. We, it began, we, it finishes, we.


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.

BIN LADEN’S PORN STASH

by Michael Shorb

The conservative group Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit Monday, demanding that the Central Intelligence Agency comply with a Freedom of Information Act request submitted last year for pornographic materials recovered during the May 2011 U.S. raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. —Politico, March 8, 2016. Comic strip by Matt Bors, Daily Kos, May 20, 2011.

midnight behind the razor wire,
after the dreary paper work
plotting the deaths
of millions, the grunt
work of recruiting a second
and third tide of brainwashed
suicide attackers, even an icon
steeped in the dark
needs to kick back,
close the door on prying
wives or sons or underlings,
stick the thumb drive in—

no pasha, nor hated
solomon himself boasted
such a harem: breasts pillowing,
thighs glowing gold in
a sinking sherbet sun,
arms embracing him,
sockets wet and waiting,
passionate sighs and secret
whisperings --

now the hard drive’s gone,
every keystroke and synapse
etched in ether, you and
your thirst for mayhem’s
washed clean and dumped
into the sea, only
the hoarse and bloody
schoolboys remain,
mumbling your name
as they search, lost
in the rubble of paradise.


Michael Shorb was a poet, fiction writer, editor, and children's book author. As an international poet, his poetry has been published in more than 100 magazines and anthologies, including TheNewVerse.News, Michigan Quarterly, The Nation, The Sun, Salzburg Poetry Review, and Kyoto Journal. He was the recipient of a PEN AWARD, won a Merit Award for the Franklin-Christoph Poetry Contest, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lived in and loved San Francisco. Michael succumbed to GIST, a rare form of cancer in 2012.

Editor’s Note: Michael’s widow Judith Grogan-Shorb sent TheNewVerse.News this eerily timely poem which Michael wrote soon after the death of Bin Laden and the subsequent Reuters story of x-rated videos found in the Abbottabad compound.

NATURAL ORDER OF THE HOUSEHOLD

by Jennifer Clark

Graphic illustrating Bill Gothard’s 7 Basic Principles. Source: Raw Story. 

“As I became a teenage young man I was constantly tempted to have lots of wrong thoughts, 

and often battled to keep my heart right.” 

—Josh Duggar, August 21, 2015, at the Josh & Anna Duggar Family website.

It’s pouring porn. Filth floods the streets. Unborn babes tumble
from the sky and clog the gutters. Nobody here trusts roofs,
especially Christ, who is patrolling the attic holding one hell
of a big umbrella.

Christ’s canopy looms over the husband who is on the second
floor slipping into loafers while clasping an umbrella,
a poor imitation of Christ’s, a little less mighty, but still, bigger

than the parasol his wife who—may she always be scurrying
one floor beneath him—holds over their 14, 15, 16 kids
and counting. With her free hand she spoons oatmeal
into her children’s mouths, then mops the dirty, dirty floors.

All these umbrellas make it difficult to move.
Dangerous, even. Here and there a lamp shatters.

The firstborn, Josh, craves a glimpse of sky. As a teen, finds it
standing in the laundry room folding a blue dress, prowls into
the bedroom for more, steals some as she pretends to sleep.

Here and there a vase shatters.

When his sky-snatching ways are discovered, Josh is sent to
a training center where he learns all about umbrellas: how to
open them, wave them about, and never, ever close them.

He returns with a brand new umbrella. Everyone feels safe.

Some years later, Josh marries a girl named Anna and Ashley
Madison—who loves to feel the rain on her skin— tells him
Life is short. Have an affair. He listens.

His wife blames her umbrella. If only it was prettier. If only she
had held it higher. She buys blue eyeshadow and starts walking
through the house on tiptoes while her husband
stands just as he has been taught, under thin ribs
radiating refuge, the whole bloody sky wailing.


Jennifer Clark lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her first book of poetry, Necessary Clearings, was published by Shabda Press. 

WIND CHILL

by Richard Schnap

Image source: The Hoopla

It was just about the time
I noticed the number of beggars
On the sidewalks of my neighborhood
Seemed to double overnight

It was just about the time
That the local cable TV station
Began to show hardcore porn films
More explicit than ever before

It was just about the time
I started to hear the rumors
Of people I once befriended
Dying from heroin overdoses

That whenever I passed a church
I thought about going inside
And sit in a back row pew
To pray for the fate of the world


Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

PARAPHERNALIA

by Kristina England

Image source: TaxProf Blog (in response to “The Sex Toys in the Attic” in the NY Times, November 9, 2013).

The most popular article of the week:
New York Time's "Sex Toys in the Attic,"
some older woman's concerns
about her "romping" days,
some toy she collected from a boyfriend.
Surely she's seen the news -
child porn ring broken up in Canada,
over 300 people involved.
Maybe she wrote the article before
the Toronto mayor took crack,
got cracked, cracked a nation.
Or she wanted to lighten the load.
God knows we need a good laugh
and perhaps the occasional mishap
of some not-so-cozy artifact
found under our mother's bed
is enough to pause this avalanche.
There is, after all, some innocence
left in this disjointed world.
And if there's not,
let's keep pretending
vibrators matter
in all these earthquakes,
tsunamis, the tremor
of our minds.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, Found Poetry Review, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other journals.