MARCH OF THE POSTER BOYS

by Scott LaMascus

for Robin Davis

He Took His 68-Year-Old Secret to Court and Finally Confronted His Ghost: Robin Davis (above) spent a long career in finance and philanthropy haunted by what had happened to him as a boy. Could an unusual trial on Long Island help him find peace? —Michael Wilson, The New York Times, August 5, 2024

The poster boys for this malady 
each stare into their mirrors hoping to see the ghost
they would be able to fight now
their feet are no longer frozen to the spots

of their only crimes — the car ride with a coach, 
an after-school job, a church’s back room. 
They gather now in a spectral locker room of boys
chosen by chance and dark intention, charged 

and armor-plated by twenty, thirty, sixty years
of silent shame driving them to something else.
However much success they find, the juries snicker
and some doze, nodding away at lack of blood

and gore, for they cannot see the fright of spirits
gathered on each side of the glass, a throng of 
poster boys facing ghosts who picked them out 
of the schoolyards of time. No justice can redress 

the fraids on either side of the mirror, peering 
in with one hand on gavel and one on a scale, 
sometimes seeing the wispy victims, sometimes not,
I suspect. All velocity has settled now into sleep.

The pardon Robin seeks is in that mirror, too,
as he speaks before the harsher judge and jury all in one,
a lone poster boy standing again before his ghost
testifying now into the wisp of time he cannot unimagine.

Author’s Note:  This poem puts Davis (and me) into the company of a myriad of ghostly perpetrators and ghostly victims. A “fraid” is the technical name for a gathering of spirits, in this poem’s vision a two-sided confrontation of ghosts of perpetrators and of survivors. The poem also turns on found language from the Michael Wilson article including the three F’s (fight or flight or freeze) quoted by Wilson from the courtroom testimony of the psychologist, Valentina Stoycheva.

Scott LaMascus is a writer and public-humanities advocate living in Oklahoma City. His recent work may be found in World Literature Today, The Writer’s Chronicle, Bracken, Red Door, and Epiphany.

THE STUMBLING BLOCK

by Tamara Kreutz

Advocates for abuse victims at a rally outside the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas in 2018. Credit: Jeffrey Mcwhorter/Associated Press via The New York Times.

For the victims of the Southern Baptist Convention’s sex abuse coverup, whose stories were hidden, twisted, and heaped with shame to protect spiritual leaders of the SBC as well as to the victim of Pastor John Lowe II, of New Life Christian Church, whose abuse was cast as adultery.

“Then it happened one evening that David arose from his bed and walked on the roof of the king’s house. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was beautiful to behold.” II Samuel 11:2

Religious tradition placed Bathsheba on her roof

performing a striptease for the king—a bullseye 

view of her naked body on display: breasts dripping 

in nectar, smooth curve of her hips that glistened

like jewels, and her pubic hair—a lily between her legs.

Tradition imagines her hands sliding over her wet 

body—washing and touching and rubbing.

It says her beauty brought low God’s anointed 

one. Pastors brand her a stumbling block—

but David cast her from his bed,

his semen trickling out of her like blood.

I imagine she stood, her head bowed, her arms 

embracing her own ravaged body for comfort,

as she shuffled back home and closed her shutters

to shut out the king’s hidden gaze.

I imagine her crouched in the darkness, washing

and washing and rubbing away memory of David’s

hands on her breasts, his mouth on her belly—

memory of him between her legs—but his touch

was branded on her skin, as much a part of her future 

as the seed he planted in her womb. No one calls their child

Bathsheba, a name dripping with shame, though David’s 

namesakes number the stars. She is remembered

as temptress but he as a man after God’s own heart.

Tamara Kreutz is an English Language Arts teacher and a poet who currently resides in Illinois, though she will soon move to Antigua, Guatemala. She began writing poetry early in the pandemic, and through poetry, she found order, peace, and joy in a turbulent, uncertain time.

THREE EPIGRAMS ON THE EVE OF A CONFERENCE

by Julie Steiner

“With the Vatican resisting change, it will have to come from outside the Catholic world.”—“Catholic Church ‘nowhere close’ to confronting global ‘epidemic’ of child sex abuse by priests,” The Telegraph, 19 February 2019

1. A Concise Translation of the Vatican’s 1962 Crimen Sollicitationis Instruction 

Sadly,

some priests behave badly.

Give all who know it—even children—hell

if they tell.

2. The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37)

The priest and Levite couldn’t pause.

They scuttled past the victim.

To keep their cold religious laws,

the priest and Levite couldn’t pause.

The heretic could help, because

such rules did not restrict him.

The priest and Levite couldn’t. [Pause.]

They scuttled. Passed the victim.

3. The Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3-7)

The Shepherd leaves the ninety-nine

to save the one who’s in perdition.

The flock stay put, convinced they’re fine;

the Shepherd leaves. The ninety-nine

lose sight of him when they decline

to join him on his rescue mission.

The Shepherd leaves the ninety-nine

to save the one. Who’s in perdition?

Julie Steiner lives and writes in San Diego. Besides the TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, American Arts Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Rattle, and the Rat's Ass Review.

WHELM

by Tricia Knoll

For the very first time, a Russian tanker has traversed the Northern Sea Route in winter without an icebreaker Getty via The Independent, March 1, 2018

The snake fell from a branch into his canoe
inside the open lid of a wicker picnic basket
of tuna sandwiches, potato chips, and pickles.
He skipped only three paddle strokes.

The police arrive en masse at the homeless shelter
to pick up a man with a false ID wanted
in four states for sex abuse and one officer
injects out-of-date Narcan into another man seen
dying of an overdose in the restroom. One life saved.

The electrician-son lives upstairs
in his mother’s house while she frets
over garlic mustard in her garden
and an infrequent overnight guest who gives her
homemade kimchi every Wednesday.

An old man wants to sing farewell to his wife
in a hospice room. She whispers behave yourself
over and over as he forgets the words
to the tune they used to dance to.

A woman named Hope excuses herself
by saying she told white lies for the President
as if whiteness makes her trumped-up story
less problematic than a black lie might be.

On You Tube puppies tumble, parrots dance, kittens pile up
in boxes, a calf falls in love with a blind bison, and a mini-pig
scratches his hindquarters on a table leg to collect millions
of hits and oh, did I ask what happened to Hope?

The extension of the Orca’s range into waters
where sea ice melts early? Red squirrels return
to the Scottish Highlands? Kids who go to school
demand changes in gun laws to keep them safe.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who sifts through the vagaries of Facebook entries and news nearly every day. Her new book How I Learned to Be White will be available from Antrim House Press and Amazon by the end of this month.