SWASTIKAS ON MONTAUK AND EVERYWHERE ELSE

by Susan Cossette

Swastika graffiti at Naturally Good Foods in Montauk, Photo: Rabbi Josh Franklin. —Dan’s Papers, October 30, 2023

 
We spend the morning cleaning graffiti.
 
An antisemitic phrase 
scrawled on a Holocaust survivor’s home in California. 
 
A display supporting Israeli hostages,
kicked over in Minnesota. 
 
Palestinian nationalist messaging 
spray-painted on a non-profit’s building in Rhode Island.
 
There is no justification 
for raping and murdering 
ordinary citizens in front of their families, 
mutilating babies, 
decapitating people, 
using automatic weapons and grenades 
to hunt down and murder young people 
at a music festival celebrating peace, 
burning families alive, 
kidnapping and taking hostages,
parading women hostages in front of chanting crowds, 
and documenting it all on social media. 
 
Kristallnacht 2023.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

AMERICAN HISTORY

by Deb Freedman

                                           

Dozens of synagogues across different states have been targeted by “online trolls,” which has disrupted services, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The Jewish advocacy organization said a series of antisemitic “swatting” incidents and fake bomb threats have targeted at least 26 synagogues and two ADL offices in 12 states over the past month. Swatting refers to the act of making false claims to the police with the intention of provoking an aggressive response from authorities at a particular location. —The Hill, August 16, 2023

1965

A swastika

in concrete

inscribed the only path

to my elementary school.

1971

Alone,

our house

was without Christmas lights,

so someone decorated for us

with dogshit.

 1977

In Sociology class,

the captain of our high school’s football team

said Hitler was right

and should’ve killed us all.

Half my class agreed.

Our mild-mannered teacher

exploded.

Rumors spread

she was crazy.

 2005

Our synagogue hired armed security guards

for the High Holy Days

after swastikas and “Kill the Jews”

were spray-painted bloody red

on its brick walls

—an artifice of safety.

2009

A confident junior,

in his oral presentation

I assigned to my Honors English class,

explained all Jews

are rich and greedy.

Some of my class was surprised.

The presenter didn’t understand

why this was a problem;

he’d given a similar speech last year

in History

and aced it.

 2022

At our local supermarket,

the sweet-voiced lady in front of me

in the checkout line,

told the cashier she was so grateful;

her niece healed from cancer

because she prayed for her.

Fervently, she asked me

if I was a Christian.

I smiled.

told her I was Jewish

and believed in the power of prayer.

Her mouth clanked shut

as she hurried from the store.

 2023

My stomach is distended

by history

by now

ordinary.

Deb Freedman is a poet living in Pennsylvania. Her poems have been published in The New Verse News and DVP/US 1’s Worksheets 67.

IF AMERICA FOUGHT WORLD WAR II LIKE COVID-19

by Jon Wesick

More people in the United States have died this year from Covid-19 than were killed in four years of fighting on the battlefields during World War II, according to the latest NBC News data. —NBC News, December 11, 2020

The President calls it Fake News

and urges Americans to buy Japanese.

As hundreds of thousands die

in Guadalcanal and Normandy, the public

adopts swastikas and Hitler salutes

in disdain for the “liberal media.”

 

No scrap drives, no Rosie the Riveter, just Emperor Hirohito

on the cover of Life Magazine. Gilligan and the Skipper

shadow convoys across the Atlantic

and radio their positions to lurking U boats.

Calling him an “Antifa terrorist,” Gomer Pyle  

mails Audie Murphy death threats. Barney Fife

kidnaps General Eisenhower and tries him for treason.

 

A lot of people, really important people,

say this is a terrific generation, maybe the most terrific

of all. Terrific is better than greatest, okay.

It’s huge. Better than the generation that freed

the slaves, too. Bunch of losers, so sad. 

Why terrific? Winning. It’s true.

So much winning

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, The New Verse News, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his stories “The Visitor” and “A Story for the Rest of Us” for Pushcart Prizes. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collections Words of Power, Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Enigma Brokers.

PREPPING FOR DOOMSDAY

by Tom Karlson

Michigan closed down its capitol in Lansing on Thursday and canceled its legislative session rather than face the possibility of an armed protest and death threats against Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The gathering, meant to advocate opening the state for business despite the coronavirus pandemic, followed one April 30 that resulted in pictures of protesters clad in military-style gear and carrying long guns crowding the statehouse. They confronted police and taunted lawmakers. —Bloomberg, May 14, 2020

they are not wearing brown shirts
they can’t sing Deutschland Uber Alles
these protesters are tattooed white nationalists
cameo clad, heavily armed,
red hatted, tattooed, with confederate flag and swastika
they are dyed in the wool homegrown
Nazi  Motherfuckers

crazed defenders of the second amendment
president t***p tweets open up America,
protect the constitution
these are good people
these are his people

protected by Barr’s boys
the thugs are on the move
ordered and paid to liberate
Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky
they come to boogaloo (armed insurrection)
not native or black or brown
these pale thugs have carte blanche
from the loyal men in blue

BC (before covid)
45 and his boys knew
high stock market and
low employment equal
certain reelection

AC (after covid)
the equation is changed
and the impeached one
the quinine loving
fact fucker
does nothing for 8 weeks
for thousands a early death

and now we have
the orange domed leader
press briefing rallies
urging his doomsday prepping,
white privileged militia goons
to open up
and make america great again


Tom Karlson’s information: My poetry is political / my poetry is about stuff I can see / smell feel hear / read about / stuff from history, / natural history / my history / an outcry, protest / justice, injustice / of contradictions / and musings / sounds and goddesses / moving around objective / reality toward life / a better world is coming

FEBRUARY 2020

by Jennifer Franklin

Our long coats are all that separate us from the cold. Half-way around the world, the sky opens to put out wildfires over the carcasses of burned marsupials. We wait for the subway, for the train. My daughter waits for her short yellow bus that arrives each morning with one sobbing boy. He would be a perfect metaphor of Orwell’s belief that we’re all alone if he didn’t look so sad, his shirt buttoned askew. Politicians preen and posture; the air is damp with acquittal. We bend our heads but not in prayer. Our palms hold small backlit tablets that promise information and escape. Miles north, a student paints a swastika in my old dorm. Another student covers it with a star. Only the dog is calm, sleeping in a circle in her clean fleece bed. Orwell wrote, “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” I try to put my daughter to sleep on time in her new room. As I read the familiar incantations, flowers climb up the lamp to the ceiling. All the animals have escaped the zoo. I want the story to end there. All of them tucked into the corners of the zookeeper’s room—breathing their heavy eucalyptus breath across the night. Their fur shining in the moonlight through the blinds.

Jennifer Franklin (AB Brown University, MFA Columbia University School of the Arts) is the author of two full collections, most recently No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, JAMA, Love’s Executive Order, The Nation, Paris Review, Plume, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently teaching poetry in Manhattanville’s MFA program. She also teaches manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series and serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City. The poem appearing here is from Jennifer’s forthcoming collection Momento Mori: Antigone.

VANDALISM AT A MILITARY CEMETERY

by Janice D. Soderling

Dozens of Commonwealth graves have been daubed with swastikas and other symbols at a cemetery dedicated to those fought in the first and second world wars. The headstones were vandalised with red spray paint overnight at the Haifa war cemetery in northern Israel, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). It comes just days after several other Commonwealth graves were knocked over at Belfast City Cemetery in Northern Ireland. —The London Economic, October 11, 2019

Indifferent to the clangor at their tent,
the dusty lads sleep on.
Allied in unilateral descent,
indifferent to the clangor at their tent,
and to the tiffs of kings or president.
Unmindful of thick darkness and bright dawn,
indifferent to the clangor at their tent
the dusty lads sleep on.

Janice D. Soderling, poet, writer and translator, is a previous contributor to TheNewVerse.News. Her work in Spanish translation was recent at La libélula vaga and her own translations from Swedish to English are forthcoming at Better than Starbucks.

LATE NIGHT IN A SMOKY BAR AN OLD SWASTIKA DRINKS WHISKEY WITH THE GODDESS ISIS

by Kit Loney

You say a terrorist stole your name? I hear you, sister. Back in the day I was easy in my skin, passed among the creatures of the earth like a fine breeze. I was whirling dervish. Pelican diving. Windmill. Showed travelers the way to Buddhist temples. Would appear on kimono sleeves in sky-blue silk brocade to gather good fortune. Faced left in Sanskrit to juggle dots and dance on pointed toes. Man, those were the days. The Navajo would invite me to kneel on woven carpets for sacred healing chants. I was earth, air, fire, and water. north, west, south, and east. Then one day I’m grabbed from behind, knocked out cold. In fog of fever dreams I’m something small and lethal, like a pistol, dread burning up red from the tail of my spine. Wake up decades later. Splitting headache. Hands covered in blood. These days the Japanese kids call me Mangi, some hashtag to hip as if that Hitler nightmare never happened. But sister, I‘m still covered in scars, still shaking. Oh God! What have I done? And this new tide of angry men with their hands clenching my every arm. No ocean on earth is deep enough. Sister, help me, please!

Kit Loney comes to poetry from a career in visual arts. Her poems have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Fall Lines, Emrys Journal, Kakalak, Yemassee, Qarrtsiluni, Waccamaw, One, and Poetry East. In 2012 she received the Carrie McCray Nickens Poetry Fellowship from the SC Academy of Authors.

HISTORY OF A BIGOT

by David Spicer

“*trigger warning* Rabid Trump supporter” by alex674 at Deviant Art.

I never learned to love
a butterfly’s wings, the ripple of wavy hair.
My old man numbed me with buckles of belts,
along with barbed-wire insults and blame
he loved to wrap around my sensitive head.
He watched with glee when I winced and cried,

a weak kid. As an adolescent I didn’t cry
but with those lack of tears I couldn’t love
myself anymore than a turtle that swallows its head.
I began my journey of odium by growing long hair:
I felt kinship with hippies who blamed
society for their alienated rage and dodged belts

from fathers, who thought nothing of belts
of Jimmy Beam and Johnny Black before they cried
and always found their sons to blame
for being losers in life and love.
Ten years later, I buzz cut my hair,
joined a gang of skinheads

who grunged guitars and cracked heads.
This didn’t happen in Frisco, but the Cotton Belt,
where haters despised long hair and short hair,
but I loathed rednecks— they never cried,
didn’t know the meaning of love
since they never accepted self-blame.

As children, their mothers told them, You’re to blame—
I ought to bash your stupid head
in. Fifteen years later, I still didn’t know love,
so I joined right-wing crackpots who swung belts
at smaller victims, young men we kicked until they cried,
slashing their faces with swastikas, hacking their hair.

Twenty years later, I wonder what happened to my hair.
If I could, I’d find some cretin to cut with blame.
I’d feel better if the whiner whimpered and cried.
Then I’d notch it up and grind his head,
tie up his arms with rusty chains, poison-laced belts,
and after I finished him, I’d call his death my act of love.

I’m not prejudiced. I hate everybody: long hair, bald head.
Who cares, as long as I can blame and whip with a belt?
I can’t cry. I hate myself. I think I’ll buy a gun to love. 


David Spicer has published poems in Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Reed Magazine, Oddball Magazine, The Literary Nest,The Tipton Poetry Journal, Synaeresis, Chiron Review, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press), Homeworks: A Book of Tennessee Writers (The University of Tennessee Press), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press). He has been nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart once, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press), and six chapbooks, the latest of which is Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress). He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books.

WAYS TO AVOID BEN SHAPIRO'S TWITTER DISDAIN

by CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue

Reinvent Mozart as a swastika.
Assert the superior caste of privilege-filled eyes,
while never mentioning your stigmatism.
Beige as the new black.
Be goddamned sure about something.
A hammer called reason to subvert any consideration,
Moral assumption as a knife to cut through the gray.
Go back in time and give Mohammed a hickey.
Dress all seed-vessels in the finest birthing habits.
Never look directly at those who rule us,
but use a mirror to avoid being turned
into stop motion playdough. Recite
The Pledge constantly under your breath:

There is a light that never burns out. I carry it 
under my tongue. When I stand on tiptoe, it will guide 
the unwashed through the wilderness.

CL Bledsoe is the author of seventeen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the novel The Funny Thing About… . He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs, with Michael Gushue, at https://medium.com/@howtoeven 

Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press, and he co-curates the reading series Poetry at the Watergate. His work can be found in journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Germ, and American Letters & Commentary and his books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood (“a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood” —New York Times) of Washington, D.C. 

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN

by Devon Balwit

Top photo: “How New Yorkers Deal With Swastikas on the Subway” by Gregory Locke, The Forward, February 5, 2017.

Images collide in my news feed
the way strangers do on a train,
strangers on a NYC subway car,
rubbing out swastikas, the words
“Jews belong in the ovens,”
above archival Giacometti,
working papier-mâché
over the armature of a man,
a man gaunt like the Jews
after their ride in the trains,
heads shaved, teeth stripped,
children gone, names erased,
Giacometti’s man rising
like a corpse, refusing to stay dead,
race hatred rising, spectral,
bans, deportations,
Giacometti, the NYC riders,
showing what resistance looks like
when train doors open on shadows,
showing what makes a human being.


Devon Balwit is a writer and teacher from Portland, OR. She has two chapbooks forthcoming—how the blessed travel from Maverick Duck Press and Forms Most Marvelous from dancing girl press. Her recent work has found many homes, both on-line and in print.

TRUMPET SONG

by George Salamon

"In West Palm Beach on Thursday. reporters covering Mr. Trump returned to a table reserved for the press to find a sign bearing a swastika and the word 'MEDIA' scrawled on it, Jim Acosta. a senior CNN White House correspondent reported." The New York Times, October 13, 2016

The media is Jew-infested
And so is our global elite.
We cheer our next leader
Who'll de-jewvenate our state
And make it great again.
Fellow Americans, this is the drill:
Let's keep the foreskin growing,
With each of us holding his own,
And save our land from being overrun
By mongrel generations.


George Salamon is having less and less fun by the day following the 2016 presidential campaign in St. Louis, MO.

REFLECTING THE WORLD

by Richard Schnap

When he learned that
To lose was to
Be spit upon
He wore a Superman outfit

And when he discovered that
Hate was becoming
More fashionable than love
He wore a swastika armband

And when he found that
The future was looking
More like the past
He wore a watch that ran backwards

And when he saw that
To be different was
The worst of all
He wore a mask made of mirrors

Richard Schnap is a poet, songwriter, and collagist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poems have most recently appeared locally, nationally and overseas in a variety of print and online publications.