DAYS BEFORE THE ELECTION

by William Palmer

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News

He prays

and walks an old trail through the woods,

yellow leaves trembling 

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in I-70 Review, JAMA, One Art, On the Seawall, and Rust & Moth. He has published two chapbooks: A String of Blue Lights and Humble. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

by Amy Small-McKinney

The shootings never stopped during the coronavirus pandemic, they just became less public, researchers say. —The New York Times, December 1, 2021

           

Let’s say you are struggling to speak.

A six-year-old has been ensnared by a shooter

in the sights of his makeshift automatic.

Let’s say you don’t understand his language of righteousness.

You look for oxygen.

For the locust that grows nearly twenty-feet tall.

 

Let’s say his mind empties body disconnects

returns astonished by his own rage.

Let’s say you want to walk a path

through the black locusts that survive drought lousy soil

pollution sea spray light and shade its clusters of white or pink

fragrant as your own body once was.

 

Let’s say the shooter turns his back, decides not to kill.

Notice how the locust’s treetop becomes a bear holding its cub.

Now, a bird. How the Arctic tern lives longest

and travels in its lifetime

almost three times around the moon.

 

Let’s say you loved this path, following your beloved

onto another trail that looped past a waterfall then a stream

where human figures loomed above in the distance

and you could only guess if they held

guns or each other.

Amy Small-McKinney’s chapbook One Day I Am A Field written during Covid after her husband’s death, is forthcoming with Glass Lyre Press. For the 2020 virtual AWP, she co-moderated an interactive discussion, Writing Through Grief & Loss: The Intersection of Social and Personal Grief During Covid.  Her second full-length book of poems, Walking Towards Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2017. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, Connotation Press, and SWWIM. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, judged by poet Chris Bursk. Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.  Her book reviews have appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. Small-McKinney resides in Philadelphia.

THE CROSSING

by John Valentine

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a ruling from a federal judge in Texas requiring the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era immigration program that forces asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border to await approval in Mexico…. The court’s three more liberal members—Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—said they would have granted a stay of the trial judge’s ruling…. The challenged program, known commonly as Remain in Mexico and formally as the Migrant Protection Protocols, applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. After the policy was put in place at the beginning of 2019, tens of thousands of people waited for immigration hearings in unsanitary tent encampments exposed to the elements. There have been widespread reports of sexual assault, kidnapping and torture. —The New York Times, August 24, 2021. Photo: Olga Galicia and her family at a makeshift camp for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, near the border with the United States. Credit: Emilio Espejel/Associated Press via The New York Times.

The trail snakes north, coils

like a rattler.

Mindlessly moving in the glare  

of the sun, they go.

Diaspora bound. Weary,

everything left behind.

Hopeless. 

And here comes the hand

that says no. 

The one that refuses

The hand like a wall.

Thunder, rain up ahead. 

Lightning.    

The trembling. The reckoning.

All that they feared. 

The night. Its stillness.

The hand.  

And now

here comes the storm.

John Valentine lives in Savannah, GA, where he teaches aesthetics at a local art college.

THE TRAIL OF FEARS

by Alejandro Escudé

Opening scene of The Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin

As if the sun had turned into a great pyramid
as if the moon were the trophy wife of Ares
as if the sidewalks were now trapped in the 50’s,
just the sidewalks, as if the purr of the cat where
the same purr of the cat in Slovenia, in Krakow,
as if the professor were under arrest, handcuffed
to the rusty rail of a secret prison, as if the road
were now one long burning trail, a fiery border
on each side and just beyond a trio of Cherokee
staring across to a herd of dead, scattered buffalo,
as if the arrowhead had been taken to a Hooters
in downtown Denver, where it was left on a greasy
table along with leftover fries like the bodies
of Syrian children, as if all Americans were
exiled from America, a great migration across
an invisible land bridge, sidestepping mammoth
carcasses and landmines, sabertooth skulls,
to reach a country that no one ever promised.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.