UBER UNSAFE

by Susan Vespoli

"Uber's Approach to Safety"

Uber said on Thursday that it had reports of 3,045 sexual assaults during its rides in the United States in 2018, with nine people murdered and 58 killed in crashes, in its first study detailing unsafe incidents on the ride-hailing platform. —The New York Times, December 5, 2019


Atop Uber’s report
about 3,045 sexual assaults
by its drivers is a photo of two
                        beautiful women
customers, one
                        clad in a sleeveless
dress, bare legs, the other in tight
                        denim jeans, bare midriff. Of course, Uber-
employed drivers would be
                        enticed to rape
female riders, to
                        fuck or fondle them if they
get into cars wearing revealing
                        get-ups like that. Spoiler alert:
hip-app swipe of Uber equals the
                        hazards of hitchhiking. But,
it’s just a fraction of 1.3 billion rides
                        in 2018, company spokesmen
jaw their jargon of
                        justification.
Kind of ironic,
                        keen of Uber’s
legal team to
                        let this disclosure drop
mid-impeachment
                        media mayhem when
news watchers would be focused on
                        notorious nuggets
other than the apparently now common
                        occurrence of
passengers assaulted by
                        predators who supposedly passed
quasi-background checks, drivers who
                        quietly waited behind wheels
ready for
ride-hailers who
trusted a company
                        to take them
somewhere
                        safely. 3,045 in one year
unwittingly became
                        Uber’s
victims of lack of
                        vigilance.
“What it says is that Uber is a reflection of the society it serves,” is Tony
                        West’s (Uber’s chief legal officer) way to
(e)xcuse,
                        explain away, exonerate, shrug
your concerns off,
                        “yes, but” your fears, your outrage at their
zest for profit, their lack of
zealous background checks in the first place

Susan Vespoli is a poet/writer who splits her time between Arizona and Washington state and who will no longer use Uber as part of her transport equation. Her work has been published in spots such as Rattle, Mom Egg Review, Nasty Women Poets, TheNewVerse.News, and Nailed Magazine.

2018

by Ashley Green

Let’s talk about it.


Twelve and
the twenty-year-old touching
the back of your leg
where the shorts ended and your thigh began.

Thirteen and
the stucco pulling hair
from the back of your head and scraping
the backs of your arms
as his eighteen-year-old body
crushed you and
his hands pushed your legs open. 


Sixteen and
your classmate crawling
up your dazed, drunk body
unbuttoning your pants and
telling you
it’s okay.

Eighteen and
the boy you loved
forcibly turning you over
his grunts and moans
made you nauseous and
the pain of him inside you
made you cry.

Twenty and
 your neighbor corners you
 in his room and
tells you that you can’t leave
so you beg and
push and
cry and
his arms outstretch around you, caging you in.

Let’s talk about it and
 talk about it and
 talk about it until
 we are out of breath.
Let’s tell the world how
you bent our bodies and
bruised our skin and
made us bleed and
stole from us and
how we are still here
to talk about it.

Let’s talk about it.



Ashley Green lives in Southern California where she is surrounded by brilliant women.

BUCKLE

by Sarah E. Colona

More cake than cobbler. Some call it slump. Some betty.
But it’s forever August in my Memory’s kitchen:
where peaches, butter, and brown sugar puddle.

Sweetness something he too expected
in his clumsy reach for what was never offered.
Some call three decades too late. Too faded.

As if trauma grows stale for survivors.
If not your vote, he would have your silence.
Every recipe yields in the end.

Sarah E. Colona lives and teaches in her home state of New Jersey. She is the author of three poetry collections: Hibernaculum (Gold Wake Press, 2013), Thimbles (dancing girl press, 2012) and That Sister (dancing girl press, 2016).

PARADISE THEATER 1936

by Marie G. Fochios

Photograph by Erik Ravelo from his 2013 sequence “Los Intocables” (“The Untouchables") featuring a variety of issues plaguing children around the world. “The right to childhood should be protected,” Ravelo writes.

Movie house where splicing comes unglued
And the malignant image
Repeats itself again and again and again
Indecent as a pistol shot penetrating,
Entering a random target.

Fumbling, he grabs the child’s hand,
Pressing down.
Only the darkness and the voices and the shadows
Conceal the agony
The hardening into a freeze frame.
Encrypted for life
Until . . .
#MeToo

Marie  G. Fochios lives in New York City and taught in the New York public school system for over 30 years. She studied poetry at The New School with Pearl London.

THE LONG REACH OF KARMA

by Richard Hacken

Kenneth W. Starr announced Wednesday that he would resign as chancellor of Baylor University, effective immediately, saying it was a “matter of conscience.” Mr. Starr’s decision came less than a week after he was stripped of the more operationally powerful position of president of the university in the wake of a scandal in which Baylor acknowledged that it had mishandled accusations of sexual assault against several football players. . . . Mr. Starr was an independent counsel whose report to Congress led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. —NY Times, June 1, 2016. Photo: Kenneth Starr speaks to the media after arguing a case on student free-speech rights before the Supreme Court in Washington on March 19, 2007. (REUTERS/Molly Riley via RawStory)

Could some current Norman Mailer
write about the mess at Baylor,
which is so in need of journalistic prose?
Is the football program’s failure
to send rapists to the jailer
going to send it into existential throes?

Football culture says to nail her,
take a woman and impale her
when protected so that any onslaught goes.
Players hope the coach will tailor
strong defense so words will fail her,
and no prosecutor credits what she knows.

In the court: assault and flail her
and with wholesale slurs assail her,
so with craftiness your guilt you can transpose
till she seems a drunken sailor,
and you easily curtail her
own ability to witness and disclose.

With the Baptist creed at Baylor,
there’s no way truth will avail her,
since suspicion on her own sins will repose.

Now the President and Savior
of the football games at Baylor
was Ken Starr, a man to gridiron wins devoted.
Yes, Ken Starr, the Clinton slayer,
the Lewinsky-scandal hailer
(who as Special Counsel over sex tales gloated)
has mishandled accusations
of forced sexual relations,
and for this from president has been demoted.

Oh, they say that fresh raw karma
is a targeted sweet charmer
that is stronger far than energetic speech
and that irony’s sly reach
can shape attitudes and teach
with capacities designed to, well, impeach.

Richard Hacken is a poet and librarian who has published in TheNewVerse.News before. He once introduced X.J. Kennedy to the plenary session of a literary symposium via rhyming couplets, which may or may not have been gauche.