LIGHTNING

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Trying to make sense of lightning is about more

than science. How long should students lower

their heads, consult their books, run computer

simulations and not look outside.

 

By the time you read this message a bolt will

have struck in dozens of locations, though

you might not have registered the flash. The smell

of ozone in your nose, learning to count for thunder.

Did you know lightning can be silent. An owl.

 

Friction travels from cloud to cloud. It’s over my head

I’ve heard

told. There’s a space in the great codes for interpellations,

gnostic meanings, hidden from the rabble: debates about what’s

in plain view

 

Can someone without sight see a storm.

What if they also cannot hear.   

Lightning can be a figment of the mind:

logos. But if we cannot make observations

what is science.

 

Every one of us has dreams. There were heat storms

over my crib. I couldn’t talk but in my gut I knew some

thing was wrong.

 

Let the infants cry. For the betterment of science.

Watch them, how they respond. From the blur comes

a woman’s features. Mother? But not the storm.

 

They cry because they know she’s an electric force,

violence with the texture of milk—

Jeremy Nathan Marks knows that his own instinct to try to enucleate the problem is a self-deception. But he's stubborn. He lives and writes (stubbornly) in Canada.

ON THE JOB

by David Chorlton

AI-generated image by Canva for The New Verse News.

Late glow on the slopes, desert streaming
between the ridgeline
and the streets below, Friday afternoon,
T-shirts spotted with the stains
a day’s work leaves behind
                                                  and cashiers
at the supermarket scanning
what the weekend needs. Mourning doves
for restfulness, grackles for
opportunism and he who all day
wheels the carts
                               stacks another line to steer
back to the entranceway. So much
to be done: bread to bake and orders
to compile, restrooms to be cleaned
and a country to be run. A painter
splashed white is picking
up fruit,
              a man dressed in black
casually steps between coffee
and the cookie shelves with a sidearm strapped
conspicuously at his side. So much
to be done:
                    wash the floors, make
appointments, secure domestic peace
and spray the fruit to keep it fresh. Almost
Saturday, but there’s work
for the workers to do even when the sunlight
looks nervous. No rest
for the doctors, mechanics, plumbers
and all
           who believe that even
a rudderless ship reaches port in a storm.


David Chorlton lives in Phoenix close to a mountain preserve. He likes to keep track of the wildlife at the meeting of desert and the urban zone as well as the people at the nearby supermarket. His book Dreams the Stones Have was published last year by The Bitter Oleander Press.

INCREASING TURBULENCE

by Betsy Mars

 

 

“we live and move and have our being / here, in this curving and soaring world / that is not our own” –Julie Cadwallader Staub, "Blackbirds"

Each body with its own gravity, each a potential
projectile, catapulting beyond our limits.
We pin on wings, ignore warnings, leave
our belts uncinched, bang on overhead bins.

 
Oxygen masks dangle like buttercups, lines tangled 
rice noodles, seatbacks cracked, someone’s hair floats
feathering above. In galleys: scattered wine bottles, 
kiwi slices, coffee urns, snacks, the aftermath.
 
If we could see the air ahead would we swerve, 
fly below, rise above? How many words 
for this invisible curve are there in
blackbird tongue, imperceptible to us?
 
We weather the storm. Again, ask for 
mercy, oscillate, tally the toll. 

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. whose poems can be found in numerous online journals and print anthologies. She has two books, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, co-written with Alan Walowitz. Betsy is currently and sporadically working on a full-length manuscript titled Rue Obscure.

THE STORM

by Katherine West

It is the north wind

does the damage

Blind semi head-ons

small family car

Flowers mound on graves—

freeze to ice sculptures

that never melt into

palette knife paintings

We put on our winter

coats, scarves, gloves

begin the long hike

to spring

The leaders of men freeze—

proclaim the death of spring

You say: Never mind, Love,

we will make our own.

We gather wood—

make a fire in the lee

of the Holy Mountain—

my tears freeze on my cheeks

I say: The Frozen are coming. There is no dry wood.

The fire is going out.

You say: Never mind, Love,

we will make our own.

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, Writers Resist, Feminine Collective, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico, the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado, and the Tombaugh Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is also an artist.

QUESTIONS OF PORTENT

by Steven Croft

"the wind will rise, / we can only close the shutters."

—Adrienne Rich

The Emergency Alert System dial-up screech has crossed

the television with warnings several times when I nudge

the dog out the back door.

Tall pines freighted with the wind's push sway, wave lateral

arms, recompose when the wind lets go. Finger branches

splayed with needles snap, parachute down.

The dog finishes, runs back to the sound of myriad drops

touching leaves with tiny slaps. I close the glass door,

watch the wind flex muscles against an overgrown azalea.

In the house, out of harm's way, I realize there is really no

safe distance anymore.  I feel anxiety born recently,

how Irma ripped a five-hundred-pound branch from a pine.

And I still hear its fingers' soaked-green needles whipping

the edge of my tin roof, and later the sound of chainsaws

in the island's sunlit wreckage, mine one of them.

Can the twenty-first century afford the price of petroleum?

Our bad karma circling back on us with skies dark as

a funeral coat, ready to drop snakeskins of churning wind?

Should we consult climatologist oracles: leave the coast,

construct your buildings with rock-solid materials. Or forget

warnings and sniff the air like animals knowing when to run?

Or is the world brighter now when, after the wind sweeps

the earth for hours, like tonight, in catharsis, the power

stays on and no destruction comes?

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

BEFORE EARTH IS LOST

by George Salamon

“In Conclusion” by Peter Kuper at The Nib

"Humans have become as great an influence on the planet as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs," Anthony Barnosky, Stanford University biologist, quoted in The New York Times, July 30, 2021

Paradise was lost long ago,

now it's the turn of Earth,

where humans have assumed

privileges and rights for themselves:

this island belongs to us, one

nation claims, another the right

to inhabit space.

We're mammals, denying the

prehistory of our origins, the

story of how our ancestors

turned the earth's jungles into

today's fortress of machine

and stone.

We've moved too quickly past

the awe for earth's order, left

behind in the wild, playful

nature of the child, now that 

we are beginning to feel the

coming storm.

George Salamon lives and waits, hoping for the best, in St. Louis, MO.

CLICKING

by Sari Grandstaff

Sari Grandstaff is a high school librarian. Her work has been published in many print and online journals including The New Verse News, Prune Juice, and Modern Haiku. Sari and her husband are weathering out their storms in the Catskill Mountains/Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. 

ON MARS WE'RE BRIEFLY FLYING

by Chris Vola

 

The winds declined to rip

the helicopter to pieces,

its carbon-fiber blades

spinning furiously,

defiantly, churning

for a few seconds

in the flushed sky,

even though sooner or later,

like all expensive toys,

its sunken parts would be left

to fill with dust,

even though a storm

would eventually

take an antenna,

the circuitry would garble,

landing gear would be

plucked like scabs.

Still, NASA applauded.

Elon Musk re-tweeted.

Someone proclaimed

“a red-letter day on the Red Planet!”

From 178 million miles away,

another data burst confirmed

that the helicopter

had touched softly

back down on the rutted 

ground, where only rovers

dared to tread.

The waiting was finally over

for the engineers,

who, giddy from their screens,

began to believe the future

could be tolerable.

They immediately forgot 

the gorgeous sunlight that

filtered through the oaks

outside the command center,

or the clogged freeways 

where blood & plastic 

spilled like SpaceX

propulsion fluid across

our still-living desert.

The Earth's concerns

had become irrelevant  

to them, like a neighborhood

with unknown sirens & sickness,

or the bus-stop profile 

of a sleeping family.

The Earth itself, unmoved

by progress

on another sphere,

would only turn

& brace its stem

against its own putrid winds.

Most of us would continue

to stay in the homes

we’d been staying in 

& busy ourselves

with the swipe-&-click

routines that could never

really sustain us,

pretending not to hear

the whirring in our heads,

or see the ugly

bubble cockpit

of a much different chopper,

one fueled by muzzle-flash,

& boredom,

& lungs twisted

full of loss,

its impact heavier

than a verdict,

emptier than the spacesuits

we’d never wear 

while prancing

in the Martian gravity,

awaiting Elon’s rise

from cryogenic slumber

to save us

on the third day.

We'd long

given up wondering

why it came

for us this way or

if we might escape

it, its appetite whetted,

its wide blades

ready to grind us into

the only dust

we’d ever know. 

Chris Vola is the author of six books, most recently I is for Illuminati: An A-Z Guide to Our Paranoid Times (William Morrow, 2020). His recent poems appear or are forthcoming in New Pop Lit, The Collidescope, The Main Street Rag, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Horror Sleaze Trash. He lives in New York. 

NOVEMBER 2020

 by Mary Clurman

Wicked Wind by Tracey Savery Davis

i.
the wind blew wicked hard that day
it howled and blew
it rocked the house
though I slept safe in bed

the storm did rise to hit the house
kill flowers through the land
tear branches down, fell ancient trees
yet did not touch my head 

the storm rose up to strike our house
did everything it could 
yet I and thee so deep in sleep
still breathed, slept easily

ii.
that wind had come to seize our day
it danced and whirled and groaned
to wake up all to hold the land
but somehow let us sleep

why would this wind stop at our bed
why would it prowl away
if not that you and I were here
and sought to sleep that day

That wind has come to call on us
leave eddies, pools in hearts
to cry to you to me who dream
You sleep, you welcome death.


Mary Clurman is a retired Montessori teacher and childcare professional in Princeton, NJ, taking her first class in writing poetry. She has only run for school board but remains aggressively progressive.

IJS*

by Judy Juanita

Imma be ok

Even wif lightening ‘n thunder 

setting de trees on fire

& dogs howling up a storm

but if I were a spooky sort 

(which I is deep down)

I’d say we is coming into 

de apock-a-lips

* = I’m just saying

Judy Juanita’s poetry has been published widely. Her poem “Bling” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul is about a young woman who joins the Black Panther Party in the 60s (Viking, 2013). She appears in Netflix’s Last Chance U: Season 5, Laney College where she teaches.

KYUSHU RAIN

by Elizabeth Poreba




The Kuma River
churned in her bones
and rain became
a planetary
condition
gravity visible
as grey opacity,
swallowing
ceaselessly,
an event sealed
from any sense
of a time
outside its presence,
so that even
in the high room
above the storm
in her bones
anything safe,
any object —
carpet, dry sheets,
solid bed —became
a temporary
event.

A retired New York City high school English teacher and long-time resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Elizabeth Poreba’s poems have appeared in several journals, including Poetry East, Ducts, and Commonweal. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook The Family Calling. Wipf and Stock has published two collections of her work, Vexed and Self Help: A Guide for the Retiring.

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

by Marsha Owens  

Credit Warren F. Johnson, Photographer

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."  1 Corinthians 13-12


The black eye
of the storm
is the safest place
we’re told.

I don’t know blackness
slumped in the abyss
of my white privilege

yet I see broken
everywhere,
a prism of shame
shattered
beyond words.


Marsha Owens lives and writes in Richmond, VA. Her writing has appeared in print publications, including The Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, The Sun, and online at TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rat’s Ass Review, and Rise Up Review. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology, Lingering in the Margins.

THE WIND RIPS

by Daniel Lance Patrick

Protesters confront a row of police officers outside the White House in Washington, DC, on early May 30. Photographer: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images at Bloomberg.

it rattles my windows as it picks up speed
gusting between apartments
as a wind tunnel

if I was the praying type I’d pray for the death
of the damaged leader
for what he has done and hasn’t
I wish it like a gale force

throwing what isn’t tied down

it’s not how Mama taught me—
but if there was a god it might agree

as the wind rips through the courtyard
I can hear the powerline banging against a pipe

and in all the debris that settles
I just might
find forgiveness

Daniel Lance Patrick is a poet, songwriter and musician. His poems have appeared in The Sandy River Review, The Northern New England Review, NPR, The Buffalo News, among others. He won an Emmy for his work during the London Olympics.

DON'T NAP IN THE THUNDER

by Dianna MacKinnon Henning

Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs / For I am a Rain Dog too.

Don’t assume the springs won’t break free
from their box mattress—sheets flaunting their disarray
across the bed, or

count on scenery through unwashed
windows, or that mice, anticipating
your arrival, will vacate. If

there’s a wishing-well in the front
yard, likely its weed-clogged, so
cast no coin, make no wish. If

you should happen to rest
on the hay-stuffed sofa, and a torrential
downpour slams your solitude, or should you

contemplate buying this foreclosed relic
for a getaway, don’t ease into the solitude
of sleep. Just when such calm seduces

you on the edge of its tricky precipice, thunder
shivers the walls of your potential buy, and any sanity
you thought you possessed surrenders to the rain

dogs—their teeth slavered with hope.

Dianna MacKinnon Henning holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Published in, in part: The Moth, Ireland; Sukoon, Volume 5; Naugatuck River Review, Lullwater Review, The Red Rock Review, The Kentucky Review, The Good Works Review, The Main Street Rag, California Quarterly, Poetry International and Fugue. Finalist in Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award in the UK. Three-time Pushcart nominee. Henning  received several CAC grants and taught through California Poets in the Schools and through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program. Henning’s third poetry book Cathedral of the Hand published 2016 by Finishing Line Press.

EIGHTY-SIX ON MY SPEED DIAL

by James Bettendorf

Records fell as an April snowstorm blanketed the Upper Midwest. —CHANNEL 3000

The shadow I see in the meadow is really a sheep in wolf’s clothing.  I go swimming in the small pond but the ice is so thick I have to break it with an ax so I can’t chop the tree branches into firewood.  It is so cold in April I choke on clouds of ice.  I wrap myself in a buffalo robe for warmth but the snow keeps falling.  I wear a large wool hat but the snow keeps falling.  The sun is shining but the snow keeps falling.  Even the sunshine I feel is eight minutes old.  My congressman gives me the cold shoulder.  It is hard to believe anything he says. Perhaps I don’t get his attention.  If I see a poisonous spider I will crush it with my shoe.

James Bettendorf is a retired math teacher writing in Brooklyn Park, MN. He completed a two-year poetry internship in the Loft Master Track program in 2009 and has published a book of poems swimming in the earth which includes art by his daughter. He is also a contributor to  Gatherings, A Forward Poetry Anthology and In the Company of Others. He has had poems published in several journals including Rockhurst Review, Light Quarterly, Star Line, Ottertail Review, Talking Stick, and Free Verse along with several on-line publications.

DAY RUNNERS

by Laura Rodley

Photo by the poet.

Graying, white foam kicked aside
snowplow’s blade scraping bottom
thrusting wave after wave aside
breaking tides over guardrail
back into the forest’s ledged shelf,
twenty miles an hour, speed of broken sleep,
catching waves solidified as snowfall,
driver dressed in buffalo plaid shirt,
no buffalo skin upon his lap,
pink salt swirling behind, above his exhaust pipe.
He must not reach his own edge,
maintain sharpness as he thrusts the blade
down Route 2, Greenfield to Williamstown,
and back again, coffee in his thermos,
another plow ahead, wave after wave,
cars in a line behind him, crawling.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner for her New Verse News poem "Resurrection," a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee, with work in Best Indie Lit NE.  Publisher Finishing Line Press nominated her Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose for a PEN L.L.Winship Award and Mass Book Award. FLP also nominated her Rappelling Blue Light for a Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, Rodley teaches the As You Write It memoir class and has edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI, also nominated for a Mass Book Award. She was accepted at Martha’s Vineyard’s NOEPC and has been a consecutive participant in the 30 poems in 30 days fundraiser for Literacy Project. Latest books Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point upcoming by Prolific Press. 

MY MOTHER’S OCEAN

by Bill Meissner

vis Giphy

I can never take just one photograph of
the ocean. The cerulean waves are too
lovely, too graceful, tumbling gently over themselves,
then turning to foam that kisses
the sandy lip of the world.
There are no other words for it—this
huge and endless ocean’s rise and fall, this
rocking back and forth, back
and forth, the way my mother used to

hold me when I was a small child, afraid
of the oncoming storm.
The brittle window glass rattled, but
she rocked me, and replaced the thunder
with a humming, a lullaby
that rose and fell.
It’s a melody I would,
as the years passed, remember,
then forget, then
remember again. There are no words

for this song my mother sang, her liquid voice
small, but still filling the room,
overpowering the fists of wind and stabs of lightning
with a language I couldn’t understand

at the time.
One single photograph
is never enough. I know now
that there is beauty in the things that are
closest to us, and beauty in the things
that we lose. She

is gone now.
But as a wave lifts itself and rolls
toward me, then bows down and becomes
a wing of bright diamonds,
I stand again on this shore, without words,
my bare feet sinking into
the hourglass sand,
and wait for that song to wash over me.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry.  His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.

ON THE BATTLE AND THE RACE

by Rick Mullin

Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind 
and directs this Storm?—from a letter written to Thomas Jefferson by John Page, July 20, 1776,
quoted by George W. Bush in his first inaugural address, January 20, 2001.

How is the Angel in the Whirlwind fixed
for drumheads come November? Isn’t she
supposed to show us something bright betwixt
the mountain and the river? Pardon me,
but aren’t we all endowed with intuition
in our human state? The crystal liver
of the Angel in the Whirlwind waits
for a replacement on a frozen river-
bank in Pennsylvania. She hates
when she’s strung out in this position.
Once the Angel in the Whirlwind was
in charge and teleology in vogue.
But now, the latest polls get all the buzz.
The drummers and the general go rogue
and disavow the shock of recognition.


Rick Mullin's new poetry collection is Stignatz & the User of Vicenza.

DOVES BY STORMLIGHT

by David Chorlton

Wednesday’s was a sky
to cleanse a sinner of his sins: apocalyptic
rays from sunset
streaming up against a storm
about to break. The telephone cable

between the alley and the house
sagged with the weight of light
from the sun in the west
while earthquake, war, and political
intrigue welled up in the clouds
behind it. All day

the numbers rose
of bodies in the rubble, refugees
and campaign propaganda
until the pale doves

on the power line
brightened into blazing commas
from a text whose words
the news had rendered
insufficient.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications on- and off-line, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His most recent book, A Field Guide to Fire, was his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson in Arizona.

BOSTON PRE-SPRING TRAINING

by Kathy Conway

Boston braced Sunday night for a life-threatening deep freeze after a blizzard bombarded parts of the region with nearly 2 feet of snow and gale-force winds. The sixth winter storm in three weeks made February Boston’s snowiest month on record, with 58.5 inches, besting by more than 15 inches the previous record set in January 2005. --Jennifer Smith and Jeremy C. Fox, Boston Globe, February 15, 2015. Photo by Sean Proctor, Boston Globe.

Plant feet shoulder-width apart on
non-slippery surface.
Bend knees slightly.
Grab mid-handle with non-dominant hand.
Place dominant hand at handle top.
Bend knees further to scrunch, suck in belly
while keeping back straight.
Lean in to thrust handle.
Dig. Lift. Twist. Heave.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.

Necessary gear includes boots, hat,
gloves and shovel.
Repeat heave, higher.
Repeat heave, higher.
Repeat heave, higher.


Kathy Conway has published the chapbook Bacon Street about growing up in a large Boston Irish Catholic family.  She has contributed to The New Country, Getting There and the upcoming So To Speak.  She lives and writes in Arlington, MA and Brunswick, ME.