THERE ARE MONSTERS UNDER MY BED

by Celeste DeSario

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

I jolt awake wondering…
Where do the monsters go at night?
Are they hiding in the shadows?
In my closet? Under my bed?
My curtains, tightly drawn—I’m safe.
But… are the monsters still out there?
Lurking? Waiting? 
Or are they only in my head?
 
Biding their time,
They will creep into the hamlets, villages, towns, cities, 
Seducing men cloaked in blue, gray, brown uniforms, wearing badges, pointing guns.
 Masked. 
 For whose protection? 
Social Media, politicians, distort the truth even as visuals show us snippets of reality,
And now, AI, distorts images using Deep Fakes, making decisions based on values not aligned with ours, well, with values we once held respected, agreed upon. 
Is AI listening to our conversations, recording our fears, sharing them…with? 
We don’t know. That’s why we should worry.
 
Those monsters creep into Judicial chambers,
Where we assign fancy Latin terms, 
Like Mala Fide—acting in bad faith,
Or Proper ex Parte Communication—Defying justice, the court’s authority and dignity.
Tearing down our laws, 
And everything that carefully glues our country together.
Makes us free.
Makes us proud.
Makes us a republic we love.
 
Scenes crafted in sick, twisted minds play out in our towns, on our screens, 
Eventually, in our backyards.
Maybe even our living rooms.
Who is roaming the hallways of our colleges?
Our libraries?
Places we once found refuge for serious thought,
Contemplating futures we understood. 
 
Okay, now you are just listing. Stop being so dramatic.
You are scaring me.
 
Look carefully. The monsters have infiltrated our schools.
They need to get those kids,
Need to inject them with bigotry and hate.
Remember the song, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
So, they teach them. 
Yanking books off the shelves that instill dangerous, harmful ideas.
Like tolerance, inclusion, acceptance,
Twisting words and history,
Until we don’t recognize who we once were.
Using Doublespeak, Political euphemisms.
“I am the greatest peacekeeper in the history of the world.”
(Yes, bomb those fishing boats and those on them,
Demonize any country that doesn’t agree with me,
Detain citizens. Call them illegal. I don’t care.
Just do it. 
I’ll keep dancing to distract them. Make them laugh. Make them love me.)
 
They know spectacle distracts us, so,
They organize marches.
Political parades.
Use pennants, colorful flags, music,
Precision marching, a lot of saluting.
Film your leaders from below so they appear all -powerful,
So, they dominate the frame,
And then dominate what lies beyond the frame.
They appear…unstoppable.
But it’s just a trick. A low camera angle. We all know how that works.
See? We can stop them anytime we choose.
 So, do we choose now?
Choose now. 
Now.
I will fill up a cart from Amazon: that will save me.
Click. Sleep mask.  Click. Noise cancelling headphones. Air purifier. Click, click, click.
 
I will upload a new photo on my Instagram page.
See? 
Everything is okay. 
There is Nala the Cat,
Wearing a Superman Cape, and a gold crown.
Doug the Pug wearing funny sunglasses and a hat and a Christmas sweater.
 
Maybe TikTok can save me?
Just upload a new video.
Zach King, we need some of your digital magic,
Your sleight-of-hand.
That’s how it starts. That is also how it ends.
 
When you ask if there are monsters under the bed,
I assure you,
They do exist.
And when they crawl out,
There is little we can do to get them back under.
Except recognize them.
And it starts with that.
It simply starts with that. 

 
Celeste DeSario is an award-winning educator and former tenured professor of Literature and Writing at Suffolk County Community College. She is the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and a National Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas. After years of teaching the greats, she has stepped out of the classroom to craft her own worlds of impossible choices.

NEO THE VACILLATING NEAR-EARTH OBJECT

by Lee Nash




NEOWISE—your one-size-fits-all comet,
or call me C/2020 F3—
I’m hardly striving for the poetic,
named for an infrared telescope. Find me
booming near the northwestern horizon,
gassing off through the zigzag stars of Lynx,
zooming to the Great Bear, and on
to you, dear Earthlings, to be your Jumbo Jinx.
A survivor—I’m back from the far side,
SOHO’s tracking my line; ATLAS and SWAN
are steam, their bodies disintegrated...
It’s enough to make a messenger wan.
Darlings, though I’m unpredictable,
I do my utmost to be a spectacle.

I’ll do my utmost to be a spectacle,
an astral show before I dissipate,
though it’s not under my control...
To miss me would be rather unfortunate.
If I die, I’ll light up your skies; if not,
see you in 8786!
Catch me chilling in Auriga’s chariot,
conscious of my mission to transfix –
that’s why I’m here, after all, to wake
you Homo sapiens from your dopey state.
A Sign to break crass rhythms, wipe this slick
of insolence from your brows, conflate
your problems with my stellar viewpoint,
at risk of putting all your noses out of joint.

Risking putting all your noses out of joint,
I really must make clear to you, the heat
is on—for you, not just for me. Climate
is a touchy subject, isn’t it?
Excuse me? What about your right
to holidays and international travel? Of course!
But from where I’m flying the desperate plight
of islanders is difficult to ignore:
I see grandmothers planting mangroves,
their bare feet sinking into deep water,
bushfires out of control, great de-frosts
and fry-ups, dwindling groundwater...
Hence, my humble attempt to purify
your thoughts with a brief, erratic fly-by.

Your thoughts. With a brief, erratic fly-by,
I’m unlikely to change your perspective.
You’re far too set in your ways by now; I
doubt I’ll get your attention. Forgive
my cynicism... But I’m no sungrazer,
no ice crystal who doesn’t give two hoots,
no bolide or passionless trailblazer,
no sympathetic meteor content to shoot
your wish. I am, please, apocalyptic.
Dears, don’t take this badly, but if I were
to stray from my elliptic,
and plunge into your globe, the saboteur
of your finest achievements... What calamity!
What tsunami of plastic debris!

What a tsunami of plastic debris
would wash up on your greasy sardined shores!
Breathe easy, the laws of physics constrain me,
and, of course, I obey the first cause –
a humble servant, not for me to preempt
the misfortunes of the Anthropocene:
I’m merely omen, harbinger, event –
though I’ve been around since Pleistocene.
Excuse me, my humor is misguided.
A world reeling from a harrowing plague,
you’re surely feeling a little jaded
and I fear my message is somewhat vague...
I shall try to be perfectly clear:
get your shit together or the end is near.

Get your shit together or the end is near.
It bears repeating, for you haven’t listened
to scientist or teenager—
instead, you surgically scrub your hands
from guilt. So here I am, NEO—your herald
in a modern guise, your two-tailed flare;
WISE—your perspicacious portent, errand
sent from heaven against your laissez-faire.
Doomsday. What a negative word that is.
Better to leave it to Hollywood,
enjoy it in a bucket seat, drinking cherry fizz.
We comets are misunderstood!
Does this seem like a game or a riddle?
While your ley lines warm up like a griddle?

While your ley lines warm up like a griddle,
you dream of investing in cooler climes,
treat my warning as tarradiddle,
for there’s no one to punish your eco-crimes.
Before I return to the depths of space,
please think of how you consume and pollute...
you’re an odium to the human race
and your energy drive just won’t compute.
Or else, I shall assume a death wish.
I’ve seen it many times on many rounds.
Celestial destroyers are not squeamish,
and sadly pale blue dots aren’t out of bounds.
For your cataclysm, I’m on it:
I’m NEOWISE—your one-size-fits-all comet.

Lee Nash writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in diverse journals and anthologies, including Acorn, Ambit, Angle, Magma, Mezzo Cammin, Slice, and The Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first poetry chapbook Ash Keys was published by Flutter Press. She was a 2018 Bath Flash Fiction Award prizewinner, joint winner of the 2019 Princemere Poetry Prize, and is First Prize winner in Fish Publishing’s 2020 The Lockdown Prize (haiku and senryu category).

ERASURE

by Terry S. Johnson

from “Trump Turns Staid Process Into Spectacle as Aspirants Parade to His Door,”

The New York Times, 11/20/16

President-elect Donald Trump heads inside the clubhouse following his meeting with David McCormick, president of the management committee at Bridgewater Associates, at Trump International Golf Club in Bedminster Township, N.J. Drew Angerer/Getty Images via NPR, November 20, 2016

                                                                        Trump

                        inscrutable

                                                Spectacle                                            for

                                                                                    the world

                                       a pageant

                                                                        Teasing

           contenders

                        The Club’s      farmhouse

                                                         gushed

                                    former adversaries

 “phony”

                                                 Preference for older white men

                                                            military

                        No

public process

                                                 Discarded

                        election cycle

                                                                        Make

                        deals

                                                                                                Shape

                                                posture

                                                                       

                                                            Bursts

            of

                                                                                            disapproval

                                                                                    “ – nothing

funny at all.”

Terry S. Johnson explored careers as a newspaper advertising clerk, a library assistant and a professional harpsichordist before serving as a public school teacher for over twenty-five years. She earned her M.F.A. in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published in many anthologies and journals.  Her first book Coalescence was published in 2014 by WordTech and won an honorable mention award in the New England Book Festival.