HOW TO SURVIVE AN ELECTION

by Steve Zeitlin

Smokejumper

My cousin Rod McIver—smoke jumper—

parachuted into Missouri wildfires

became famous for escaping the great Montana blaze

by igniting a flickering ring of fire round himself,

hunkering down so the 

sea of flames—

passed over and around

 

teaching us—when the infernos of the body politic

hurl down upon your fragile soul

light a passionate, fiery circle 

round yourself, your family, friends

 

let the fires of this wicked world

pass over and around

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

Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore, New York City’s Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-founder of the Brevitas poetry collective.  He the author of a volume of poetry, I Hear American Singing in the Rain, and twelve books on America’s folk culture. In 2016, he published a collection of essays, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness with Cornell University Press.  In 2022, he published JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling (JPS/U. of Nebraska Press).

MOMENT

by Jennifer M Phillips

"I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!" —Trump on TruthSocial via Newsweek, September 21, 2024

You could surrender everything
hearing the mesmeric voice of the predator
saying, I will make you safe, will save you
from your body, from decisions between the imperfect,
from nebulous fear, from the unknown future, from your tired heart;
fluttering at the excitement of the sycophant carrying a big idea
of someone else's like a hydrogen balloon,
his tongue a blurted  flame, and suddenly
you long for detonations. Life's long patience
and quiet hands you shake off like your mother's
holding you back from the thrill of traffic,
the allure of the other side.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock)

BUFFALOED

by Susan Vespoli

Use this link to the Sierra Club to send a letter to the Department of Interior Secretary Jewell and President Obama today telling them we must protect public lands from fracking.

Big shoulders, dark and burly like Mike Tyson,
2,000 pounds of bull that’s bred with Harley,
some think I’m buffalo but I’m a bison,
an herbivore who’s getting pissed and snarly

at lack of media blitz—where is the news?
Cameras should be filming this whole story
of Badlands, Bakken shale now fracked by crews
near national park, in remote parts of prairie.

Holding tanks, pump jacks of wells surround
my habitat at Roosevelt National Park.
Damn noisy trucks and Amtrak roar through town
with oil; pit flares scare away the dark.

Will someone witness for me, snap pix with phone?
Please save me. Fracking’s fucking up my home.


Susan Vespoli recently traveled to North Dakota where she met a bison at a porta-john. She teaches English and Creative Writing at a couple of Arizona colleges. Her work has been published online, in print, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.