A HAUNTING AND A CURSE

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

               

     Came a land with no children but many flowers. 

Weeded out by ground thieves, God-given, they thought 

and said. Their right, being most moral to themselves.

     In mothers’ wombs slaughtered sons and daughters. 

In incubators denied power. Refused milk, starved, no matter 

their wails, no rescue or slightest mercy even water.

     Survived to toddle, shot in their heads. Walk or run, 

in knees hobbling for life. Life? Called lawn to be mowed.

At mid-youth, still alive, picked off, 

     thought of as rats on forbidden dumps. And grass 

to be cut. Bombed and drone-shot day and night til nothing

but chunks rolled in dirt like fish in flour 

     from nets also forbidden. Came a land with no 

children, a foot, arm, patch of flesh while rubble baked and 

blew away in the sun, then the absolute misery of winter 

without shelter not a dry or safe space to be had not a meal 

     and the people who wanted it that way, staked and 

claimed, liking it with no children or only childrens’ bones, 

congratulating themselves. No humanitarian aid allowed! 

No humanity for Christ’s sake!

     Came a time their stolen olive trees turned blood red 

fruiting with the colors of newborn eyes watching them.

     Their soiled window boxes boasted the lushest 

greens ever seen, breaking out with poison petals 

startlingly splendid but quick to rot. 

     Their gardens made them sick. Trees never 

stopped boiling over with tears. Yet still, they praised

themselves, thanking their gods. 

     The map to the land with no children can be found 

by the cries the wind is made of. World ‘round, it is named 

shame in laments whispered and screamed forever.

Outback Maine native Patricia Smith Ranzoni is a child veteran of WWII and retired educator nearing the land of 85. Daughter of a woodsworking paper mill rigger and farm woman, she and her second generation Italian-American husband met and married while working their way through the University of Maine (1962). With their three children they have devoted their lives to keeping the family G.I. Bill homestead for three more generations. They were the last on both sides to keep a family cow. Her mostly self-taught poetry has been published across the country and abroad, including numerous times in The New Verse News where she goes for solace.

NOBODY SAID FLEAS

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Could America’s pandemic response be any more medieval? 

—Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, June 30, 2020

The Great Mortality produced, when it came,
a five-year torment for the Gothic mind.
Wise men—there were not wise women then—
proposed these causes: conjunct planets, corruption,
close-by swamps, over-consumption of fruit, dung.
Further, they condemned corpses rotting in ditches
or in makeshift graveyards. Folk understood their murrain
as the footprint of God’s fury, a penalty for their lapses.
Nobody said fleas. Nobody said rats.
If a citizen sprouted buboes there were nostrums:
banishing foul “vapors,” balancing ill “humors,”
drinking urine, yours or others’, holding a dead snake
or a live hen against your afflicted skin, burning spices,
using potions: Unicorn or theriac, Four Thieves Vinegar
or if you were well off, powdered emeralds.
The pious tottered along scourging themselves.
Most cures contained a fair amount of opium.
To stop the spread of plague without a remedy,
the Fourteenth Century would separate the sick from well
for 30, then for 40 days under the law of quarantine.
The US tried isolation for a month or two, then gave it up.
Despite the pestilence, news from the government was
they were on it, but since it exploded as a novel virus,
what could they promise? After that, they faked the data,
muzzled experts, gas-lit, spread the blame, and when their
constituents asked, without a remedy, how do we survive
contagion? Their answer was, wear masks, stay home
or keep six feet apart. However puzzled, folk understood
they must persist in using the regime's meager directions,
or perish en masse. Proving our regime no more advanced
than our forefathers, salvation just past what politicians
can imagine, just past their careless, medieval reach.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks. Her poems have appeared on line and in anthologies.

POSTCARD FROM THE PANDEMIC

by Pauletta Hansel




Crabgrass beneath the iris rhizomes
where my muddy fingers
can’t tell one root from another.
Meanwhile, down in the French Quarter
the rats are starving.
No tourists, no trash.
What can they do but feed on their young?
Everything wants to survive.

Inside our lungs the virus slips
itself into the Ace-2 receptors and is remade.
Scientists call what happens next a cytokine storm.
Bugler, sound the charge! An army of cells
march up from the trenches,
destroy what they can’t save.
“We have to think about this pandemic from the virus’s position.”
All it wants to do is to eat us alive.

Pauletta Hansel’s seven poetry collections include Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award. Her writing has been featured in Rattle and Still: The Journal, and on The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016- 2018).

COVID-19

by Gary Lark

Here we are
waiting for the world to end.
Enough stuff to last a month
and angst hanging outside
waiting to gobble us up.

I go out back
to the garden
plant spring seeds
in an eight-year plot
and collect some vitamin D
for the long haul.

Sheltering in place,
seeing even less people
than I usually do.
A neighbor turns out her little dog,
we wave. I check the rat traps,
some of the bait is gone.
They lose a few every day.

Gary Lark’s work includes Ordinary Gravity (Airlie Press); River of Solace (Editor's Choice Chapbook Award from Turtle Island Quarterly); In the House of Memory (BatCat Press); Without a Map (Wellstone Press); Getting By (Holland Prize from Logan House Press). Daybreak on the Water is forthcoming from Flowstone Press. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Catamaran, Hubbub, Poet Lore, ZYZZYVA, and others.

A STATUE OF A GUY ON A HORSE MAKES GOOD RIP RAP

by Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin

The Robert E. Lee statue for which the "Unite the Right" rally was organized to protest its removal in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 13, 2017.  (Tasos Katopodis / EPA via The Chicago Tribune)

It makes me want to hurl myself
off a cliff.
They are still here.
With permission to be unashamed
and a hall pass from the president,
who hand feeds them Ensure
and protein bars on weekends.
They slither the streets
as if they have something new
to add to the national discourse.
Swastikas.
Confederate flags.
Once I pretended they were rats.
Annoying, but you didn’t really
see them that often.
They have been breeding in the dark,
spreading disease across sidewalks
and playgrounds.
No antibacterial soap in the world is strong
enough to cover that kind of stench.
My eyes, lately a little stunned,
cast themselves on photos
of Charlottesville. They stutter when
reporting back to the brain,
who rubs its ears, slaps its cheeks,
reaches for dilapidated walking shoes.
Dips a finger into an ink pot and
traces NO across her forehead.

Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin’s poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, Fall, 2017), Troubadour: An Anthology of Music-inspired Poetry (Picaroon Poetry Press, 2017), Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press, 2016), Gyroscope Review, TheNewVerse.News, Picaroon Poetry, Unbroken Journal and elsewhere. 

POST WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY BLUES

by Howie Good

Howie Good is the recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his forthcoming collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.

NIGHT RATS

by Carolyn Gregory

At night, they run toward each other,
biting off each other's tails.

They flagellate themselves
over an unknown God
who answers none of their prayers
for work, land or hope.

Hiding during the day,
they are aroused by the need
for meat at night,

their prayers not inspired by love
but by the drill to capture,
biting off the heads of the enemy
and spitting out their hearts.


Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ygdrasil, Seattle Review. Her first and second books were published by Windmill Editions in Florida.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A BLIZZARD

by Michael Carosone

Exeter, NH, February 16, 2015. Photo by Emmaline Kim.

 
It takes a blizzard to stop time

to stop the hamsters from turning the wheels
            to stop the mice from running in the mazes
                        to stop the rat race

to make people slow down

and breathe
             and appreciate
                        and think

to make people realize

that they are not hamsters
            not mice
                        not rats


Michael Carosone is a writer, educator, activist, and native New Yorker from Kings Bay/Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. With his partner, Joseph LoGiudice, he wrote and edited the book, Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men (Bordighera Press, May 2013), a collection of 15 personal essays on the lives of Gay Italian American men. His poems and essays have been published in a variety of books and journals. He writes on personal, political, and social topics and issues, including marginalized peoples and literatures, especially Italian Americans and people of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer (GLBTQ) community. He is pursuing his Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree in English Education at Teachers College of Columbia University, and his dissertation will focus on incorporating marginalized literatures and writers—Queer and Italian American—into the English classroom, in grades K-12 and at the college level. He lives in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, with his partner, Joseph LoGiudice.