IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE

by Jim Burns

with echoes of Buffalo Springfield

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

it can’t happen here 

they say

and go on 

with their day, 

but are they sure,

do they remember a time 

way back in their prime 

when they raised voices and sang

that something’s happening here,

it’s not exactly clear,

but we’d better beware

and look what’s goin’ down

what’s that sound, 

it ain’t exactly clear, 

but something for sure 

is happening here, 

the Constitution, institutions, 

are biting the dust, 

like used up metal 

they’ll dissolve into rust 

while we whistle 

in the dark, 

take a walk 

in the park, 

say it’ll be alright

and forget 

that what follows

the dark 

is the night

Jim Burns was born and raised in rural Indiana, received degrees from Indiana State University and Indiana University, and spent most of his working life as a librarian. After retirement he turned to an earlier love of writing and has been fortunate to have seen over 20 of his poems and prose published either online or in print. He lives with his wife and dog in Jacksonville, Florida.

MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, EVEN IF IT KILLS US

by George Salamon

“Young Americans are dying from despair. After the Great Recession, people aged between 25 and 44 started to overdose on opioids at an alarming pace. Overall, death rates for this age group rose an astounding 8% between 2010 and 2015.” —Jessika Bohon,  “Deaths of despair are rising in America. They are claiming lives all around me,” The Guardian, June 22, 2017. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images via The Guardian.

Flavius Josephus chronicled
The suicide of 960 Jews in 73 CE
Besieged by a Roman legion in Masada.
It may be history, it may be legend.
What young Americans are doing today
Is the real thing.
It is making America ugly and mean
And a mockery of the American Dream.

George Salamon has been watching the crumbling of the American Dream in and from St. Louis, MO.

REAWAKENED

by Richard Schnap




I hear the sound
Of drums approaching
Beating a rhythm
From the distant past

Down a ghostly road
That’s been reopened
To slither beneath
A bloodstained dawn

And in the wind
Come a thousand voices
Cheering the arrival
Of a man I’ve met before

Speaking a language
Of fashionable hatred
Designed to enshrine him
In the temple he’s rebuilt


Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally, and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.

SHOULD NEVER

by Jay Duret

On the grassy plains of Siberia 42,000 years ago, a baby woolly mammoth fell into a sticky mud hole and choked to death, leaving her mother to grieve for her. Now this little mammoth is the star attraction of [London’s] Natural History Museum’s Ice Age exhibition, which opens [May 24]. Because of her riverbed location, her body was . . .  pickled by acids formed by bacteria that entered her body soon after death, which was then frozen in permafrost. . . . Her DNA is well preserved and there are very few samples of this type of mammoth. --Daily Mail (UK), May 21, 2014

Image source: SingularityHUB

 I.

Should never
I see that now.
Twisted by logic
Played by logicians, swept
By the force of cunning argument.
Should never.

Debate will do that.
The river of words
Slow, languorous even, at the edges
Where you first step in.
Gently seductive, gently urging,
Gently gently gently down the stream.
But further, towards the sluicing middle, the current
Irresistible. The logic, the argument, the hard claw of debate.
Irresistible.
I was carried down the stream.
I am sorry.
Should never.

I blame Google.
It is one thing, after all, to search for words.
We do that.
We are human; we have no choice.
But pictures? Images?
This should be taboo.

Once I saw you I could not straighten my thinking.
I knew the arguments, heard the debates,
I have a mind that can hold opposing ideas in balance.
In equipoise.
But the swoop of your ivory. Its magnificent curl.
The rich dignity of your coverings.
As a people, we dream of a coat like your colossal swinging fur coat.
We hear in dreams the deep poundings of your stride
Turning tundra to grassland, step by booming step.

To see your image was to fail you.
Should never.
Should never have brought you,
Woolly Mammoth, Woolly Mammoth,
I should never have brought you back.

II.

I was born in a glass tube in a clinic in LA
Cloned from a morsel of DNA, that DNA exhumed
From a nugget of amber,
Or a bubbling tar pit, or a fossil in the Dakotas.
My papa, not mammoth, not woolly,
A balding man in a white lab coat
With bad breath, like he stunk inside,
Like all humans.
Stunk inside.

I don’t speak human.
Human sounds won’t pass my mouth.
We took a vow, my brothers and sisters,
Even as we dwindled,
Even as the light that burned within us
Flickered
We would never utter words that had been spoken
By humans or their kind.
Poisoned meat. Poisoned grasses.
The rapaciousness of hunters.
The voraciousness of human hunger.
You hunted us down. You ate us up.
All of us.
Extinction.

I know why it is you brought me back.
I know what it is you want.
The debate, the logic, the business with Google; all lies
I know why you brought me back:
You want me to blow life into you.
You want me to give a gift of words.
But I won’t speak them.

To be extinct is to be beyond words.
Beyond any words, beyond all words,
Human words, mammoth words, it doesn’t matter.
I am beyond words.
I am dead to words.
I don’t speak human.
I took a vow.

Jay Duret is a San Francisco writer and illustrator. His stories have appeared in many online and print journals. He blogs at www.jayduret.com and welcomes feedback at jayduret(at)yahoo.com.