PLEASE, AMERICA, DON'T TURN YOUR BACK ON ME

by Cecil Morris

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

I remember breaking up with my first real girlfriend, 
the one who surprised me with earthly delights 
and let me touch the promised land, again and again, 
the one who did not push my hands away as if 
they were impertinent puppies, maybe cute 
but mostly annoying. I loved everything about her, 
her hair on my skin, her mouth, her own wild eagerness, 
her eyes turned up to me, the way we enjoyed 
the American River on sun-burnished afternoons, 
even how she dropped the great, immovable river rock 
on my naked heart and made me beg and cry 
and empty myself in stupid, sprawling letters. 
I thought she loved me and then she didn’t love me. 
 
That was almost 50 years ago—1976— 
and this is it again exactly, another love 
rejecting me, lifting her marbled foot and stepping 
on me with all the gorgeous, colonnaded tons 
of her, repulsing my advances, saying keep 
your nasty science off of me and covering 
her liberal titty. Her voice, that smile and kiss 
of democracy, has turned to bray and bawls 
and claims that I misunderstood, that she 
doesn’t even know me. And, again, I am left 
in tears to beg my heart’s case in postcards 
and signs, my own voice now raw with the ache 
of what I thought I had and now have lost. 
Please, America, please. Please come back to me.

 
Author’s note: The epigraph comes from Chris Banks, a line in his long poem “Core Samples of the Late-Capitalist Dream” in Alternator, Nightwood Editions, 2023. I borrowed the “liberal titty” and the imagery and language of the line “Her voice, that smile and kiss / of democracy” from e. e. cumming’s “Thanksgiving (1956)”

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025.  He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

FLIGHT PATHS

by Angie Minkin

AI-Generated graphic from Shutterstock for The New Verse News

I write postcards every day in bright blue ink,

the color of the sea, the color of hope.

Do these missives even matter?

Fingers cramped, I stretch, breathe,

step outside, rest in shade, pause,

think of the future, our families, this earth.

These women I write to—

Brittany, Natalie, Peng,

in Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska,

moms who love their kids,

wash the clothes, sweep the floors,

dry the tears, pump the gas.

Shirley, Andrea, Mattie, and Nicole—

we’re all in this together, dear women,

and I see your kids outside playing tag,

sipping water, running free.

My postcards fly to your mailboxes,

homing pigeons with stars and hearts.

 

Homing pigeons with stars and hearts,

my postcards fly to your mailboxes,

as kids sip water, run free

and I see our kids outside playing tag. 

We’re all in this together, dear women,

Shirley, Andrea, Mattie, and Nicole—

dry your tears. Pump the gas,

sweep the floors, wash the clothes.

We’re moms who love our kids

in California, Arizona, Nevada, Nebraska. 

Brittany, Natalie, Peng,

I write to you as friends,

so think of our kids, our futures, this earth.

Step outside, sit down in shade, pause.

Stretch cramped hands, breathe.

Do these missives even matter?

I imagine hope the color of the sea. Please

read my bright blue ink, my postcards. Vote.

 

Postcards to Voters Program

Angie Minkin is an award-winning Pushcart Prize-nominated San Francisco poet who reads the news and tries not to despair. She stands on her head for inspiration when gazing out the window doesn’t work. Her work has been published in Birdy, Loch Raven Review, The MacGuffin, New Verse News, Rattle, Stirring, Westchester Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Balm for the Living, was published in 2023.

SENDING POSTCARDS

by Julia Lisella

It’s all history now,

even my walk to the mailbox

to drop the shiny cards into the blue box

little teeth at the edge of the slot – I can hear them

grinding & scraping as I push the cards in

10 at a time. Because

Covid 19 pandemic

because Breonna and George are dead

because T***p lied his ass off

we know this is true all the time, but now?

And I think this is why

I walk to the mailbox

with 50 postcards and I worry

the people who get them won’t

understand my handwriting

when they read “Dear Friend”

they’ll know we are not friends but

Friend please vote, friend

the anxiety of thinking

you won’t vote

makes my fingers ache

the anxiety of thinking

in the quiet, the basil bloom

of evening, the petulance

of late summer, the walk now

more or less guarded

Mostly anxiety I do not think

in prose but in the murmur of fear

the stuttered life of

catch in the throat

the imbalance of what can’t be

how is it now that the shiny postcards

urging

sit at the bottom of a large blue box—

what faith I once had in the box

How I once believed anything in it

would begin its great journey

Will anyone of you 50 desperate cards

released reluctantly by my fingertips

(afraid to touch the box) the confluences

of emergencies

we have acclimated to

will any one of you reach the street

the court, the place, the road, the Tampa,

the Ft. Lauderdale, the Ft. Myers so many forts

the ranch house the apartment building the PO Box

and journey how? and when if it arrives

on your counter, thrown in your car

stuck under a welcome mat?

I press the pen into the card

to make the name and wonder

will it be you, you one soul

who will get my card and lifting it

above the garbage will see and notice

the wobble of my D or F or

the note I squeezed into the left side

of the card, the funny way I write my E’s, my V’s and M’s

you can’t tell apart

you, someone will know I walked down

the quiet Covid street

I pushed the cards through the slot

dear friend released from prison who is not

a murderer or a rapist dear friend who was

desperate and forged a check dear friend who was

naïve and dated a con artist and a drug dealer

Dear friend still alive, released they say

and living in Sunny Florida, please don’t

get sick, please find a job

please vote.

Randy Hudnell raises four fingers to represent Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote to most former felons in Florida who'd completed their sentences. Credit: ALEX PENA/CBS NEWS, October 26, 2020

Julia Lisella’s books include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007), and the chapbook Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems have most recently appeared in Ploughshares, Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review, Nimrod, Exit 7, and Ocean State Review. She writes on modernist women writers, teaches American literature at Regis College and co-curates the Italian American Writers Association (IAWA) Reading Series in Boston. 

WHAT STILL BELONGS TO US

by Sean J Mahoney

“Tangled Roots,” a painting by Wayne Doyle.

Offer the dark and far side of the house as stilled
prey to light and wind. Sky filled with weather
balloons, a story of openings and the dishrag
calamities of coming wars fought not between
soldiers but callous ideologies. My neighbors
crossing waters caught aflame, sown with
stench of powder, predatory hint of pheromone.
Those boat holds packed with coffins of kin.
Fragments of lovers. Loads of hurt, spray-painted
time, viral loss of speech coming fast, loose.

Clothed people with weathered skin, sitting and
waiting for apples and a humanity of eyebrows.
Decent beings most, stripped for their good deeds,
their mutual bonds and returns, for grid coordinates
of physical love and further acid rain bombs.
As though a brush stroke across the sky could
cure the vicissitudes of storms, of the prickly
aftermath where many headed in the days and
years that followed. Brush and slow stroke.
Spiritual tech and the uncaged graphic stations

of the body. This they say is art. Street magic.
Lord of hands digging trenches through rubble
and dirty clothing of unfamiliar beings. Postcards
of a land in better times; tourists, culture, and
radiant sunshine. Blue house on a block of narrow
mildewed homes. Bloated curbs and skinny
streetlamps illume familiar strain: a colored side
and the other side, a have side and a have next
to nothing side. Storm drains usher ill promises
and leprous iguanas to a cold sea amid tangles
of tree roots promulgated by water and by state.

Sean J Mahoney has had work published at Poets Reading the News, The Good Men Project, Nine Mile Literary Magazine, Antithesis Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Wordgathering among others. He lives in Southern California with Dianne, her mother, 3 dogs, and 4 renters. There is a large garden and two trees with big, bitter oranges that look more lemon-like. Sean co-edited the 2nd and 3rd volumes of the MS benefit anthology series Something On Our Minds and he helps to run the Disability Literature Consortium booth at the annual AWP bookfair… lit by crips.