The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Gilbert Allen has tried to live True Blue in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, since 1977. For more information about him and his work, check out the interview here.
The governor of Alabama on Friday signed into law two controversial bills: one that criminalizes healthcare providers who offer gender-affirming care to transgender youth and another that requires students to use bathrooms that match the gender on their birth certificates. Kay Ivey, a Republican, said she “believed very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl”. The anti-gender-affirming care bill, described as the first legislation of its kind in the US, makes it a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison to provide medical care including hormone treatment and puberty blockers to minors. It also includes bans on gender-affirming surgeries for transgender youth, which are extremely rare, and compels school personnel to disclose to a parent or guardian that a “minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s sex”. —The Guardian, April 8, 2022
We will fight them on the
beaches we will fight them in
the sandbox these tiny
terrorists, the little boys
with nail polish, a spangly pony
and a special Barbie.
We have God on our side
He who surely must have sanctified
the hand of the doctor filling out
the birth certificate. We have
George Orwell on our side to
inspire our marketing team.
We’ll call it de-nazification, no,
we’ll call it parental support, no,
wait, we’ll call it The Vulnerable Child
Compassion and Protection Act.
No more shelter in the demilitarized
school nurse’s office. We’ll make It a crime
to slow the inexorable hands of time
bringing forth an unwanted body.
In this holy war
No prisoners are too small.
Eileen Ivey Sirota is a psychotherapist and a poet. Her chapbook Out of Order was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. Her poems have been published in District Lines, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Lighten Up, The New Verse News, Ekphrastic Review, The Poeming Pigeon, Calyx, and Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy. She lives in Bethesda, MD with her husband and an ever-shifting blend of rage and wonder.
I call my doctor and tell him, I don’t want to be a man
today. Detransitioning? No. I mean I don’t want to be alive
in a place that thinks my heart strings are puppeteered, that I am
a marionette genetically modified for road rage, sex drive, alcoholic
tendencies. That I don’t want the pharmacy tech to stare extra
hard at my driver license on a routine prescription pickup.
That I don’t want to blush when drunk friends ask:
tampon or jockstrap? Because they’re not asking, are they?
The dive-bar dust on their credit cards will remind them later
that yes, it was rude, but they were drunk, and they have a right
to know who their friends are, their dates are, what I
will expect them to suck or fuck.
Greg Abbott isn’t asking why the children want to change,
he’s asking why they’d want to look like that.
Like a man in a dress or a woman who’s been mutilated
from the inside out, breasts carved off by a butcher’s
knife or by a tree when she lurched in the wrong direction
at the shout of “timber,” wearing, presumably, a flannel
button-up under a leather jacket. Like a turtle without its shell
or a ring-tailed lemur without its jewels. But if Greg Abbott
asked me, I’d tell him, what kind of parents agree to HRT
in the first place? What kind of parents say, yes, I trust you
to grow a beard you won’t regret? Maybe our mothers
are lovely and our fathers are brave, but I have always been alone
and I have always made my own choices. I’d tell Greg Abbott
that sometimes a law is just a word and abuse is a red
herring for an onslaught of transphobic legislature, an actual
school of fish with teeth and fish with fins, and who, now,
can win against the slaughter.
Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021, Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); his forthcoming chapbook Sober will be published with Red Bird Chapbooks in 2022.
