The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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The experiences that made Susan Patton who she is include a year as a VISTA volunteer on the Navajo reservation in 1969, a two month trip through Europe in 1969, a partnership in a travel agency which offered many travel opportunities, and 20 years as a children’s librarian in the public school system. She has a daughter, a grand-daughter, a husband of 59 years, and a cat. Susan has some wonderful friends who are kind enough to read some of my poems and country songs. She enjoys the discipline of the sonnet form which requires choosing the right words and discarding many favorites until it feels finished.
Cumulonimbus clouds jostle & dominate the dark side of the sky. They have gathered in towering, glowering stacks, as ominous grumbles of thunder announce the storm is upon us.
Of course we ignored the signs— we have long learned to ignore warning signs here at the far end of democracy, lest one of the regime’s masked rib-breaking squads single us out somehow, & fling us to the ground & kick us until our ribs break.
So, we simply accept, that under the hard rain that’s gonna fall, we will, as usual, get soaking wet.
How did we become so sad & beaten down? Isn’t it true that, en masse, Americans are good people?
Perhaps racist & prejudiced, but with good hearts?
Maybe short on critical thinking, but mostly meaning well?
Whatever—this is still America— supposedly no kings allowed.
We can put on raincoats & resistance yellow hats. We can wear red knitted hats like WWII Norwegians. We can wear turquoise knitted hats, or teal— & many of us will wear those bright rainbow hats— because that’s where we stand— & some ladies among us will dig out their old pink pussy hats from back when the country was another country.
What we seemingly can’t do is decide on a single unifying hat color— not a good omen.
Roderick Deacey writes many poems and is rejected a lot. James is always very nice about it, though.
Stripped of her name
and branded,
her onyx pearls
dropping
one by one.
Backlash.
Corporate fathers
take a knee
in insincere
solidarity.
A belated Mea Culpa,
treacle spilling
from the lips of execs
once the deck was stacked
like flapjacks, they scurried,
transparent as lace,
finely collared,
ready to erase
the mammy
they embraced
in the race to be virtuous,
awakened just in time—
the tortoise at the finish line—
when it impacts their bottom line.
Betsy Mars is a poet, educator (prior to the pandemic), photographer, and occasional publisher. She is currently working on her second anthology to be released by her press, Kingly Street Press, this summer. She is also finishing a book co-written with friend and poet Alan Walowitz entitled In the Muddle of the Night, coming soon from Arroyo Seco Press. She has one chapbook, Alinea (Picture Show Press), to her name, as well as numerous publications on the web and in anthologies, most recently in Verse-Virtual, The Blue Nib, Kissing Dynamite, and The Poetry Super Highway. Her childhood years in Brazil gave her a deep appreciation for language and culture, a love of travel, and an early awareness of the disparities that exist throughout the world.
Drive downtown, in the circles can be found
Stonewall Jackson, Arthur Ashe in Monument town.
Two hooves in the air mean the rider died in battle,
Others want their freedom, don’t make me no chattle.
The history society debunks the horse limbs lore
But slavery, Lost Causes leave generations sore
and hurting from a war and the endless chore
of teaching you, the victor, writing the stor-
ies, the history, the truth of our nation.
On the block in Shockoe Bottom, bound in chains
Or, cause cotton weren’t the only crop, sold down the James.
We scrawl on Jeff Davis Black Lives Matter.
At Robert E. Lee’s feet red paint is splattered.
Say his name. Lynch Trump. This is racist.
Your vote was a hate crime. The south ain’t no oasis.
Yet near Monument Avenue a black man rides,
Nike high tops astride a horse with one foot high.
Pony-tailed dreadlocks, rips in his jeans,
Wounded in the battle of his own life it seems.
Yet regard his hoodied shoulders, straight and proud.
Regard his youth, his gaze, his head unbowed.
Wiley brought him here to Arthur Ashe Boulevard.
The statue sits right here, in Richmond unmarred
the painful mourning after in our own backyard.
Nan Ottenritter lives in Richmond, VA and has driven by the confederate statues for years. Yet in February, 2019 the city council voted to change the name of the Boulevard to Arthur Ashe Boulevard. In December, 2019 Kehinde Wiley’s statue Rumors of War was installed in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It stands in stark comparison to the statues on Monument Avenue. With both of these actions the author began to feel a little proud of what was once the capitol of the Confederacy.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, left, reacts as he and First Lady Melania Trump listen to President Trump speak at U.N. headquarters on Sept. 19, 2017. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer via The Washington Post)
Well, he
was a racist and a liar and a bit of a baby,
but maybe
not an outright crook.
Waiting now for the book!
In Missouri, an acolyte of President Trump is running for the U.S. Senate and denouncing “manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils.” The candidate, Courtland Sykes, . . . is worth quoting as a window into the backlash against #MeToo and empowered women: “I don’t buy into radical feminism’s crazy definition of modern womanhood and I never did,” Sykes wrote on his campaign’s Facebook page. “They made it up to suit their own nasty, snake-filled heads. . . . I don’t buy the non-stop feminization campaign against manhood. I want to come home to a home cooked dinner at six every night, one that [my fiancée] fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix.” —The New York Times, January 31, 2018
My head is filled with snakes of many kinds—
huge pythons, cobras, moccasins, and corals.
Unlike Medusa’s, mine are hard to find;
they lurk within and poison my morals.
The venom of equality
is stored in my fangs,
paralyzing your patriarchal limbs,
rendering you unprivileged.
The reptiles crawl; they hiss, prepared to strike
at monsters who are deadlier than they
could ever be. You hold me in contempt,
for my head is filled with snakes of many kinds.
Editor’s note thanks to the Poets Collective: The dorsimbra, created by Eve Braden, Frieda Dorris and Robert Simonton, is a 12-line poem consisting of (1) a quatrain of iambic pentameter rhyming abab, (2) a quatrain of "short and snappy" free verse, and (3) a quatrain of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). The final (12th) line is the same as the first line. The form's creators suggest the use of enjambment, interlaced rhymes, and near-rhymes to bind the three stanzas.
Diane Elayne Dees's poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women's professional tennis throughout the world.
Why don’t we get more immigrants from Norway?
All winter long they never see the sun.
But their health care’s taken care of
And they’re not, that I’m aware of,
Very likely to be murdered with a gun.
What is it with these ignorant Norwegians?
Don’t they want what all Americans receive?
But they love the smorgasbords
And the mountains and the fjords,
And on top of that, they get parental leave.
Why do I sometimes wish I were Norwegian?
Am I really quite as socialist as that?
Yes, the dream that I aspire to
Is to sit beside the fire to
Caress my own Norwegian forest cat.
Gail White is a formalist poet with work in many journals, including Measure, Light, First Things, and Hudson Review. She is a two-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award. Her latest book Catechism was published in 2016 by White Violet Press.
Caricature of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio by Lem Luminarias.
Arpaio sees a cage before the soul
of any brown-skinned man—
There is a god in every racist being,
chimeric fool, derogatory chant.
Arpaio sees a cage before the soul
of any brown-skinned man—
The mind molds prisoners, releases them as well,
fright detracts the willing and the fair.
Arpaio sees a cage before the soul
of any brown-skinned man—
The foreigner beneath a tarp of fear hides
from the sheriff hunting desolate lands.
Arpaio sees a cage before the soul
of any brown-skinned man—
More fascist general than lawman, stink
of Southwest sweat, sunglasses large and dim.
Arpaio sees a cage before the soul
of any brown-skinned man—
I spot the van along the American road,
a hot, disgruntled breeze, no court, and dry as death.
Arpaio sees a cage before the soul
of any brown-skinned man—
I speak, when helpless, in swallowed knives.
Nowhere to run from the people’s armored beast.
Arpaio sees a cage before the soul
of any brown-skinned man.
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.
O Crying Nazi, cry all night long
because you’re a goddamn human being,
Crying Nazi, you weep like a mourning
mother at her son’s closed casket.
You weep like a goddamn lynching victim on his nickering horse.
You weep like a maniac suffering a nervous breakdown.
Crying Nazi, I don’t feel sorry for you.
Crying Nazi, are your parents proud of you?
Does your sister call you a creep?
Do you hate yourself, deep down in the coal mine shaft of your soul?
You’re embarrassing yourself, Crying Nazi.
Will you forgive yourself for your crybaby tears, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, will you ever cry again?
It can’t go well if you do.
Have you cried many times as an adult?
Did women think you’re too sensitive to straddle you?
I don’t understand you, Crying Nazi.
Does the sun ever shine on your glossy pate when you sin?
O Crying Nazi, how many people have you stabbed,
how many Mexicans have you tarred and feathered?
Have you ever prayed in a mosque or synagogue?
I saw you blubber on tv, Crying Nazi, and I’m not empathetic.
You’re a sissy.
Were you a good little boy playing Cowboys & Indians,
always the cowboy?
O Crying Nazi, are you a misogynist, too?
Or do you love all women as long
as they’re not black, brown, yellow, red, or Semites?
Will you ever fall in love with someone?
When you cry, Nazi, do your fellow Nazis
bristle that you’re such a pussy?
Crying Nazi, is acid in your tears?
Do you chew your bile at breakfast or supper?
Do you hate yourself, Crying Nazi?
Crying Nazi, did you study a lot of Hitler books?
Did you read them in lotus position on your easy chair?
Do you idolize Sheriff Joe and David Duke?
Could you ever be your own hero, Crying Nazi?
What shade of red is your blood, Crying Nazi?
Do you bathe yourself with your tears?
Has life been easy or hard for you?
Can you look into the eclipse and see the blackness
in your fellow Nazis?
Will you immolate yourself until your skin
barbecues into blackness?
When did you learn to hate, Crying Nazi?
Did a black boxer beat the hell out of you in the ring
and then brag about it?
Do you cry yourself to sleep in your cell at night?
I wonder if you regret your twenty minutes of infamy.
I wonder if God loves you, Crying Nazi.
Do you hang out with your Nazi buddies in chow hall?
O Crying Nazi, cry for the Charleston Nine.
Cry for Trayvon Martin.
Cry for Ferguson.
Cry for Buchenwald.
Cry for the martyred saints.
Most of all, cry for your fellow Nazis.
Stop crying for yourself, Crying Nazi.
Maybe you’ll meet a girl who loves you
because you’re bald.
Maybe she’ll love you because you’re cute.
Or maybe she’ll love you because you’re a Crying Nazi.
Then you can father crying Nazi babies.
Crying Nazi, you’re an oxymoron.
Do you get high, Crying Nazi?
Do you eat a lot of beef or are you a vegan?
I know you don’t eat nails, Crying Nazi.
They’d make you bawl, Crying Nazi.
Do you jack off in your cell at night, Crying Nazi?
O Crying Nazi, I feel your hateful pain.
How many guns do you own?
I saw you wearing your zebra outfit in jail the other day, Crying Nazi.
You looked sad as a fallen cake.
You looked sadder than a Syrian orphan.
Sadder than a basset hound who’s lost his best friend.
Sadder than a starving cat.
Sadder than a melting snowman.
You didn’t look proud, Crying Nazi.
Where was your Sieg Heil! when you needed it, Crying Nazi?
Will your hate buddies protect you against the Mexican Mafia?
The Black Brotherhood?
High prices in the commissary?
I’m sorry I judge you, Crying Nazi.
So, when you get out of jail, I’ll buy you a Heineken
and a one-way ticket to Death Valley,
throw in a Bible to read on your bus trip
and leave a two-dollar bill in it, Crying Nazi,
along with a little note reading Prove you’re a goddamn human being, Crying Nazi: Love yourself a little more, and maybe, just maybe you can love the rest of us, too, because we’re all goddamn human beings, Crying Nazi.
David Spicer has had poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Easy Street, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, Santa Clara Review, Rat’s Ass Review, 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.
He was always a thug with a coarse mouth, peacock swagger,
and a proclivity to break rules like his paterfamilias who
wouldn’t rent to African Americans but sent his misbehaving boy
to military school to learn how to play football, stick it to losers,
and escape the draft so as to not serve in Vietnam or praise
John McCain for being captured rather than killing the enemy
in real estate deals that were too big to fail or have T***p
put into jail for hiring undocumented workers to mount his name
on glitzy Gotham towers and gaudy gambling casinos that
went bust in New Jersey where busts are bounteous and
pussies can be grabbed for the asking if you are a celebrity
palling around with Russians, wrestlers, and rapscallions from
Fox and Friends who want to make America great again
like it was in the eighteen fifties when blacks were chattel and
nativist numbskulls were not considered nattering nabobs of
negativity by their supporters but impassioned Neanderthals
capable of challenging Obama’s citizenship and backing a
Muslim ban and a Slavic first lady who under our nation’s new
immigration rules would have been a deportation priority during
the nineteen nineties when her husband did not report hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tenuous tax maneuver
later outlawed by a Congress that is now led by a Cheesehead from
Wisconsin and a prune face from Kentucky who loves coal more than
the proles who work the mines in a state which ranks forty-seventh in
educational attainment, is solidly Republican, and has a constituency
the POTUS respects as much as Marla Maples who learned she was
being divorced by reading about it in the New York Post rather than
seeing it on TV where Jim Comey found out he had been fired as
Director of the FBI and students from T***p University discovered
they had been defrauded by a corpulent con man who thought
climate change was bogus, Mexicans were bad hombres, and
a nasty woman was making life difficult on the campaign trail
by calling the star of the Apprentice Putin’s puppet, a teller of
untruths and a fellow unfit for the highest office in the land
of the me, the home of the knave, and the dockets red glare,
lawsuits bursting in air, gave proof through the night that
our hate was where it has forever been—gays, the elites,
liberals, immigrants, people of color and those perceived as
getting a good deal in a global economy that features
home runs for the rich, strikeouts for the poor and
lies hit down the foul line that T***p always calls fair.
Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published nine books and numerous articles and poems in various publications. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.
As if no one notices yet. Falling in places, with
Brexit like a planet aligning as the latest. As if
Coincidence is still the most observable. No
Doors for fleers from carnage, no asylums for
Escapers. They’d rather say no and risk Europe’s
Fragmentation than be part of the solution, the
Greatest refugee crisis as if orbiting, our only
Home heating up like the fever of nationalism.
In my country Human Rights will be hanged, extra-
judicial exclusivity for the poor and powerless. We
Keep divining stars as mankind, rising among us
Leaders with iron hands, lifted to power as
Messiahs, Impunity summarily executing, murder
Negating the promised change, whim from
One man the only law. In the land of the free, where
Power is Jupiter, the worst of human nature
Quickly gains followers. In the home of the brave,
Return to a Dark Age cheers a Demagogue. It will
Shock me if, with this planetary pattern, the
Truest Racist won’t be enthroned in November.
Understand – not underestimate – The Cosmic
Verity, Which (or Who) guarantees The Karmic
Whirligig. Mars should perhaps be walled for
Xenophobes, our nostalgia for the strongman rule
Yoked to our willingness, history with the same
Zeal as the Universe granting our careful wishes
Jonel Abellanosa resides in Cebu City, The Philippines. A number of his poems have previously appeared on TheNewVerse.News.
“not an uncommon example of humanity in SC: Leroy Smith helps white supremacist to shelter & water as heat bears down.” Image/caption source: @RobGodfrey
I came upon a wedding guest list tucked inside a legal pad. I needed the pad for a workshop: “Racial Issues in the LGBT Community.” But the list? What was I hanging on to—the way Amy once loved me? I know it wasn’t perfect, but what is? Hell, if love required perfection, there’d be no love at all. I was in a mood before I ever walked into that workshop. Then we had to name our preferred pronouns. I wanted to say this and that. I know trans people suffer, but do we really need to make an 80-year-old straight guy with a beard say he, him, his? By the time someone said hetero-normative, I was sick of words. It helped when Lester told us he was there because his gay son died in a car accident. Plain English. Real grief. The next day a newspaper photo caught my eye: black cop guiding sun-baked supremacist up South Carolina stairs toward air-conditioning. The cop looked sure on his feet, the white guy ready to topple onto his swastika. It was the day the Confederate flag came down at the state house. A reporter asked the cop why he thought the photo went wild on the Internet. Love, he said. I think that’s the greatest thing in the world—love. Yes, that, I thought, breaking down at last—for Amy and me, for Lester and his son, for the cop, for the hater, for the whole racist, trans-phobic, hetero-normative world.
Margaret DeRitter lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her dog, Murray. When she’s not walking him in the woods, paddling her kayak or writing poetry, she teaches college journalism classes and does freelance writing and editing. She worked as a full-time journalist for 30 years, including 22 at the KalamazooGazette, Her poetry has appeared in Scarlet Literary Magazine, Melancholy Hyperbole, Midnight Circus and Encore.
