IT'S THE EXOTIC, THE FOREIGN...

by Phyllis Wax

who rouse fear—                                                           

the Egyptian cobra, the black mamba,                                                  

the pit vipers of Pakistan and Afghanistan—                                        

and nativists lump the unfamiliar benign 

with these toxic snakes, want to fence them all out. 

                                                         

But what about the homegrown “patriots”—the domestic

side-armed sidewinding rattler, chattering and clattering           

its venomous views, sowing discord wherever  it chooses?

What about the skin-headed southern cottonmouth

with its deceptive languid accent and aggressive

lashing out?  The klanned coral snake, venomous,         

yet anonymous?  The paranoid tea-                                

stained copperhead?  The credulous shrug them off,                        

consider them crazies,

not dangerous species

to be monitored and tracked.

They slither from under rocks and brush piles                            

in the western hills, cluster in nests in lowland swamps,

ooze out of slimy mics all over the homeland.

The willfully oblivious ignore them—              

even when they rear back and strike.                                                                                                     

Phyllis Wax writes in Milwaukee, WI, where she is now watching in horror as the homegrown snakes are all slithering out at once. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, both online and in print.

ENEMIES LIST

by David Radavich

This poster was created by Shepard Fairey who eight years ago made the iconic Obama poster that captured a period of HOPE in America. Today we are in a very different moment, one that requires new images that reject the hate, fear, and open racism that were normalized during the 2016 presidential campaign. So on Inauguration Day, We the People will flood Washington, DC with NEW symbols of hope. You can download the set of posters for free at: http://bit.ly/wtpdownloads. You can choose to support this We the People art project via Kickstarter.

I am the one you want.
The one who can be
anything.

Beast, flower, rock,
Arab, Jew, atheist, member
of a congregation,

waters flowing over
the dam,
leaves falling
in a pattern of forgetting.

I want to be on your list.

Registry of those cast out,
cursed and damned.

We wander
and we recollect,
we migrating passerines.

Our faces are wind,
our hearts are silence.

You are the terrorists
whose eyes create shadows.

David Radavich's recent poetry collections are America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love's Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011).   His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  His latest books are The Countries We Live In (2014) and a co-edited volume called Magic Again: Selected Poems on Thomas Wolfe (2016).   He is currently president of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

BIOGRAPHY/MALHEUR

by Amy Eisner

Cattle at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge wait out the fog of a cold, winter morning January 11, 2016. Image source: Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Her childhood cards said interested, alert, and eager to learn.
In her twenties she was an associative thinker and loved
to work numbers, fold them like origami in a spread
sheet. But she has no head for numbers, they slip through.
Her boyfriend said it was obnoxious to put him on a list
after laundry, and eventually he slipped through too.
In her thirties she had babies, became a thing of many:
mouths, wakings, -pieced toys. By her forties she is simply
scattered. "Get your [ship] together" reads the tote bag
in the store. (She has become a shopper, provisioning being
the only news she can solve.) This week she thinks often
of white men in the cold, in the bird refuge
they have claimed as their own. If they stay long enough
will we come look at them through binoculars, mark them
by the particular scruff on their duck canvas chests?
On so much land the fog must roll in layers: blue, sooty,
breathy, tinged with sun, filling secret baskets in secret
Paiute graves, filling the bunchgrass and the people squatting
in it--new arrivals with binoculars in their mitts watching
us watch the tribe watch the birders watch the ranchers
(oh, the ranger and the cowman should be friends)
and the vision of what you can own in a glance
multiplies to a power, like Galileo's scope, devised
to make a man on a ship fifty miles away appear five.
You can see the ship, you can see the man,
but what can you own but what you admit?


Amy Eisner teaches writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her poems have appeared in Confrontation, Fence, Valparaiso, and other journals.

HIGH NOON

by Zev Shanken

Image credit: Gregory Ferrand for Education Week

1.

Then the good guy reaches for his hidden gun,
cries, “Take that, you wicked terrorists!”
After the commercial, he kills them all,
speaks modestly on the Evening News
about just doing his job as a citizen.

2.

Will Kane's new wife threatens to leave him
if he breaks his promise
and goes after Frank Miller. Kane says,
“Seems I gotta do this.” Loads his gun.
She leaves, but when she hears shots,
runs back and shoots a bad guy herself.

3.

A student I don't know walks into my class,
shouts an obscenity, turns and runs.
I give chase. Three flights down the stairs,
he stops, out of breath. I ask him his name.
No answer. I ask for his ID. No answer.
I demand that he come with me to the dean.
He doesn't move. The brat is damn lucky
I left my gun at the ranch.


Zev Shanken is a retired teacher of English and Film at High School for Health Careers and Sciences in Washington Heights, New York City. His chapbook, Al Het, was published by Blue Begonia Press, Yakima, WA, in 1996. He is a member of brevitas, an on-line poetry group devoted to the short poem. 

SHARED GRIEVING

by F.I. Goldhaber

Haidar Mustafa, who was wounded in Thursday's twin suicide bombings, sleeps on a bed at the Rasoul Aazam Hospital in Burj al-Barajneh, southern Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, Nov. 13, 2015. Haidar's parents Hussein and Leila were killed in the blast as they were parking their car when one of two suicide attackers blew himself up in a southern Beirut suburb near their vehicle. —BILAL HUSSEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS, The WorldPost, Nov. 16, 2015

Every day people of color die.
Bombs in Yemen, shootings in Lebanon
Suicide explosions in Syria.
No one shouts out on Twitter, changes their
photo on Facebook, creates a hashtag.

But when terrorists kill white people in
European countries, you rally round
their flag, change your profile picture, add
a ribbon to show how you much care. But,
only if the victims look/believe like you.


As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, F.I. Goldhaber produced news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now, her poems, short stories, novelettes, essays, and reviews appear in paper, electronic, and audio magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies.  Her newest book of poetry Subversive Verse collects poems about corporate cruelty, gender grievances, supreme shambles, political perversion, and race relations. 

NIGHT RATS

by Carolyn Gregory

At night, they run toward each other,
biting off each other's tails.

They flagellate themselves
over an unknown God
who answers none of their prayers
for work, land or hope.

Hiding during the day,
they are aroused by the need
for meat at night,

their prayers not inspired by love
but by the drill to capture,
biting off the heads of the enemy
and spitting out their hearts.


Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat, Main Street Rag, Wilderness House Literary Review, Ygdrasil, Seattle Review. Her first and second books were published by Windmill Editions in Florida.

REQUIEM FOR A DOOMED YOUTH

by James Penha

A one-and-a-half year-old Palestinian infant was burned to death and three of his family members were seriously wounded late Thursday night after a house was set on fire in the village of Douma, near Nablus. According to reports, settlers were those who set the house on fire after targeting it with firebombs and graffiti. The Israeli military called the attack "Jewish terror," while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials echoed the claim, vehemently condemning the attack. —Haaretz, July 31, 2015

Rest

Ali Saad Daobasa (2014-2015)

In Peace

Ali had no GPS round his neck;
only the noose of the occupied.
Ali had no Oxford foundation,
only the ardent love of his family.

Ali had no arrow plunged into his heart,
no time even to scramble before he was killed;
only the shrill, demented firebombs of terror,
shouts of revenge and an invisible Messiah.

As the death of a lion is the pall
of all who allow the endangered
to die in powders prescribed for profits,
the ashes of a Palestinian baby settle
on this earth too silently before those who take
in the name of parties, apartheid,
and passing prophets.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News.

OH, MOTHER EARTH

by Gil Hoy

Boston, MA. Photo by Sarah Levy via National Weather Service, January 28, 2015.

Oh, mother earth,
Is this global warming
or climate change?

Atop this particular Goldilocks
planet, on this particular 22nd
day of February, in this city
this particular hour

: "Frankly, my dear, I don’t
give a damn." I’m freezing
My toes are cold. Where

the hell is the Congress
Did it think the Tennessee
senator's words an inconvenient
truth?  I’ve got ice dams in

my living room  Snow statues
surround my home. Oh, mother
earth,  To lie down on one
of your sizzling beaches.  With no

Headless Coptic Christians
in orange death masks,
Where the hot orange sun

never glistens on freshly

red-tainted steel. My gutters
are filled with frozen things
Sixteen minutes exposure to
life-giving air causes corporeal

damage  Eight feet of God’s
cold stuff already on the ground,
But    Boston

is a tough nut to
crack.

Oh, mother earth,
Americans have hardy souls.
Terrorists, beheadings, cruel wars
Snow cannot stop Us.  Frozen crystals

of atmospheric vapor have their
redeeming qualities, although to this
particular poet, in this particular state

of mind, on this particular Sunday,

they seem few and far between
in the New England tundra.


Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News.  He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction a year ago.  Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in Third Wednesday, Stepping Stones Magazine, The Potomac and The Zodiac Review.

NOTE TO THE SELF-RIGHTEOUS ONES

by LaWanda Walters

                              After James Merrill’s “Casual Wear”

We can see through your disguises.
It is nothing new to use the name of goodness
like it’s your accessory from Kate Spade.
These days you are young.  You follow a fad.

It is nothing new to use some name for goodness
as you end or maim someone’s being here.
So many of you are young.  This killing is a fad.
You chew and smack Muhammad’s name like a cud.

You end or maim someone who exists
while yelling some word that meant rain, forgiveness.
In your mouth that name's pink bubble gum,
is sugar, spit, preservative and dye.

You do not refer to kindness or rain.
What you mean is you are cool and in style,
blowing bubbles made of sugar and spit, blowing brains out.
There are others like you--other mobs and crowds--

who would hate my poem as much as you do.
You fit right in with those Americans
mouthing names like “Jesus” and “Christmas”
while they vote against those who can’t afford Kate Spade.


LaWanda Walters has had poems in Antioch Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Southern Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Laurel Review, The New Verse News, Sou'wester, and other periodicals.  She lives in Cincinnati.

PHILOSOPHY

by Donna Hilbert

The British Prime Minister

fucks a pig in the first episode

of “The Black Mirror”

on prime-time TV,  just as the terrorists

demanded, to save the princess

whom they’d kidnapped

before the first frame.

As incentive, they’ve presented

her severed finger in a box to prove

they’re serious. Mean business.

Sorry to spoil it for you.

But, alas, all plots are spoiled

in this life slipping fast past satire

into theater beyond absurd.

What role would suit you to perform?

Terrorist? Princess? PM? Pig?

Me, I choose to play non-contemplating pig,

happy and innocent in my muck

until evil overtakes me from behind.

Donna Hilbert's latest book is The Congress of Luminous Bodies, 2013, Aoritc Books. She writes, leads workshops, and carps about movies from her home in Long Beach California. 

THE LIES

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Some Gazans have admitted that they were afraid of criticizing Hamas, but none have said they had been forced by the organisation to stay in places of danger and become unwilling human-shields. The Bani Sobeila area, near Khan Younis, where the Abu Jamaa deaths took place received leaflets dropped from the air last week warning them to leave. But almost all stayed. One reason for that was many of the houses belonged to the Abu Jamaa clan who felt there was safety in staying together. Another reason was given by a neighbour, Abdullah al-Daweish: “Where do we go to? Some people moved from the outer edge of Khan Younis to Khan Younis centre after Israelis told them to, then the centre got bombed. People have moved from this area to Gaza City, and Gaza City has been bombed. It’s not Hamas who is ordering us in this, it’s the Israelis.”  --“Israel-Gaza conflict: The myth of Hamas’s human shields.” The Independent (UK), July 21, 2014. Image source: Israel Defense Forces.

The lies rise early
To shower and shave
And don their heroic flight suits
(The lies are nothing
If not clean-cut
And smartly turned-out)

At breakfast the lies
Playfully mock each other
And make light
Of the dangers of their upcoming mission
Over enemy territory
(The lies are nothing
If not courageous)

During their preflight briefing
The lies receive
Aerial photographs
And location coordinates
For surgical strikes
Against terrorist targets
(The lies are nothing
If not precise)

In the cockpits of their F16s
The lies crack jokes
Over their crackling radios
About mowing down “future terrorists”
(The lies are nothing
If not witty)

When they return to base
The lies meet over a few beers
To review their day’s work
And pledge allegiance once again
To the founding myths
While on enemy ground
Countless small truths
Bleed into soil and sand


Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.  He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective).  He lives in northern California.

UNHOLY LAND GRAB

by Saknarin Chinayote & Charles Frederickson

The writer and Israel Prize laureate Amoz Oz said on Friday that those responsible for hate crimes against Arabs and Christians are "Hebrew neo-Nazis."
     Speaking at a Tel Aviv event marking his 75th birthday, Oz said that terms like "hilltop youth" and "price tag" are "sweet names for a monster that needs to be called what it is: Hebrew neo-Nazis groups."
     Oz added that in his mind, perhaps the only difference between neo-Nazis around the world and perpetrators of hate crimes in Israel is that "our neo-Nazi groups enjoy the support of numerous nationalist or even racist legislators, as well as rabbis who give them what is in my view pseudo-religious justification."
--Haaretz, May 10, 2014

In the Unholy no-man’s Land
Illegal settlers masked hoodlum gangsters
Hide behind wave of hate
Crimes against Muslims and Christians

Graffiti ranging from “Arabs out!”
Sprayed on mosque to “Price
Tag. King David is for
The Jews. Jesus is garbage.”

5 mosques and 3 churches
In Jerusalem have been vandalized
With 399 brutal extremist attacks
Causing Palestinian injuries property damage

The slick well-oiled Israeli propaganda
Machine and powerful Washington lobby
Fiercely defend these un-prosecuted disturbing
Acts officially condoned not condemned

Sacred scarred scared stiff landscape
Imploding upon itself honeybee stung
Shriveled olives pitted trees strangled
Unkind non-homogenized milk turned sour

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

WAITING FOR THE TERRORISTS

by Richard O'Connell

                 after Cavafy's "Waiting for the Barbarians"


Why are we waiting, desperate for information?
Because the terrorists will strike today.

Why has Congress adjourned and gone into hiding
and set up a secret shadow government?

Because the terrorists are on their way,
muffled, dressed like cut-rate dervishes,
and they'll abolish speeches and elections.

Why did our president evaporate
on a jet, spirited to a distant site,     
enthroned in a lead vault deep under ground?

Because the terrorists will strike today
and the President and his advisers must
survive to issue proclamations and appeals
for public calm and broadcast patriotic hymns
surrounded by bright panoplies of banners.

Why are so many generals on television   
parading their medals, beating the drum
for prophylactic war with loud boasts about 
our unprecedented military might? 
Why is the press in bed with mad Procrustes?
Why is criticism greeted with derision? 

Because the terrorists will strike today
and one person's patriotism is another's prison.

Why have our moral leaders disappeared?
Why have our laws and civil rights been trashed?

Because the terrorists are on the way
and death's their only concept of due process.

Why do we see nightmare in every face
we encounter?  Why can't we sleep?  Why are our cities
impoverished for the sake of imperial projects?
Why do we hide in our homes afraid to speak?

Night falls and the terrorists are still not here.
Rumors abound that they have been destroyed
by a virus they were carrying to envenom us.

Now what will become of us without the terrorists?
Those people were some sort of a solution.


Richard O'Connell lives in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Collections of his poetry include RetroWorlds, Simulations, Voyages, and The Bright Tower, all published by the University of Salzburg Press (now Poetry Salzburg). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, The Paris Review, Margie, Measure, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Formalist, etc.

ON FLAG DAY I THINK BACK TO MY YOUNG STUDENTS SPEAKING

by Jane Herschlag

Photo: Jane Herschlag

                  
               Two planes, each crashed into one tower.
               People got hit by flying pieces of glass and concrete.
               All people care about the dead people and their families.
               We need to make flags.  The blue part stands for liberty.
               They draped a big one on the collapsed building.
               In France they were praying and many countries sang,
               God Bless America.

Despite the terrorists’ actions they see love in the world.
They see the pure, mythical America
as I saw it in childhood, the country that
saved my family from Hitler when others refused.

Our big red-white-and-blue blowing in the breeze—
a dwarfed pride still swells in me despite our lost democracy,
our taint of WMD’s, of Corporations Are People,
of Monsanto’s GMOs, for the first time in the history of the world,
changing the DNA of humans, animals, vegetation,
contaminating organic farms.

As wealth rules, America declines,
ethics fall to the toxic curb, along with the poor.
Betsy Ross what do you think of us now?
Each of your stitches were sewn with hope
and wishes for America’s wisdom.

I can’t even find my thread; it’s hidden
under years of fallen bodies,
corrupt bankers’ viscous lies.
Big Pharma and giant chemical companies
have smeared our red and blue into
our white stripes of virtue.  Our field of blue is dotted,
not by stars, but by lobbyists demands.

I want our flag to mean what it used to mean,
when city colleges were free, after
the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements.
I want my flag to wave for immigrants,
lesbians and gays.  I want again
to be proud of being American.


Jane Herschlag, a former apparel designer, textile designer, teacher, and model home decorator,  has a degree in Apparel Design, a B.A. in Creative Writing, and Women’s Studies from Hunter College.  Her Masters in Creative Writing is from CCNY.  Jane has won numerous writing awards and placed 1st with her  photography/poetry at Richter Assoc. for the Arts in Danbury.  She is an avid poet, photographer, and loves to Stage Homes for selling, refinancing, and simply enjoying.  She has shown at the Danbury Fair Mall, Midtown Café in Danbury, at the historic building—30 Bridge Street in New Milford, at American Pie Restaurant in Sherman.  She combines her passion for the visual and the written by writing ekphrastic poetry, poems inspired by the visual.  She curated readings at the West Side YMCA in NYC for seven years and has run a peer workshop since 1997.  Her Docu-Poetry collection Bully In The Spotlight is published by Pudding House Publications.

THE FOUR YEAR PRANK

by David Feela

Image source: campusghanta

It’s not so difficult to believe Manti Te'o.
For the last four years I thought Congress
might come to a meaningful bipartisan
decision, but I was duped.  I trusted

the banks with my home, the stock market
with my retirement, the doctors and
insurance companies with my health,
but I presumed too much.  I was so sure

that terrorists lived abroad, were denied
access to our theaters, malls, and schools. 
Of course I’m gullible, but there’s so much
I want to believe, even if I can’t see it.

Talk to me with a tender voice, tell me
the next four years will be better.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

GAZA REDUX

by David Radavich

From Yahoo News: "A Palestinian worker shovels sand as he repairs a damaged smuggling tunnel dug beneath the Egyptian-Gaza border in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip November 26, 2012. Knee-deep in craters carved out by Israeli air strikes, Palestinians wielded shovels and planks to reopen tunnels used to smuggle in goods from Egypt to Gaza, as international aid agencies raced to replenish Gaza's supplies." Photo by REUTERS/Mohammed Salem.

This time invasion
may work.

Bombing, certainly.

We can’t allow ourselves
to be victimized.

You can’t complain
we shouldn’t assassinate
your leaders.

We have declared you
terrorists.

We define you.
We can kill if we choose.

Don’t blame us
for the consequences.

All blood is
not created equal.


David Radavich’s recent collections are America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011).  His plays have been produced across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  He is currently president of the Charlotte Writers’ Club.