JEREMIAH 2020AD

by Julie Kramer

Immigrant families wait in May 2019 in Los Ebanos, Tex., to be searched and taken to a U.S. Border Patrol station after they were caught illegally crossing into the United States from Mexico. Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post, October 23, 2020

“Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” —Matthew 19:14

 

You put them in cages

    and arm their enemies with AK47s

You take away their food

   and say that it is for their own good

You dirty their air and water

   and point to it as progress

You make their world uninhabitable

   and call their cries a hoax

You let your police

   murder them in their beds

   and say they deserved it

You punish their governors

   for standing up for them

You take away their families’ health insurance

   and say it’s in service of freedom

You beat them in the streets

   because they challenge your authority

You promise them relief

   and present it to the rich

You insult their allies

   and sell out their friends

You sit by as they die of a dread disease

  saying it will just... go away

You defile and debase

   the halls of their government

   with petty criminals and yes men

You make their lives less sane, less safe, and less free

 

You think that their God is sleeping

   do not be deceived

God will bring about his justice

   through the least of things

Including teenage TikTokers

               small dollar donations

                                absentee ballots

                                               and subpoenas.

 

Julie Kramer is a molecular biologist, lay minister, marketer, and mom of three teenagers living in Madison, Wisconsin.  In 2012, she made the unforeseen and disconcerting discovery that she is also a poet. Her themes include family, religion, #me too, and current events. She has had previous work published in the Journal of Women and Religion, and the Wisconsin UCC Conference newsletter.

SIMILE

by Gil Hoy

So now he's said:

 "Maybe 

I'll have to leave 

the country 

if I lose the election." 

You mean 

like a fleeing felon 

trying to get away?

All of America's birds

gone South

Will then be seen 

flying north.

Every hibernating thing

will be waking early.

Gil Hoy is a Best of the Net nominated Boston poet who studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy from BU, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for 4 terms. Hoy's poetry has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, Right Hand Pointing, Indian Periodical, Rusty Truck, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The New Verse News, Rat's Ass Review, the penmen review, and elsewhere. 

OCTOBER 2020

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Embers fly from a tree as the Glass Fire burns. St. Helena, CA, September 27, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020

After a couple of weeks of relief
From fire and smoke and intense heat
We are the recipients
Of a brand new Red Flag Warning
Tinkling on our phones:
Extreme temperatures. 
High winds.
Wildfire danger all over
This parched paradise.
Lucky us.
Meanwhile, the Orange Exhibitionist 
And his tiny-minded acolytes
Grow nuttier and more authoritarian
By the day
Saying now they may or may not
Support a peaceful transition
Of presidential power
Come November.
And we still have a hard time
Believing that there are any
Other than the severely disoriented
Who will give the guy their X. 
The guy whose response
To the current conflagrations
Has been as ignorant 
As a sack of ash and cinders,
Whose response 
To the great plague 
Still bedeviling us
Has been to sow disinformation,
And create chaos
By attacking scientists and science,
By failing to establish
A coherent Federal response,
By claiming that the pandemic
Is no big deal,
That it will soon vanish on its own,
Thereby assuring that the USA
With 5% of the world’s population
Has had 20-25% of COVID fatalities.
We’re #1!
And it ain’t over yet.
So here we sit gazing out the window
At the masked families
Strolling up the street,
At the trees swaying energetically
In a stiff breeze,
Emergency evacuation packs
Stacked by the front door,
Listening for sirens,
Checking the internet
For the latest inferno info,
Counting the hours until 8 A.M. tomorrow
When it is predicted
That conditions will allow us
To bugle the colors down the pole
And we might just be able
To relax our shoulders for a moment or two
As we exhale a fervent prayer
For cooler temps, buckets of rain
And a November worth writing home about.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California. He podcasts at: thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

AFTER THE ELECTION

by Vincent Bell

Lost Man painting by Irena Jablonski at Saatchi Art

He traveled for a long time

to be near the Atlantic Ocean.

He sleeps on a bench exhausted.

 

The west coast is in flames.

He saw planes dropping red

retardant and heard the screams

 

of people, a concerto with flaming trees.

People are afraid to leave their homes.

He is alone in the park.

 

The smoke has reached Europe

and the election has passed without a

resolution. The authorities suppress

 

civil unrest. People have given up.

Prayers failed. Self-appointed saviors

have come and gone.

 

People ask each other

if they know what’s going to happen.

The man has no place to go.

Vincent Bell is from NYC and attended NYU and Fordham. He lives with his wife in Ardsley, NY.

LOSERS AND SUCKERS

by Nan Ottenritter

My Dad 

Date of enlistment:                                         21 May 40

Education:                                                     grammar 8, high school 2, college 0

Military occupation specialty:                       Surgical Technician 86

Battles and campaigns:                                 Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Central Europe

Demobilized at the

convenience of the Government RR 1-1:       July 28, 1945

Mustering out pay:                                         $300

For five years, two months, and eight days my Dad served

our country, proudly defeated fascism.

He is my hero, our hero, our American hero.

I wouldn’t trade him for all the fathers in the world.

Nor will I let anyone call him a loser or a sucker. 

Call him that, call me that too for I 

carry his beliefs, his pride, and his trauma.

I was enlisted as an American on the day of my birth,

I am a warrior up until this day, and I will never

muster out, have Donald’s government demobilize me,

stop campaigning for voting rights, justice, equality, 

health care: the battlegrounds of our time.

I will soldier on. Our current enemy will be defeated.

Author's Note: The first half of this is a found poem with language taken from my father’s discharge papers. Battles are unique to time and place, yet have commonalities. I will fight on, not only because it is right, but as an homage to my father and all service men and women.


Nan Ottenritter is a poet and musician who lives in Richmond, VA.

THE LONG PAUSE

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Illustration: Craig Stephens, The South China Morning Post, August 16, 2020

The night descended
an oiled slickness
thick black sludge
and it stayed on
not draining itself
into the blue day

we didn't know why
we had to wait
wait, fight, wait
we were all boxed up
and boxed in
alone
together
piled up in stacks

and in the silence
that lasted for years
we all had to shut
ourselves down
breathe through holes
sometimes killing
choking someone
for their air
for their silence
the cruel darkness
like a hard migraine
full of daggering jolts
of lost sunshine
so much existential pain
we stuck to shadows
'til all light was gone
and nothing
beautiful
left
to see

for ourselves
the energy it took
to shepherd ourselves
and everyone else
to come close
to conspire
to fling ourselves
out of the dark nest
the safety boxes
we had been placed in
like blind chicks
we didn't know why
we knew
we had to decamp
breaths held
the countdown:

November 1
November 2
November 3…

and we decanted
a vast gushing
pushing us all out
every single one of us
free flowing
from a fogged dream
of lonely sleepwalkers
unable to see the depth
skating on the surface
like insects, pond skippers
but now we dove deep
into our inventory of loss
the trappings of despotism
saying no, no
no more

and we were cresting
in violent surges
flooding our grief
hammered out
the cheap walls
the stockade of lies
the prison of secrets
the years of self-harm
bursting seams
breaking up
shattering, scattering
into the brightness
the blue sky world
we had always known
as American
life.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Novels include  Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). Kelsay Books recently published the poetry chapbook the disappearing self.

NOVEMBER 2020

by Gil Hoy

Graphic: MoveOn.org

When the poet's
arrow hits the mark,

a wishful paragraph
can become

a single word:

Blue

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and served four terms as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman. He is a member of the Brookline Democratic Town Committee. 

400 BIRDS

by Preston Martin

Photos of birds that died Wednesday, May 3, after crashing into a high-rise building in Galveston. Animal Control Officer Josh Henderson said a total of 398 birds crashed into the building, and three —Houston Chronicle, May 5, 2017

In Auden’s low dishonest decade
History displayed a taste for tyrants.
Recent voters share that taste.
Some pray this retreat a wrinkle,
global sense will, with a start, awake.

New reality weighs our days,
our troubled nights; we grow stooped.
We appeal to our turning minds
see the long view, humanity is wise,
yearns for truth, fraternity. As if
wishing could make true.

Yesterday four hundred birds
lost their birdy instincts, reason—
blinded in reflection of a Galveston high rise—
flew full and headlong to greet their deaths.

Speculation by bird authorities:
glare mistaken for the sun, or moon light,
something, that seemed right at the time—
led them, without reason, to their demise.

Warblers, redstarts, ovenbirds,
bluebirds, cuckoos, sparrows, kestrels,
blackbirds, redwings, robins, cardinals,
orioles.

Preston Martin has published poems in literary journals including New Ohio Review, Iodine, Chaffin Journal, Kakalak, won awards or recognition by the North and South Carolina Poetry Societies and the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival. He has also published in anthologies including Every River on Earth: Writings from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press), and  Heron Clan III. He reads, writes, and teaches in Chapel Hill and Durham, NC, and chairs the Brockman-Campbell book competition for the North Carolina Poetry Society.

MARCH MADNESS

by Gerard Sarnat

Image source: CNN

Although an ambitious young father, I took a year off from work
to be with my wife and firstborn in the Pt. Reyes National Seashore.
We bought a twelve inch black and white TV with rabbit ear antennae
so I could watch Watergate unfold while doing pushups holding our baby.

More than four decades later it occurs to schedule requisite joint replacements
to coincide with college basketball’s month of playoffs then the inexorable
Select Congressional Committee to investigate T***p & Associates
relationship to Russia’s influence on the ‘16 Presidential election.


Gerard Sarnat is the author of four collections: Homeless Chronicles from Abraham to Burning Man (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014) and Melting The Ice King (2016). Harvard and Stanford educated, Gerry’s worked in jails, built and staffed clinics for the marginalized and been a CEO of healthcare organizations and Stanford Medical School professor. Married since 1969, he and his wife have three children and three grandkids.

THE FIELD, SOMETHING BORES INTO IT

by Alejandro Escudé

Cover of the 2007 Washington Life feature on the Russian diplomatic compound in Maryland.

The columns are grandiose on the Maryland estate.
Green, greener, and inside, a more Russian Russia,
clean as Vodka, cleaner, and by right, legal. So,
in dark suits, dense cologne, diplomats walk over
‘welcome home’ mats to leave, ousted. The intelligence
apparatus hides in a piece of cake, a delicious cake too.
Something stalks the field, something bores into it,
a veiled screw, a bullet hole in the back but no blood,
a bloodless hole, that is the internet, a leak-less leak.

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.

LESSONS FROM THE 2016 ELECTION

by David Galef

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

Narcissistic bigotry is never a crime.
You can be a billionaire on a very thin dime.
There’s no disgrace out of which you can’t climb.
One lie will pull another out of the slime.
Though interest rates vary, some slurs are prime.
You can fool enough people enough of the time.


David Galef is an American fiction writer, critic, poet, translator, and essayist. His most recent books are Brevity, A Flash Fiction Handbook and Kanji Poems. He has published over 100 poems in places ranging from The Yale Review to Shenandoah.

THANKSGIVING 2016—A RETROSPECTIVE

by Joan Colby

Image source: Cooking with Drew

Sky of beaten tin
Addressed by the bare
Limbs of the hickories.

We gather to eat
Tradition—our politics
Aligned in fortune.

We plan to march in the new year
Against dark forces
That lean like barbed wire
Upon the liberty
Of an open range.

Today, the pasture has gone
Brown and dormant. Like
Those who say give him a chance.
Those who hunker down when the Nazis
Pound on a neighbor’s door.

It won’t be us, we vow,
Unfolding our napkins,
Slicing the breast and the
Good dark meat,
Ladling the gravy
Of our lives so far.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

GIVING THANKS IN THE DISUNITED STATES OF AMERICA

by George Salamon

Archive photo of Thanksgiving at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York City.

Give thanks with a beholden heart
To 12 million Americans who voted for Bernie Sanders.
Give thanks because of the future we could build with them.

Give thanks with a sympathetic heart
To two of ten Americans whose vision is not electronically enslaved.
Give thanks because they insist on seeing for themselves.

Give thanks with a delighted heart
To Susan Sarandon, celebrity with mouth and mind.
Give thanks because she spoke truth to DNC's power.

Give thanks with an empathic heart
To Mitch Hedges, cattle farmer in Paris, Kentucky.
Give thanks because on November 8 he understood that "there was nobody to vote for."

Give thanks that all Americans
Are neither wolves of Wall Street nor sheep on Main Street.
Give thanks because more of them begin to see through
Slogans touting "change" or "greatness."
Give thanks that some of those duped and disenfranchised
No longer are seduced by circuses performing for them.
Give thanks because they may discredit and dismiss
The folklore of capitalism as provider and protector
Of government for the people.

Let's eat!

George Salamon experienced his first American Thanksgiving at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in Manhattan in 1948. He was asked to slice a turkey and his picture doing that appeared in the centerfold photo section of a New York tabloid, with a caption claiming that the turkey was the first one he had seen. That was correct, but the paper's reporter never asked him if he had ever seen a turkey before. Some things have not changed since then. Salamon now lives and writes in St. Louis. MO.

AMERICAN ICON

by Lylanne Musselman

Image source: Terapeak

I saw a bald eagle today
soaring back and forth,
sewing the edge of a
pure, fleecy cloud as if
it were being threaded
from the top of his snow
white head to the tip
of his ivory tail feathers.

I imagined he was quilting
a fresh, new day for Americans,
or embroidering a body bag
to collect the fragile bones
of this once strong,
colorful, united tapestry.              

Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet, playwright, and artist. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Poetry Breakfast, TheNewVerse.News, among others, and many anthologies.  In addition, Musselman has twice been a Pushcart Nominee. Musselman is the author of three chapbooks, with a fourth forthcoming: Weathering Under the Cat, from Finishing Line Press. She also co-authored Company of Women: New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013). Presently, she teaches writing at IUPUI, and online for Ivy Tech Community College.

GUZZLING DOWN THE BLUES

a post-election ghazal
by Joe Pacheco

I wake up each morning but can’t turn on the news,
My coffee’s cold and bitter with the Sore Loser Blues.

Start to write a poem, but I can’t find my muse,
She’s run away and left me with just Sore Loser Blues.

Called up Liberty Travel for a one-way Canada cruise,
They told me they’re booked solid with the Sore Loser Blues.

I’m keeping my Clinton sign, in case we didn’t lose,
But don’t know where to hide it with these Sore Loser Blues.

Maybe I’ll jump into the mainstream and drown my liberal views,
It’ll be easier to swim the narrows with the Sore Loser Blues.

The President-elect is desperate, no Dems left to abuse,
He’s willing to twitter anyone with the Sore Loser Blues.

Our nation’s divided, Pacheco, pick a side to choose,
It’s either freeloading Red states or the Sore Loser Blues.

Joseph Pacheco is a retired New York City superintendent  living on Sanibel Island. His  poetry has been featured several times on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Latino USA and WGCU. He has performed his poetry with David Amram’s jazz quartet at the Bowery Poets Café and Cornelia Street Café in New York City. He writes a poetry column for the Sanibel Islander and his poetry has appeared in English and Spanish in the News-Press. In 2008 he received the Literary Artist of the  Year award from Alliance for the Arts. He has published three books of poetry, The First of the Nuyoricans/Sailing to  Sanibel, Alligator in the Sky and, Sanibel Joe’s Songbook.

MY CHERRY TREE HAS FAILED TO YIELD

by Gregory Palmerino

Gregory Palmerino’s essays and poems have appeared in Explicator, Teaching English in the Two Year College, College English, Amaze: The Cinquain Journal, International Poetry Review, Courtland Review, Shot Glass Journal, The Lyric, the fib review, The Road Not Taken, Autumn Sky and The Society of Classical Poets. He teaches writing at Manchester Community College and writes poetry in Connecticut’s Quiet Corner, where he lives with his wife and three children.

THE THIRTEENTH MORNING AFTER

by Lyndi O'Laughlin

Image source: Loyal White Knights

Someone put an Amazon box
with a dirty bomb
under the Wizard of Oz’s throne,
blowing millions of barefaced replicas
into a blameless wind,

some lined-up right now
outside the local tattoo parlor,
needles buzzing over the raw flesh
of “Stars and Stripes Forever”.

The Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade is
planned for December, pale guys
and the women who love them
will wave from the beds of
pick-up trucks slithering down
a slick shiny boulevard in
North Carolina, and light will try to glint
off the gun metal barrels of dusty rifles
hanging on racks in back windows;
confetti and balloons will thrill
the children of the children and
maple trees along the parade route
will blow backwards into
the indifferent faces of crows,

and there is so much joy
around me that I turn away,
walk myself into the ocean,
breath salt water and fish scales,
stroll by anemones and sea stars
hiding under vast islands of
Huggies, Big Mac wrappers,
condoms and water bottles.

I’ll nap in a kelp bed, wake to
my own whimpers and howls
bubbling forth like the bays of
a three-legged red bone hound
tethered underwater to a coral reef,
head straight back, mouth an open gash,
seven billion balls of air bubbling forth.

It’s a comfortable enough seat,
this rocky outcrop, and I hardly
have to crane my neck at all
to see the soft underbelly
of that great white shark,
circling the shipwreck on my left.

Nothing to be done today
but keen bad poems,
let them rise in bubbles that
break the surface with a feeble crack
like the chipped edge
of a flat oar,
knowing I will never again
have to wonder—
how the Holocaust was
able to happen in the first place.

Lyndi O'Laughlin has a degree in nursing, but spends her time writing poetry from her home in Kaycee, Wyoming. As a progressive living in a rural, conservative area, poetry has become her way of expressing views that question the status quo. 

BEFORE THE ANTI-TRUMP RALLY

by Jon Wesick

Model Train Museum, Balboa Park, San Diego

Three hours sleep, one hour early
I wander Balboa Park. If only
today was just about healing crystals
and the gentle girl selling yoga pants.
It’s unseasonably hot as if flames of spite
burned the calendar back to August.

There have always been two Americas. Banana Republicans
elected the America of empty promises,
magical thinking, witch hunts, and internment camps;
the America of George Wallace and Bull Connor.

Little hope
for a country this far gone.
If I’m lucky, a lonely exile
of plantains and fried yucca.
The bureaucracy of overseas visas
so disheartening.

There’s a Japanese bridge
in the gully below the tea garden.
Up ahead a Baroque tower
and gold-flecked dome of lapis lazuli.
I’ll miss this place, its people,
my language

One protester shot in Portland.
My bulletproof vest, too bulky
for today. Ten minutes left. No time
for the Model Train Museum’s miniature world,
a world more perfect than this.
I backtrack toward a perilous future

Anti-Trump protesters in Balboa Park. Nov. 12, 2016. Photo by Jean Guerrero/KPBS

Jon Wesick hosts Southern California’s best ice cream parlor poetry reading and is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels.

UNTITLED

by Karen Neuberg

And I’m carrying my teaspoon
filled with water and I’ll pour it on
the raging fire and I’ll go back and get
more water and that’s what I’ll do
unless I find a bucket to fill and pour,
or a power hose to flush it all away
and I will never stop helping
the greening to return.


Karen Neuberg's most recent chapbook is Myself Taking Stage (Finishing Line Press). She has previously published at TheNewVerse.News.

SPECTRUM: NOVEMBER 8, 2016

by Deborah Kahan Kolb

The day the red-ones drew the curtains and chose the orange-one
to mind the white oval that had embraced the black-one
nearly three thousand days --- that day

was the day the blue-ones formed
a veined parenthesis to contain the pulsing mass
of the red-ones, spilling sideways,

was the day the red-ones and the blue-ones
never turned to purple and the green-ones
stayed scattered, shoots pushing up to be counted,

was the day the brown-ones huddled and burst, and
waited for the white-ones, the eye-holed pointed ones,
to bear a burning broken cross, its twisted arms akimbo,

was the day the pink-ones, like the blue-one who
missed her grip at the finish, snatched steel from
between their legs and bound themselves each to each,

was the day the tan-ones veiled themselves
into invisibility,

was the day the yellow-ones shifted, and strove
for the exits,

was the day the beige-ones bent double, and breathed
dios mio,

was the day the rainbows clung together, their colors melted
and shriven,

was the day a keening Hallelujah rose up from the teeming streets
and evanesced into the violet sky,

was the day I waited for the raging ones to bring a yellow star
for me.

Deborah Kahan Kolb is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Windows and a Looking Glass (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Poetica, Veils, Halos & Shackles, and Voices Israel. She lives in Bronx, NY.