FEEDING THE FAT CATS

by Paul Burgess

Republican bill cuts food aid for elderly, low-income, & disabled Americans and increases funding for their own version of Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program. —Ann Telnaes, May 2

Ensure that butter fills the bowls of batter, 
And watch the oven while the mixture bakes.
The fattest cat will soon be getting fatter 
Once fed these massive overfrosted cakes.
 
Then, offer up your children's hamster pet,
The cuddly thing with white and brownish fur,
And thank the Lord the fattest cat you've met
Has deigned to eat your food and give a purr.
 
Now, find a book of ancient magic words
And learn the phrase you'll have your family say 
To turn yourselves to tiny, harmless birds
That Mister Fats will swallow as his prey.
 
And soon you'll be a bone-and-feather lump 
Excreted from your idol's noble rump.

Paul Burgess, an emerging poet, is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has recently contributed work to Blue Unicorn, Light, The Orchards, The Ekphrastic Review, Pulsebeat, The New Verse News, Lighten Up On Line, The Asses of Parnassus, and several other publications

ELECTING THE SHADOW KING: A SPECULATIVE TALE

by Fred Demien

A study that evaluated medical records from 156 [St. Louis] child victims of firearms found that most did not know who shot them or why. —St. Louis Public Radio, May 9, 2023. Graphic by Susannah Lohr.

Americans under the age of eighteen are eight times more likely to be killed in St. Louis than in the rest of the country...[As of] March, eight St. Louis children have already been killed in 2021. —St. Louis Riverfront Times, March 10, 2021 

 

·      In 2021, twenty-three children were killed in gunfire in the St. Louis metropolitan area. 

·      In 2022, twenty-six children were killed in gunfire in the St. Louis metropolitan area. 

·      As of 13 June 2023, ten children have been killed in gunfire in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

There is no known original name, only what it became.  
The city that drips with the Shadow’s pitch.  
 
It wasn’t planned— 
the architects didn’t plot it in their original drawings;  
the sewer district had no recourse for its removal;  
the contractor did not budget it in her original bid.  
Only the asphalt worker knew, driving his roller,  
slow in the stick and heat of summer. But no one listened  
when he said he saw it swallow a child whole.  
Except that child’s mother, and another, another,  
as child after child disappeared. 
 
News reached the mayor too late  
after his election to campaign, so he ignored it.  
But one day the Shadow towered at the city’s gateway  
and opened like a mouth, with thousands of cries  
of young girls and boys screaming out.  
 
The mayor declared it a threat, but  
the money was already allotted, he said.  
They never fully calculated the damage, but a generation  
of future voters—gone. Everyone else evacuated.  
Even mothers left, their sons and daughters all 
drawn down the unending gullet of the Shadow. 
 
Still the mayor stays in the swallowed city,  
sitting at his darkened desk, writing 
—in what he thinks is ink— 
the songs he hears carried in children’s voices  
seeping from the walls. 
 
 He sends what he can to their mothers. 

Fred Demien is a queer, itinerant minister. In 2016, her work was longlisted for the Lascaux Prize in Poetry. Her writing will be published by The Forge Literary Magazine in July of 2023. An admirer of trees, bees, and human beings, she is currently writing and building community in the greater St. Louis area. 

NOT IN OUR STAR…

by Phyllis Frakt

The distant death throes of a star—

entire worlds gassed, doomed, 

consumed in its stellar belly.

 

They say our sun will do the same

and swallow the Earth in the “deep future”

five billion years from now.

 

While we wait, let’s celebrate spring,

a season in love with the sun,

carefree and heedless of remote catastrophe.

 

But humans bring peril five billion years early

Our planet gobbled up, not from afar,

but from us, under our benevolent star.

Phyllis Frakt began writing poems in 2021. Her previous poems in The New Verse News are "Teach to the Test" and "Caught in Between." She lives in New Jersey.

THE WOMAN WHO SWALLOWED THINGS

by Lois Marie Harrod

Image source: Getty Images via Vice.

In high school, the usual which pleased the boys, and in college
the predictable, goldfish and frogs with beer,
and, on a whim or a dare and after a little practice,
swords. Before graduating she became the star of her sorority
when she ate 69 hot dogs in ten minutes. Later,
she swallowed the diamond ring her fiancé put in a Softee—
seems he thought it would be an unusual way to ask for her hand and her throat,
and once she had that kid in diapers, safety pins open and shut.
The day she turned forty-five, she downed the restaurant spoons and forks,
and most recently she feasted on the more than ten thousand lies
told by the President which wasn’t as bad as it sounds
because by then lots of other people were swallowing oddities too—
concrete walls and steel barriers, the Golan Heights, Bears Ears,
Greenland with all its ICE and those nice White Supremacists—

which brought on a national epidemic of distressed intestines
and shut down nearly every hospital and nursing home in the country—
there no longer being medical insurance to cover belly aches,
or for that matter, any poorly paid immigrants to fill the health-care jobs—
unless, of course, you were very rich and had had practice in swallowing it all whole.

Lois Marie Harrod’s 17th collection Woman is forthcoming from Blue Lyra in December 2019. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and at The College of New Jersey.

THE FACTORY

by David Chorlton

"Richmond Hill" by LS Lowry

I
When they laid the first brick they said
This is progress,
and then they laid another, promising to carry on
until there was a wall
where previously the wind had blown without obstruction
across the grass. The wall
was high and strong, with just one row of narrow
windows for light to pass through.
Look at what is possible, they said
as they drew up plans for the second wall.
These will stand through any storms, they claimed,
and storms came to test them
and the walls remained.
Foxes came to sniff. They didn’t understand
what was happening. Swallows
flew above and in between the walls
until the third and fourth sides of a mighty rectangle
were complete. Sometimes a swallow
would go in through a window and fly playfully
out of the open space held aloft
by the walls. This is the future, they said,
this is the place
where darkness will turn to money.
So they covered the space with a roof
which blocked out light
except for the long, dusty shafts
that streamed in when the sun
was on the window side, and the valley appeared
to sit deeper in the earth
because of the weight
pushing down. Only a circling hawk
remained of the sky. They raised a tall chimney
and fed it with coal. This is the power, they said,
that nature forgot, and as they bowed their heads
in prayer a viper
slithered by and spat a hiss.

II
Many came to see it. Many more
entered by the door and stayed inside until each day
was over. Those who praised it
never went inside, but said to those who did,
You’re fortunate, be grateful. So the line formed
every morning, and each man
bowed his head as he moved to his assigned position
while outside, the deer
on their way to the river ran by
until water no longer ran there
because it had been redirected
and after it had been used
it became a kind of poison
so the decision was made
to have it soak into the ground and disappear,
but it was still there,
like fire just beneath the surface of the earth.

III
We need another one just like it,
they said, and they marked the ground
for the new one to stand on. We must cut down
these trees, they said, and lay a new foundation
that will seal the earth.
It looked just like the one before it
and those who entered looked
just like the ones who entered the first one.
Two were not enough.
However many they built
they kept on finding people to feed into them
and the many chimneys
poured waste into the sky
as if to make an offering to whichever gods
survived in the smoke.

IV
So it continued, each one followed by the next
until no trace remained
of the grass in the valley and the trees on the hills,
and nobody who came to see
what had replaced them
could ever imagine the way it used to be
when the air was clear enough
for the sparrows to be seen
with their feathers turning gold
as they flocked in early sun.
Don’t think about the past,
they said, your memories will not feed you.
And they kept on building,
beating down the earth
to make it level for another floor,
creating enclosures where once had been space,
and when they were sure
nobody could remember what they had replaced
a man old enough to have been dead several times
stood up to speak about what had been lost
but he could not be heard
above the growling of machines.

V
More, they said, we need more.
And it did not matter how many,
they were too few. Some sparrows appeared,
and a lost fox, but no matter
how few were the animals
they said, They are too many.


David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in England, and spent several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in1978. He pursued his visual art and had several shows as well as writing and publishing his poetry in magazines and collections, the latest of which is The Devil’s Sonata from FutureCycle Press. Although he became ever more interested in the desert and its wildlife, the shadow side of Vienna emerges in his fiction and The Taste of Fog, which was published by Rain Mountain Press.