BAKING BEFORE THE ELECTION

by Joy Kreves

There just happened to be exactly 

the right amount of butter in the fridge 

to make the Blood Orange boxed cake 

and frosting mix 

that sat in the cupboard for over a year

just waiting for election anxiety to crescendo

into a medicinal need for baked goods. 

 

The citrus flavor was out of sync 

with this Season of the Dead warm pumpkin, 

apple and caramel, yet a perfect flavor note 

for a particular person, on this day

of this year.

 

Who knew cake mixes could be best 

when left to ripen in the dark like pears

into an allure that calls out in a time of need

says, I’m here, yes, I’m here,

I’ve been waiting for you—

 

not shouted in a threatening way, not

like it’s wandering down a hallway 

I’m here, I’m coming for you, Nancy,

Nancy, where are you? Not menacing like that.                          

 

Look at this cake’s color—a delightful pink 

neither bloody nor orange.

Nothing revolting, no—no assault on the senses

no clobbering of tastebuds

just a small tart dance upon the tongue

an antidote for its time, this time.

 

If it had to write its own package description.            

it might state as its aim 

to serve a slice of laughter, a forkful of delight

for that overburdened, anxious brain.

I am at my best when paired

with pre-election hand-wringing.

Joy Kreves is an artist/poet in Central New Jersey, where she watches in horror as civil society comes crashing down around her. She is the Managing Editor of US1 Worksheets, in which she has had poems published, as well as several art exhibition catalogs. Her recent chapbook is Nature of The Beast.

ODE TO THE OCTOBER PUMPKIN

Earl Wilcox is a regular reader and contributor to The New Verse News.

OLD MAN SHOUTING IN A BARN

by Tricia Knoll

Photo by the poet.

On any given fine fall day and this one was given
as gold on the hills, gold in sunshine after rain,
two young parents push a stroller for a baby
wearing a knit hat down a fine gravel road.


The sun might have known it would dip soon
to a sunset but in that moment’s radiance, I asked
what brought them to this Vermont farm
this afternoon. They had many choices


on a day as fine as this. Snow has already topped
a nearby mountain. My purple petunias took on frost
last night. These October days are numbered
more reluctantly than most days, double digiting.


They said they came to u-pick a pumpkin
for Halloween to carve the baby’s first ghost face.
Light a candle. A fine Sunday to get out. Then
they heard “the old man shouting in the barn.”


I nod to the baby, ask “Another first?”
They smile. Another first for sure.
Too bad the baby won’t remember this.
That old man is Bernie Sanders,


a rally three weeks before mid-terms.
The baby inherits our crisis of climate change
and on this fine day, the old man whipped us
up to cheering his amplified words in a barn.


The mother, father and little boy—who will soon
see his first ghost—go rolling up the road to a field
where they might find a perfect pumpkin,
harvest gold despite this fine summer’s drought.



Tricia Knoll attended the rally in a barn in rural Vermont for Democratic candidates in Vermont on Sunday, October 14. This is a true story that means whatever you think it does.

PUMPKIN MAN

by David Spicer

Portrait pumpkin by Hugh McMahon

His name alone is an October
cartoon, but he’s an omen
that warns us like a hawk
swooping above black snakes
unluckier than the thirteenth
disciple who hovers like a specter.

Infamous Pumpkin Man isn’t a specter,
but he’s full of the famed October
surprises that fall on Friday the 13th,
standing in cornfields, yelling, Oh men,
oh women, kill all the snakes,
hang any women who hawk

their wares at nights and seek to hock
their babies’ souls. No, he isn’t a specter,
but real as a crawling king snake
that strikes on the last day of October.
Pumpkin Man’s more than an omen:
he’s the personification of the number 13,

betrays friends with his straw heart, as the thirteenth
disciple did at the last supper. He’s the hawk’s
nemesis, the hawk unafraid of human omens,
fearless of pumpkin men fearful of specters,
especially on the last day of golden October,
the day of lizards, of alligators, of orange snakes.

One day, it’s foretold, a ghostly stranger will snake
with a plumber’s auger the second to the thirteenth
straw in Pumpkin Man’s brain, October-
colored, like his hair that barkers have hawked
as a brand, as immortal as a specter’s
mastery of spells, sacrifices, and omens

to belie the trust of women and men.
And Pumpkin Man, alone in the field, will sneak,
or try to sneak, away in his final days like a specter
from a graveyard, and the twelfth and thirteenth
members of a boil of spiraling hawks will
grab his long red tie on the last day of golden October,

strangling him as no omen can, the thirteenth
and last time specters roam the days of October,
celebrating with the world, the snakes, the hawks.

David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, TheNewVerse.News, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, Santa Clara Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Yellow Mama,  Midnight Lane Boutique, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. The author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks, he’s the former editor of raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. His latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree available from Flutter Press.