The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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If you’re hungry for the past,
there are choices galore inside,
and a coat check girl for starters.
Think fifties, think Marilyn.
The doorman is smiling
like he has for decades,
clinging to yesterday
like those who secretly wish
they could wear fur
and oh, for a Lucky Strike!
But there, across the street,
young men gathering like storm clouds.
We can only hope
they don’t light their torches,
will do nothing to incite rage.
Rage is everywhere these days,
wearing boots that stomp
driving cars that bully down sidewalks
like this one,
so narrow, so yielding.
Oh, the hurley-burley of it all.
Here comes the chanting
crossing the street.
There goes the doorman, shouting,
“We’re closed!”
Linda Lowe's poems and stories have appeared in Outlook Springs, The Pacific Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Gone Lawn, Dogzplot, Right Hand Pointing, and others.
There are barbed wire fences in my dreamless nights.
And hands caught in nets, children growing who cannot whirl.
There are torches tonight, and chants to drown saints.
And simple good people who want a steak at lunch, or hummus with a carrot.
I have had friends in great numbers, who watch with prescient eyes
of brown and green and black and gold and hazel and azure-
The marches of hatred, the chants of those with bludgeons for
Writers, and I am one, journalists, and the films in black and white
Reeling through the avenues where magnolias should bloom,
Where souls are not crushed , because we will not permit it.
Where freedom fighters/writers are ploughed down like deer on the highway
In the nights of barbed wire fences in my dreamless dreams.
Because we will stop it, my friends.
I could tell you, my friends, who will come into my garden of ripening tomatoes, roses.
Who will give me echinacea with pink flowers, who will swim with me in sweet lake water,
And who will read my poetry for 40 years, keeping it a secret until the most crucial moment
That determines a hidden mountain behind the mist of decades.
I have had friends in great numbers, who take me to the ocean, and we have shared
The small rises and falls of our children in laughing texts. We will not tolerate
We will not accept, these marches from a haunted hunted slaughtering, a genocide past, a genocide that echoes other genocides, and other genocides, and others
To be revived? Forget it. We’re here. We know the score.
The lurid lips of nazi clowns shouting hatred slogans, the mowing down
Of friends? We will speak/act now, we will stop this insanity.
Judy Katz-Levine is the author of these books: When The Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace, Ocarina, and When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast. Her new collection The Everything Saint will be published by WordTEch in August 2018. Poems have appeared recently in Kritya (India), Stanzaic Stylings, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, Blue Unicorn, Springhouse Journal, Peacock Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, and many others. Also a jazz flutist, she just played a 3 hour gig at the Farmer's Market in Needham MA.
The call came out to come with candles.
To stand up. Be counted. A vigil, a word
I learned came from awoke, Latin.
Bring your candles. Hold your fingers
around the flame if the wind blows.
We cannot let hate extinguish us.
Calling us to this city corner at this
time for what happened in that city
some moments ago. What runs
through my head, but those white men
carried torches! Torches designed
to discourage bugs. Though my tears
threaten to douse my candle,
I will keep my light shining,
to call forth our angels of good will.
Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who saw her city and the nation in bereavement when men trying to stop racial bigotry on a train were killed and hurt. And now Charlotteville.
Several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists were met by a small group of counterprotesters at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson on Friday night at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville.
O my America!
What are these phosphors
borne in the hands of men
wearing polo shirts and swastikas?
The pastor flees her church.
She hasn’t seen Klan with torches
since she was five years old.
Here they stride with baseball bats,
dressed like college students
or fresh from the boardroom.
She fears for the black man walking
alone the streets of her town,
where bands of predators roam.
“Blood and soil,” they chant.
”White lives matter.”
”You will not replace us.”
”Jews will not replace us.”
Where are the streets of gold
my great-grandparents came looking for?
Now it’s blond men who brandish flambeaux
surrounding a circle of antifascist students,
hands joined around a monument,
facing outward against the slavering pack.
The Nazis throw their torches,
mace the kids. Afterward a girl
tweets that she’s safe,
but she’s not okay.
Where is the God in whom she trusted?
Out of the many, where is the one?
Charlottesville, tonight the dream
of a shining city on a hill
shatters into points of light
marching along your occupied streets.
Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who left the practice of medicine because of chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards for LGBT writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere.
