THE TIPPING POINT

by Jill Rachel Jacobs

(Ode to an Unseen Migrant During Perilous Times)

 

When evil comes a knocking, 

it may arrive with a vengeance, or 

incognito, like some 

Bible-thumping

good ol’ Joe, 

humping a flag.

 

("What we've got here is a failure to communicate")

When rage is sadness and 

sadness is rage, and it becomes

impossible to distinguish the two,

it’s not surprising we may recoil,

hidden in the shadows of the 

reality of what has become 

the new normal. 

 

("But I don’t want to go among mad people")

Like a cancer gone undetected, 

metastasized, 

cell by cell, 

dividing 

conquering,

licking wounds,

stealing secrets, 

tempted by madness,

trying to make sense of 

how we have now become 

that which we once loathed.

 

("Thank you, Sir, May I have another?")

 

When horror is contained, 

darkness has lifted, 

emerging from the underbelly,

dreams intact, 

still blinded by the 

innocence of children’s eyes, 

resting comfortably;

We wait.

 

("We have learned to see the world in gasps")

Unencumbered by reason,

justice now a luxury, 

in a world unrecognizable,

where compassion no longer prevails.

 

(How long? An hour, a year, a lifetime or two?)

 

When will we say when?

When prey becomes the predator,

When captors are held captive,

When cage doors are flung wide open.

Jill Rachel Jacobs is a New York based writer, poet whose poetry has been featured in numerous journals. Her features, commentaries, interviews have been published in The New York Times, Reuters, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, NPR’s Marketplace and Morning Edition.

THE RECKONING

by Julia Griffin

But for the young, I might not care too much.

I’ll go on reading in my little hutch

And typing quirky poems, as before;

I don’t in fact expect a civil war:

This outcome leaves small danger of a putsch.

Books, dogs, Prosecco—I intend to clutch

My pleasures, drifting further out of touch.

I’d be content just to enjoy them more

But for the young.

Here’s four more years of vicious double dutch,

The crumbling earth denied a vital crutch,

More guns, bent laws, less safety for the poor,

Billionaires’ bribes—all this I might ignore;

It’s not for me my misery is such,

But for the young.

Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia.  She did what she could.

HEADLINES

by Howie Good

“Springtime” Claude Monet 1886 Fitzwilliam Museum (University of Cambridge), Cambridge, UK

Baby dies in attic fire. 400 dead in floods and landslides. 3 killed, 6 injured in New Mexico shooting. “All of life,” the Buddha said, “is sadness,” as if he’d been reading the same headlines as me. Cops seek masked gunman. Ukrainian attack looms. 12-year-old charged with murder. Every day the mirror held up to existence only darkens further. Then the spring melt reveals there’s been grass alive under the snow this whole time. Birds return to the marsh from the hot countries full of excited chatter. Sunshine grows brighter and more frequent and falls like a benediction on old bent trees and fat buds and us who don’t even deserve it. 

Howie Good's newest poetry collection Heart-Shaped Hole which also includes examples of his handmade collages, is available from Laughing Ronin Press.

ANGUISHED SOUL

by Jerrice J. Baptiste and Roodly Laurore

Dèyè mòn, gen mòn. (Beyond every mountain, there's another mountain.)

—Haitian Proverb

A woman walks past local authorities removing the bodies of men that were set on fire by a mob in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday, April 25, 2023, a day after a mob pulled the 13 suspected gang members from police custody at a traffic stop and beat and burned them to death with gasoline-soaked tires. (AP Photo/Odelyn Joseph) April 25, 2023

Sadness in his chest, 
his spirit weakens,
enemy of our race.
 
I’m still a young girl grinning, watching him smile. 
Now, his smile vanishes quick, unlike gun 
powder floating in air, we both know the scent well.  
 
“Free my heart,” he says.
His mango tree awaits, bandits pluck his luck.    
Our island is still awake, sleepless 
1,460 nights, and centuries of anguish. 
 
You snooze, you lose your life.
 
No banana leaves to fold his skin. 
Wrap, wrap his chest to become 
a bullet vest, impenetrable.
 
No difference from his friends’ ashes 
at noon or during the early moon.    
 
“My soul courts pain and grief,” he sighs.
I fall deeper in disbelief. 
Nothing to catch either one of us. 
No net large enough from any fishermen. 
 
When will the rays of hope appear?
Sunshine after anxious nights. 
 
Loss of kinetic energy. Craves the little joy of
scooping young coconuts like we used to  
in the countryside. Flamingos on a distant beach.
 
Now, my uncle wishes 
one day to enjoy 
the pink side of life. 

 

Roodly Laurore was born and raised in Haiti. He is an engineer and poet. His poems are published in Kosmos Journal, Autism Parenting Magazine, Solstice Literary Magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician, and others.  Roodly lives in Haiti with his wife and two sons. He collaborated with his neice Jerrice on this poem.

 

Jerrice J. Baptiste is an author of eight books and a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center & Residency in NY.  She is extensively published in journals and magazines such as Artemis Journal, The Yale Review, Mantis, Eco Theo Review, The Caribbean Writer, and many others. Jerrice has been nominated as Best of The Net by Blue Stem. She has been facilitating poetry workshops for eighteen years.

A POEM FOR UKRAINE

by David James

“Writing My Heart Out,” a painting by Gladiola Sotomayor.

I want to write a poem that will lick

 

your heart clean,

that will make you forget every nightmare,

 

every cut and scrape, every syllable of bad news you’ve ever heard,

a poem that will close your eyes and let you dream

 

of another life, perfect in its arc, where

all things, dead or alive, bow to your smile,

 

all clouds move to your breath, birds and desires and wishes

land on your forearm when you call them.

 

I want to write a poem to send all sadness into exile,

to fit all pain and despair onto one gaudy blue dish

 

that you can toss outside and ignore,

a poem so quiet you never hear it

 

come into your life, sit on your couch, sleep in your bed,

never hear its small footsteps on the floor.

This poem, which must be written under a moonlit

sky with eleven stars and one dog barking in town,

 

will end the world as we know it. No more death

or hunger or war. No more aging or sickness or weeping.

 

No more walking with your feet on the ground.

David James’ most recent book is Alive in Your Skin While You Still Own It.

THE SADDEST DAY OF MY LIFE: JANUARY 6, 2021

by Nan Ottenritter

on the eve of the January 6 hearings

Television crews and technicians prepare for Thursday night's hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, on June 7. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP via The Washington Post)

I want to say my saddest moment of my life

was when my first love left me, my father died, or

when we pulled the plug on my terminally ill brother.

 

I want to say the saddest day of my life

was a missed job opportunity, a miscarriage,

a failed novel.

 

But truth be told, it was seeing

our stormed Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The cracked glass, ransacked desks.

 

Hearing screams of trapped Capitol Police,

chants of hanging Mike Pence,

the hubris of those unquestioning, disrespectful

 

of all I have come to regard as second only to god,

sacred as only sacred in a secular sense can be.

How can you not appreciate our American democracy?

 

This democracy is the only life I know.

Please don’t take it away from me, from us.

Let me talk to you of miracles,

 

moments of shame and victory,

moments shared and shattered,

moments that are, like it or not, our collective lives.

 

I want to remain with you.

And you?

Nan Ottenritter lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her first chapbook Eleanor, Speak is available from Finishing Line Press.

GOING GONE

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S.

Nick Anderson

here in texas we say 

go down the road a bit 

for getting to the next town 

or just to the next gas station 

where you can fill up 

before you drive on 

sometimes i say 

once you get out of texas 

you are halfway to where you  

are going 

now  

this week  

children and adults again are going nowhere 

with families stuck in a forever sadness  

sad that 

until those in the power of going 

somewhere   anywhere 

feel the bullet bite their own child 

all of us  

will still be going nowhere 

Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.”

EIGHT FAT OLD WOMEN

by Susan McLean

      Overheard in Southern California

“I can’t believe we have to wear masks again

just to save eight fat old women,” one

hipster, walking past me, told the other, 

staring at me, no longer young nor thin.

Which crones would she gladly jettison? Her grandmother?

Her eighth-grade English teacher? Did she imagine

a merciful weeding of homeless crazies or

the clutter of ghosts at care facilities?

Of one thing I felt sure: she couldn’t picture

herself at seventy, softened by loss and sadness,

weighted with aches, regrets, lost fantasies,

and wanting nothing from life except some sweetness.

Susan McLean, a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University, has published two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and a book of translations of the Latin poems of Martial, Selected Epigrams.  She is the translations editor at Better Than Starbucks.

FRIDAY NIGHT ON EAST VAN BUREN

by Roxanne Lynn Doty

"Weeping Woman" by Pablo Picasso

It was the end of the line on Van Buren, a Friday night in April, a section of this gritty street where it leaves the city behind, disappears into east valley sprawl, and forgets the history that rumbles beneath its concrete and asphalt, the ghosts of old Phoenix that breathe the night air. The woman stood under the 202 overpass, moving from fence post to fence post, lightly touching each as if in a child’s game or dance, her long hair flying in wind that rushed through the valley that night, blew dead palm fronds across the 4 lanes, debris into the air to flutter gracefully in the haze of dull streetlights and she walked into the oncoming traffic, stood with arms spread—a welcome or a plea or an effort simply to breathe and the cars stopped and watched and some blew their horns and waited as she got onto her knees and folded her hands in prayer in the glare of terrified headlights. And I wanted to say, leave her alone, give her space, don’t call anyone, she has probably been fucked over time and again and beauty has a strangeness and sadness a glow and I looked around for red lights, for an official vehicle that might have been summoned.  But the night remained still and free from authority and we waited and the woman finally rose, and walked to the other side of the street and climbed the incline toward the highway and the traffic began to move again.

Roxanne Lynn Doty lives in Phoenix, Arizona. She has poetry in I70 Review and short stories in Four Chambers, Forge, Soundings Review, Lunaris Review, Journal of Microliterature and Lascaux Review. Two of her  stories were nominated for the New Letters Alexander Patterson Capon Prize for Fiction.

THE VERSATILITY OF BLUE

by Tracey Gratch

The world’s newest shade of blue, a brilliantly bright, durable pigment called YInMn blue, has been licensed for commercial use and is already in the hands of some artists. The pigment was discovered in 2009 by chemist Mas Subramanian and his team at Oregon State University while they were conducting experiments connected to electronics. For one series of tests, the scientists mixed black manganese oxide with a variety of chemicals and heated them to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. (The name comes from the pigment’s elemental makeup, which includes Yttrium, Indium and Manganese.) —artnet news, June 20, 2016

Blue is sapphire when on fire
blue is indigo in the night sky
Blue is cobalt, elemental,
YInMn's bright – blue's latest dye

Blue is navy when it’s strong
blue is sadness in a song
Blue is the diver drown in the lake
blue's the baby miscarried for heaven's sake

Blue is turquoise tile in the bath
blue's the jay to cross my path
Blood, spent, returns through sky-blue veins –
to the heart to be renewed again.


Tracey Gratch lives in Quincy, MA with her husband and their four children. Several of her poems have appeared at TheNewVerse.News.