(F)LIGHT

by Jen Schneider

Suzanne Somers, who died Sunday, in New York in 2020. Photo:Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times

As a child,
I’d watch Three’s Company regularly.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s,
I appreciated the sitcom as revolutionary.

From legal work to florist to culinary 
adventurer, I came to believe I could 
live wherever and be whatever I desired.

Later, the show’s offscreen testimony 
taught me more than I ever imagined.

When Suzanne Somers fought for equal pay
and instead received notice of her final day,
I understood that while there might be open
rooms in set apartments, equity
was still off the market.

While Cindy and Terri moved into the room
recently vacated, they never replaced
the space newly renovated. 

Somers embraced her role as a changemaker
at a time when the television was a media 
supremacy. With authentic resiliency, 
she took on turkeys, Ropers, bowling, 
and Wandas in a step-by-step fashion. 

She’d spin wands of words, as Chrissy,
Jack, and Janet created fodder for ideas 
not yet comfortable. In the process, 
she created new spaces for hospitality 
on issues previously closeted. 

Somers was a master at keeping things light 
while taking on the toughest of fights. She spun 
a diet of equal pay and blonde delight. Creator 
of the ThighMaster and a business blaster,
Somers was a fighter of original making. 

Nobody’s fool, 
she wielded the script as a tool. Somers 
never stopped fighting for what she believed, 
from gender parity to healthy living. 

Her memory will forever be a prime-time 
recollection of a life worth regularly revisiting. 

With deep admiration—

Thank you, Suzanne Somers 
May you rest in f(light).

Jen Schneider is a poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of several books of poetry, with her most recent collection 14 (Plus) Reasons Why, published with free lines press, now available. If she’s not writing, you can find her teaching legal and justice courses in her favorite city.

DRIVING BY THE DANUBE IN BUDAPEST

by Joan Leotta

on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah)

Our tour bus was rushing to

Reach the next “place to see”

In Budapest when I looked

Out the window to watch

Night begin to be reflected

In the Danube.

We turned a corner and

Driving close by the river,

I saw, an installation

of sculpted shoes along the banks.

Our guide did not seem

to notice. Her purview was

government buildings and

restored churches.

With wifi I reached back

In time, to the moment when

real people, Budapest’s Jews,

fell out of those shoes into the

Danube as Nazi machine guns

cut through their bodies.

Men. Women. Children.

My heart began to pound,

Evil lives on where

people chose to ignore it

past or present.

Only remembering can

begin to protect us from

evil perpetrating such again.

Joan Leotta is an author and Story Performer.

TWENTY YEARS IN & OUT

by Art Goodtimes

For the first ten years after 9/11

a band of us peaceniks marched our

San Miguel County Seat’s main street

in protest & remembrance

Once a month. Every eleventh

Doves preaching to the peacocks

 

No permits. Just commish & citizen kin

remembering those who held hands

falling from the Towers like shot duck

 

Remembering those eagles in uniforms

racing up stairwells intent on rescue

as the crushing hate of true believers

came crashing down on their heads

 

Remembering America’s lashing out

without true purpose. Invading Iraq

Afghanistan. Predator strikes. Collateral

damage. A nation bent on inflicting

endless terror on endless terrorists

 

After decades of foreign wars

we peace-marchers kind of lost heart

Chickadees with PTSD. Crows

becoming accustomed to carrion

So industrial Telluride’s unreal

estate bubbles on undisturbed

 

Now, explains

Capt. Barefoot

lives of peace

our only protest

 

Parade-master & poet-in-residence at the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, Art Goodtimes served fives terms as Colorado’s only Green county commissioner. He is currently represented in Congress by U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Rifle).

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY, 2021

by Howie Good

The SS officer rolled the corpse over, and the girl saw the face of her music teacher, with blood here and there. He had gone to fetch a ration of bread, and a loaf was sticking out of his coat. The girl drew closer. It looked like a serious piece of bread, and Jews had little to eat, soup that was mostly water with grass. Her instinct was to grab the bread and run. But she left it. She left it because she saw his face, with blood here and there.

&

When someone complains to me about trivial stuff, I’ll say, “Oh yeah, try going through life as a Howard.” In Judaism, at least as practiced by my parents, one is named in honor of a person who has died. I was named in honor of my mother’s father’s brother. I never met him. I’ve never even seen a picture of him. He died long before I was born and without leaving a trace—except for the 100-year-old man, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, arrested in Germany on 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder.

&

It’s spring in name but not in substance. The land, to my amazement, seems to constantly rearrange itself in wild new patterns of rage and decay. On the border, small brown children languish in lockups. On city streets, young black men in police chokeholds beg for breath. There is something I have to do. I don’t know how I will do it. I just know from the pressure of tears behind my eyes that it has to be done.

Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).

MOURNING GEORGE FLOYD

by Marilyn Peretti

A boxy white truck with the blue eagle
pulls up to the curb, the postal vehicle
I observe most days.

Today I’m absorbed in tv, at the same time
view the driver through my window—
her pale blue clerk’s shirt, a billed cap,
and the blue-gray summer shorts
showing her shiny brown legs
through the open door.

Fleetingly I wonder what mail she’ll
bring me. But back to the Houston
funeral of George Floyd, victim
of city police brutality.

The choir, distancing themselves
due to the pandemic, the speakers,
the pastors lowering their safety masks.
The organ, the hymns, the brothers.

Then Rev. Al Sharpton, “‘I can’t breathe’
he said, and was choked for 8 minutes,
46 seconds — Breath is how God gives
you life, it is sanctified, it is sacred.”

She’s still sitting in the truck
looking down intently at her device
it seems. I watch the congregants,
hear sad and glorious words, lifting
George up, praising his honesty,
his leadership, his faith.

After 15 minutes she climbs out
of the truck, opens the rear door,
lifts the mail tub out for our building,
interrupting her concentration—
she our civil servant, an essential worker,
experiencing this near-personal funeral
on the job.

More songs, more lifting up of George.
She returns to the truck, empty tub
over her head, protection from the
sudden June downpour.

In her seat again, she stares at the device,
mourning in the postal truck. After
some time, I see the red brake light
come on, and she pulls away.

Marilyn Peretti of Glen Ellyn, IL, does too much thinking. And probably feeling. She has been published many times before at TheNewVerse.News.

A RUMOR OF GHOSTS

by Howie Good

Hundreds of protestors gathered outside the Ohio Statehouse on Saturday, April 18, 2020, calling for state officials to lift restrictions now, including this car with an anti-Semitic sign. (Laura Hancock / cleveland.com)

They seized you at your home
and dragged you away,
and though we searched for you in the after years,
we found no trail or trace.
It was as if you had never really existed
but were always only a false memory,
a rumored ghost.

I also am as nothing,
and whether I shamble along the street
or stumble up the staircase,
whether I pray to God for preservation
or curse him for the inventiveness of his cruelties,
the same ancestral nightmares repeat –
swastikas smeared on synagogues,
bearded Jews harried through the streets,
hearts shoveled like coal into the fire.


Editor's Note: Today, April 21, 2020 is Holocaust Remembrance Day—Yom Hashoah—in the United States. It marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.


Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

HISTORY

by Howard Winn

A D-Day commemoration on the beach of Arromanches in France on June 6, 2019, marking the 75th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy in World War II. (Joel Saget/Getty-AFP via Chicago Tribune)

of D Day by genetic fate

there is no escape

is where I find myself

with only three percent left

it seems The Greatest Generation

labeled by that newsman who

needed a catchy concept to draw

his audience for the news of the day

when other networks stood ready 

to step in to alter the ratings so

he found the catchy concept for

the mostly children drafted some 

out of high school to be the new

war heroes even though the survivors

kept quiet about their sacrifices 

often with loss of limbs

they were as voiceless as the bodies

buried in those field of crosses in

France where the living might 

have found them selves if they

were as unlucky as those who

survived to become portrayed in

the films of the next life leaving

today only the three percent who

movies seem to give permission to

recount the history they had kept

secret about until the later wars

involving their children gave some

permission to reveal fears and cruelty

for those survivors once silent veterans 

of that conflict between the dead and 

the emotionally quiet and silent for

history to become reality not just story

Howard Winn publishes widely in literary journals such as the Hiram Poetry Review and Valley Voices Journal. His novel has been published by Propertius Press.

THE STUMBLING STONES

by Mark Tarren

A candle and roses laid on a set of Stolpersteine in Berlin at a commemorative ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Photograph: Eliza Apperly —The Guardian, February 18, 2019

So they walk.
This invisible procession of ghosts,
a march of mist.

Hidden amongst the alleyways
and cobblestones

of forgotten footprints
in stone and snow.

A fingerless glove
caresses a patch of brass.

Here I am

His words
shadows in the air.

Kristallnacht.

His home
the face of the past.


The girl recognises him.

The Boy with the Jasper Eyes.

They used to play and sing
in the alleyways of
snow and school satchels.

She could smell the scent
of leather between them.

His musty jacket.
The fragrance of childhood.

She could only see
the back of his head
as they walked.

An innocent almond
in its collared sheath.

She remembers his gentle hands.
His careful smile.

Please turn around.

The Boy with the Jasper Eyes.

His words fell to the floor
of stone and snow
in their quiet knowing.

Three pebbles rolled
off the tongue onto

The Stumbling Stone

Here I am

Then she was alone.


The girl suddenly felt tired.
It was as if the whole of history
was buried deep behind her eyes.

A Grave for the Jews.

It was then she noticed the fire.

A window. A fireplace.
Laughter. Papa’s arms.
The smell of pine.

The taste of boiled lollies.

There was no brass plate
beneath her feet.

No Stolpersteine.

My name is Anna

and I live here.


Mark Tarren is a poet and writer based in Queensland, Australia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary journals including TheNewVerse.News, The Blue Nib, Poets Reading The News, Street Light Press, Spillwords Press and Tuck Magazine.

THE NEW WORLD

by Barlow Adams


It’s not my birthday
but they bring me cake,
a rainbow bearing my name
with candles like lighthouses
on a multihued shore,
welcoming me to safe harbor.
What a beach,
what a holiday we have discovered,
a paradise prescribed through 
HR interventions, signs saying
love is love, we are all one,
Life Gets Better Together.
We get tomorrow off for the parade.

I face the flames, 
wax runs with my mascara
sizzling like sugar.
Caramelized callousness, 
calls back the heat in my shoulder
where a cluster of circles remembers where
my father used to snuff his Pall Malls.
A fag for a fag, here’s a flag
I claim this land, you scallywag.
And none of these brave explorers of equality,
in business casual and formal apology,
realize that they are not the first to arrive,
that I am not an undiscovered country.

Barlow Adams is the author of two novellas. His poetry has been featured by Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel and Dos Madres Press, and is set to appear later this year in formercactus and Finishing Line Press.

9/11 REMEMBRANCE

by Charles Frederickson

USAge of rAGE September 11th

GMT ocean apart November 9th

Bloodied souls hearts of darkness

Infected scar wounds never heal

Unforgettable demonic horrors ghostly afterimAGEs

Haunted nightmares still under siege

Chaos confusion consternation almost coming

 To terms with unsaid goodbyes

Unsung heroes turn next pAGE

Keeping on fighting valiantly never

Giving up or giving in

That’s what makes them heroes

Incredible boundless voyAGE lone survivor

Stranded indifferent drowning pool wake

Awakened fathomable dreams in-limbo RIP

Perfect stillness breathless last gasps

If only this was mirAGE

Never knowing anything but sand

Sunshiny glare parched thirst unquenched

Deserted foolish delusions of oases

EncourAGEment lovingly learned by hearts

Cherishing mutually shared family moments

Never stopped being each other

Unanswered prayers one less “Amen”

Revitalized existence bitterness resilient resolve

Intent on rewriting happier ending

Being moved eventually moving on

Treasured forever friends invaluable support

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson  proudly presents YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .