CHOSEN

by Linda Parsons

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

You, yes, you. On the porch glider of memory, 

thinking again of your grandmother’s grease-

stained kitchen and how she saved you. You, 

in the first snow of the year, the burdened photinia 

limbs, the night’s blue note. I mean you. You 

who’ve been griping and gnashing your teeth 

in the constant upheaval—not just our country’s 

bruised fist, but the world entire, its tectonics adrift. 

It was your idea, when the roll was called up yonder, 

to take up your pallet, to rise like Lazurus, 

his winding sheet of myrrh and aloe trailing behind. 

To say, Me, I’ll go. I’ll go to that time, that cliff 

and split sky, that rage of brother against brother 

against sister, unfriending right and left. 

Left from right. It’s my time. My time to be 

a lighthouse, to shine far and wide over veined 

stones and broken vows alike, though my heels 

bleed, my steps falter. My time to march 

on the winter streets and hold high my sign: 

God is watching you kill.

 

Remember 

your Ecclesiastes: Time and chance happen 

to us all. And what will you do with this time, 

this chance to sweep your beam along the rocky 

shoreline, to pull whoever outlasted the nor’easter 

back to breath? This is your time—to spend 

like a wastrel or shower the heavens with a gracious 

plenty. You engine of steam and plow. You 

shoulder to the squeaky wheel. You asked for it. 

You volunteered to help turn the tide 

and guide this mother home. 

 

Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville. 

AUTHORITARIANISM

by Scott Lowery

 

No point appealing to the heart

            or soul it doesn’t have, so save

                        your breath. It needs its namelessness,

 

but name it with too many syllables 

            and it wins again, the goon squad’s 

                        tracks wiped clean by grocery lists, snow,

 

football scores. Just four words 

            on my sign: Breathe Easier—Join Us!

                        Hah! Not really! jokes the nervous

 

young marshal in his or her 

            neon vest at the busy crosswalk—

                        too cold to breathe easy here today!

 

It’s what we do at these things—

            wry smiles, weather complaints,

                        bits of chatter to pass around

 

like balm for our deeper shivering.

            Most of us have paid our protest dues 

                        before, are dressed for bitter wind,

 

giving motorists our cheerful best

            reflected back by honks and hand 

                        waves, leaning our way behind unshattered 

 

windshields. Faces like or unlike 

            ours, bright momentary smiles—

                        running to Target for toothpaste or beer, 

 

some Happy Meals on the way home, 

            trying not to see those prices rising like

                        flood water, halfway up the basement steps. 

 

Give us a good old 

            disaster any day of the week,

                        we all know how to pitch right in,

 

wade through mud and wreckage

            in our rubber boots. Same kind 

                        of summons is why we’re here, 

 

boots, signs and all. So, thanks 

            for the wave but next week join us, 

                        please—all of us breathing easier, 

 

warm bodies out in the cold to say 

            it plain and clear. Name it Wrong. 

                        Name it Not While I Can Breathe.

 

Scott Lowery is a poet, songwriter, and teaching artist, who currently lives with his wife and cats in Milwaukee near their young grandkids. More than ever, he is proud to have grown up in Minneapolis. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Great River Review, River Styx, North American Review, Canary, and elsewhere, including several anthologies, ekphrastic shows, and podcasts. Lowery’s award-winning second chapbook, Mutual Life, observes small-town life against a looming backdrop of pandemic, climate change, and extremism. Find more, including work with young authors, at www.scottlowery.org.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

by Lisa Seidenberg

Woman found living in Family Fare sign in Midland, Michigan for almost a year.

It had a roof and a door

space for a laptop and clothes

electric kettle, plant and more

in her improvised home

above the big box store.

warmed on chill Michigan nights

wrapped in rays of a red neon sign 

while unseeing shoppers passed below 

What thoughts crossed her mind

as she lay perched behind the sign;

Is it a crime to be homeless in America?

settlers came to this land 

with only their hands

and some tools and their wits

making up the rules of wrong

and right as survival

is the primal law

not simply a need for shelter

led her to this penthouse nest. 

living for a year like a stealthy mountaineer

scaling the crest of Family Fare. 

a temporary home.

a summit of her own.

Lisa Seidenberg is a writer and filmmaker who makes documentaries and poetry films. She enjoys reading poems on the Rattlecast and other poetry performance venues. 

WARNING SIGN

by Diane Elayne Dees

The sign is hard to miss,

as shoppers cross 

the parking lot to buy

t-shirts, groceries, toys,

bath towels, cosmetics.

The sign next to it 

is even bigger, and 

just as serious, warning

patrons that abuse of any kind

toward staff will not be tolerated,

and that law enforcement

will be notified. Maybe someday,

those signs will appear normal—

the new normal, that assumes

that we are all under threat of attack

at every moment in any place.

Or maybe someday, 

in a parallel universe, 

it will be normal not to carry

shotguns and knives on errands,

or—in a different galaxy—

normal to treat people with respect.

In the meantime, every time I pass,

I wonder about the little girls and boys

—already anxious, already frightened,

clinging to their teddy bears—

I wonder what must have happened

inside that glass-enclosed pediatric clinic,

and I wonder what will happen next.

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the chapbooks Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books) The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), and The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press). Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

THE LEAK, THE CHILL, AND FOAMCORE

by Tricia Knoll

5am. This fleece robe does not ward off April chill

that goes to my bones knowing what leaked. 

Someone could not stay silent. Someone was right. 

Fifty years and my hand knows a rage. I grab a marker

to make my sign. Simple words, I insist, simple words:

I remember

 

                        that girl who hired a man to drive her

to Mexico. They did not drink Margaritas. She returned

with a raging infection. She lost one possible future

as a mother. She was eighteen. Jobless. Alone. 

She rocked herself holding a teddy bear

and smoked menthol cigarettes. She did not tell

her Catholic family.  I could hear her rocking

 in the room next door. Her teddy bear wore

 a scarlet ribbon. 

 

Rachel Maddow said all her life women had this one right. 

How strange to have become this old: I remember.

The Janes remember. The jobless remember. Those raped

remember. Those with hard decisions remember. 

And now it’s possible to get legal abortions in Mexico. 

Yes, I remember. My sign smells of broad-stroke marker. 

Tricia Knoll does remember the days before Roe v. Wade. This draft court opinion terrifies her. As people in Ukraine have expressed, it is no gift to experience deja vu. Her poetry appears widely in anthologies, journals, and five collections of poetry. She is a contributing editor to Verse Virtual. 

SACRED

by George Held

The governor’s statement places
the key word, “God,” in the place

of emphasis, at the end, where
it makes the most of her pious case

but most offends those who question
when a fetus has become a “life”

or even doubt there is a god,
at least one who can give sacred gifts,

and those who believe that a woman’s life
is her own to join in sex with whomever

she wants and once pregnant whether
or not to delete that tiny comma without

the intervention of the almighty state.
What sort of Handmaid’s Tale

is ‘Bama spinning here now that its Senate
and the Court are packed with Medieval

men of the Right who consign women
to the stove and the marital bed,

where all conception is authorized
by a Fundamentalist Godhead.

What country is this where theocracy
struts its stuff in public and democracy

hides under the bed to avoid
a vengeful thrashing? My count-

try, ’tis of me, I sing, sweet place
of Liberty, of thee I sing . . .


George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News and other periodicals, has received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and published or edited twenty-two poetry books.