POEM TO RUMI

for my granddaughter

by Tina Williams

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

“Ken Paxton sues New York doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to Texas woman: This case sets up a legal battle between Texas’ near-total abortion ban and New York’s shield law that protects doctors from out-of-state prosecution.” —The Texas Tribune, December 13, 2024

A week before the election,

my neighbor next door overnight

posted a Women for Trump

sign and I was too incensed

the next day to wave to her

as she stood on her porch

with a smile as big as Texas

which is where we live

and where my 17-year-old

granddaughter could be raped

tomorrow and made to bear

the damage done

no questions asked.

 

Meanwhile Rumi 

calls from a wall

in my office

that out beyond 

the ideas 

of wrongdoing 

and rightdoing

there is a field

and that we should 

meet each other there

but, Rumi, my dear 

dead Sufi poet,

you never met

my neighbor's 

grab ’em 

by the pussy hero.

 

You never saw

freckles dance

on my 

granddaughter’s

cheeks.

 

In some poems 

there is a field 

too far.

Tina Williams’s poems have appeared in the San Pedro River Review, Quartet Journal, Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, As It Ought To Be Magazine, Stone Poetry Journal, and Green Ink Poetry.

LIFE ON MARS

by John Whitney Steele

NASA’s Retiring Top Scientist Says We Can Terraform Mars and Maybe Venus, Too —The New York Times, January 2, 2022

Imagine the red planet with an atmosphere,

replete with plants and animals. It isn’t hard to do. 

A couple billion years ago Mars lost its air,

its water too, and so it is no longer blue.

But should we choose to live there, we could change it,

claims NASA’s top scientist. All we’d have to do

is terraform the planet—that goes for Venus too.

Put up a magnetic shield, block the sun, retain

more heat, and watch Mars turn from red to blue.

The solar system’s ours. Imagine life on Mars 

while back on planet Earth we churn out CO2.

John Whitney Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University. His chapbook The Stones Keep Watch was published by Kelsay Books in 2021. His full length collection Shiva’s Dance will be released in 2022. Born in Toronto and raised among the pines and granite cliffs of Foot’s Bay, Ontario, John lives in Boulder, Colorado where he encounters his muse wandering in the mountains.

KNOWING YOU ARE A POET (OUTSIDE WASHINGTON)

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

“Truth/Poetry,” a painting by Cameron Holmes.

There is nothing quite like knowing 

that poetry is your calling  

when you’re growing up in a Washington 

D.C. suburb where the word is power 

for in the nation’s capital no poem passes 

laws no verse crafts policy no poem ever 

delivered a constituency 

Poetry is a gesture so vital 

as to be without use 

it’s like telling the truth

about the deficit 

how we should curb our penchant 

for violence Poetry is a useless means 

of pulling bounties off wolf heads it is hardly

a writer’s rubber to hatred’s glue 

for nothing bounces off of me 

and sticks to you 

why write a poem to change the world 

when you could become a lawyer 

or banker 

a dynamite maker 

whose lucrative investments 

bear witness to capital’s power 

why write a poem when you could 

become a shield to the truncheon’s 

bludgeon hear 

a bomb’s whistle bullets over Baghdad 

or the silence that comes when there’s no one 

to listen to the words you’ve just written.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. New work appears this fall in Anti-Heroin Chic, Dissident Voice, So It Goes, Chiron Review, Bewildering Stories, The Last Leaves, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Expressive Writing, Boog City, and Ginosko Review.

ANTI-LIFE RHAPSODY

by George Salamon

On the day seniors graduate from Lafayette High School in Wildwood, Mo., students walk past a memorial to victims of the high school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. (David Carson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Chicago Tribune)

     "School boycotts? Yes, parents must pressure Congress to pass smart gun laws." 
     —Chicago Tribune, May 23, 2018


It usually comes down to this:
Madness is always in fashion.
The world ignores what it knows not,
The world forgets what it knows.
They'll raise another dream for us,
And we will fight for it,
And time after time
Our hopes go unrealized.
We are left with memories
Of the trigger, the bullet
And the target, but hardly ever
Of the shield.


George Salamon lives in St. Louis, MO, where plenty of bullets fly.

OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE

by Richard O'Connell

Image source: http://www.timetrips.co.uk/gw%20armour.htm

                            from the Greek of Archilochus

What if I thew away my ox-hide shield
And ran to save my skin. Let some Thracian strut
When he picks it up. Fanatics die on the spot.
No professional's about to lose his butt.

      
Richard O’Connell lives in Hillsboro Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in  The Paris Review,  The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, Margie, National Review, The Texas Review, Acumen, The Formalist,  Light, etc.