FREE SPEECH

by Alixa Brobbey

Image Credits: Jim Watson/AFP/ (collage by TechCrunch) / Getty Images

You are free to stand on the sidewalk

with your thumbs up. You are free to like

this Tweet. You are free to boo silently.

You are free to clap loudly. You are free

to give me a dollar to vote in this poll.

You are free not to vote. You are free

to choose between silence and tinnitus.

You are free to leave. Here is the back 

door. You are free to leave without a 

goodbye. You are free to swallow

thumb tacks. You are free to live inside

this snake’s nest. You are free to

decide: hunger pains or cyanide.

You are free to give me another dollar

to vote in a new poll. You are free to know

nothing—I change this game at my whim.

You are free to play this game by my rules.

You are free to leave. You are free to

shut up and like this tweet. You are free

to comment well wishes. You are free

to correct my science—once. You are

free to be fired. You are free to leave.

Go stand outside. Sip some blue air.

Ponder the wide and winding road

that led us, somehow, here.

Alixa Brobbey spent portions of her childhood in The Netherlands and Ghana. She has a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University, where she won the Ethel Lowry Handley Poetry Prize in 2020. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Blue Marble Review, Segullah, Inscape, The Albion Review, The Susquehanna Review, The Palouse Review, The Exponent II, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and others. She is currently a law student at Brigham Young University.

ODE TO MY TESLA

by Timothy Hennum

Oh how shiny she sits,
a cord thick as my wrist dangles from her hip.
Oh how silent she moves,
her screen—flat as a flag—glows bright as the moon.
Perched behind her wheel, parked and alone,
I scroll through their tweets and scowl at my phone.
How easy it would be to delete my account;
to push a few buttons and finally be out.
But what about her?
Now these smooth lines, this warm screen, her sweet purrs
do not bring me joy.
And no longer can I look at her, her screen a decoy
mounted to that dark dash, that inflated hood, those obnoxious rims, 
and not think of him.

Timothy Hennum is a writer and a physical therapist living in Minneapolis with his wife and two daughters. His writing has appeared in Your Fire Magazine, Intrinsick Magazine, Gear Junkie Magazine, and the Minneapolis StarTribune. 

GREAT MEN

by Kyle Gervais

 after Robinson Jeffers

Consider greatness.
A great man must have a following, and this is true,
as death, of Trump, who pulls like a fear-blind buffalo
the pressed herd onward, downward, over the land’s edge
to an imagined security. Kanye too is great,
is he not, in his crazy rage, and a yearning
turning, centrifuge fast, to an ever darker love?
But Elon’s greatness outpaces even these, demonstrably, incontrovertibly, 
one hundred twenty million 
massed numbers following him where he flutters, of all
such vast images that are not good, but great,
today the greatest.

Kyle Gervais teaches Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He has poems in Arion, Canadian Literature, Classical Outlook, Eunoia Review, The New Verse News, Litbreak Magazine, PRISM international, and elsewhere.

TWITTER VS THE NEW VERSE NEWS — UPDATE

It wasn’t easy, but finally we found the right place at Twitter to complain about the undermining of our urls on their platform. We sent them yesterday’s posting (below) to explain our position. 

Within hours—albeit without explanation or apology—Twitter reversed the sanctions against us.

You and we can again tweet all of our urls.

A few years ago, Facebook took down, without explanation or right to appeal, our page on that platform.

Yesterday, when we tried to tweet an announcement that included our url TheNewVerse.News about the day’s new poems, our tweet was disallowed with this explanation: “We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”

The same happens if we attempt to tweet our basic url: http://newversenews.blogspot.com .

And if anyone tries to click those urls from a tweet, they see this message:

NVN readers know that this journal is guilty of none of the characteristics Twitter lists above.

Neither @TwitterSupport nor https://help.twitter.com/en has provided any specific explanation or any path to appeal.

We can’t help but believe that right-wing haters who loathe the progressive politics of this journal have fed Twitter lies about us.

We will try to work around these problems on Twitter for as long as we can.

And, of course, The New Verse News site itself has not been affected. Not yet anyway.

But we are discouraged.

James

D&D IN 2020

by Patricia Davis

On the one hand we’ve got Phandalin

a fantasy mining town besieged by dragons.

We are trying to learn the rules at the dining room table—

attributes, quests, etc. Then we move on

to real life, sitting in front of the fire,

exploring the properties of air on sparks.

Then Anna goes to bed

and I check Twitter for #MartialLaw

just like every night for the past two

months.  Half of America

(or a tenth of America and an industrious

factory of Russian bots) clamor for their rights

to be doused.  Choose your adventure.

They implore the president to JUST DO IT

Do Martial Law.  Save the Republic.

The only real thing is the fire

crackling on dry logs,

my daughter stretched out

with our remaining cat,

telling me the plot of her story—

how can four teenagers escape after creating

a distraction? One a light wielder, one a wielder

of shadows, one a wielder of time, one of frost

and a mindreader and telekinetic.

I tell her how powerful they are.

Of course they can rescue the captured one.

Of course they can escape.   

Patricia Davis’ poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The New Verse News, Smartish Pace, Third Coast, The Atlanta Review, Salt Hill, Crab Creek Review, and other journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has an MFA from American University, where she was a Lannan Fellow. She is currently translations editor for Poet Lore.  

IF I COULD BLOCK YOUR ANTI-BLM TWEETS, BY GOD, I WOULD

by K Roberts

“All lives matter,” you sniffed,
and I marvel at how glibly
a cry for help
is transformed into a grammar lesson.

We are dying, they said to you,
and within your bleached brain
you donned a miniaturizing monocle.
You placed a mirror over your ears, like a hearing aid.

If a man is drowning
will apostrophes keep him afloat?
If a house is burning
will conjugating “veni, vidi, vici” dowse the flames?

America, the stones in your foundation are on fire.
Put down the textbook. Pick up a bucket.
The colorless gas
of cowardice and silence
is poisoning us all.


K Roberts is a professional non-fiction writer.

OTHER PLACES WE MIGHT WANT TO DUMP SOME CHICKENSH*T

by Melissa Balmain

The southern Swedish city of Lund spread stinking chicken-manure on the grounds of a central park to discourage a public celebration there on Thursday. It’s traditionally a big festive day among Swedish students and youth. Gustav Lindblad from Lund’s environmental committee told Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan that “we get the opportunity of fertilising the lawns in the park and, at the same time, it will stink and it may not be so nice to sit and drink beer in the park.” The city says up 30,000 people from different parts of Sweden—mostly students from Lund University—have in previous years gathered to the Stadspark to celebrate Valborg, a spontaneous festival that marks the arrival of spring for Swedes. AFP Photo: Gardener Robert Nilsson gets ready to fertilise lawns in Lund’s Stadsparken park with chicken manure on Thursday.  —The Weekend Australian, May 2, 2020

On beaches and bistros in Fla.
and on barbershops down in the Peach State;
on rib joints in Texas that (wha…?)
soon will be in an easy-to-reach state;
but mostly on anyone who
doesn’t care if his countrymen sicken
for the sake of a Dow point or two,
and tweets sh*t like a flatulent chicken.

Melissa Balmain's poetry and prose have appeared in The American Bystander, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She edits Light, a journal of light verse.  

FREAK

by Terese Coe

In each pathological deal

Freak is petulant, false, and unreal.

His extortion and murk

are what passes for work

while he tweets about copping a feel.

The bigot’s a twist and a troll

whose psychosis has taken a toll

on folks who can’t cope

with a chief misanthrope

traitor who's deep in a hole.

It's past time he gave up the ghost.

Every tweet still drives home that he’s toast:

a demon enraged,

it's time he was caged

and dropped 90 miles off the coast.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

THE SUE BIRD PLAN

by Carol Parris Krauss




The grass is mowed, the weeds eaten.
Floors are polished and free of cat hair.
I have begun to create lessons for the upcoming
school year while the linens spin, rinse, rotate.
A quick glance at Twitter shows Sue and Megan
being interviewed during the WNBA All Star game.
The superstar couple. So while Baltimore is bashed,
women of color are insulted, Russian roulette spins
our president, and children are caged there is
evidence of love and beauty when Megan
steps aside, pushes Sue into the camera’s eye,
and declares “I’m on the Sue plan.”
Much more than a nutritional regime. Shouldn’t we

all have

someone look at us with those same eyes of
love and passion? Shouldn’t we all be on the
Sue Plan?


Carol Parris Krauss: Mother. Teacher. Poet.

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. 

AMERICA IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE MUELLER REPORT AND THE ANGRY TWEETS THAT FOLLOWED

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker

Graphic: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES NEWS/GETTY IMAGES, TWITTER via Elite Daily

I.

She swallows the news, a lump in the back of her throat,

watching all the armies who rally to save her gather,

seemingly defeated, their hopes hanging 

upon the delicate flesh of failed ghosts.

Balance of possibilities can go either way:

with just a whisper of wind, touching hand giving strength

to moments of truth swinging gently, leaning, anchored, swaying, 

rediscovering & restoring, though always permanently rooted. 

A new furnace burns brightly, metal ablaze, wrapped in red heat;

sweat pouring, glistening brighter than molten steel, boiling her people

until the day is done & lions roar by the hearth-fire. 

The sun briefly shines, allowing moments for thoughts

& strange songs of what will happen 

tomorrow that may never be real.

II.

She grits her teeth & makes a home far away—

deep within caves within caves, farther back until blue becomes blackness.

She returns to her mother, to nothing,

for inside Plato’s ultimate form illusions of illusions demystified & ugly

rely on her starkness—this & all that she saw

when he crawled in her bed unworthy of sitting by her side,

her form easy enough to reach, as if an object of his desire

left alone to bruise & soil while lying beneath the earth,

left with angry words unable to differentiate

the stomping with supposed compassionate feet, 

the head held down feeling no regrets. 

III.

She can see the revolution from her window,

the small orbits, when they turn away & return 

& sometimes a star falls, a blazing fire shot down,

a demigod dying & it comes down on her—

the thing that once was but is now lost inside her,

borrowing girder, salvaging safety for others, 

relieving the pressure amid weary shoulders grasping

for strength, taking refuge in sacrifice & pain

of her people giving what they’re willing to never receive,

as they walk breathlessly into the ether,

surveying the fact or fiction placed in their hands.

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.

DRIP. DRIP. DRIP.

Dixie J-Elder’s family moved forty-eight times before Dixie turned thirteen, due to her father’s job as a cartographer. Dixie spent her teen years protesting frequently in Washington, D.C. (for civil rights, against the Vietnam War). Dixie wanders often with her husband, investigating archaeological sites. They’ve trekked around Iceland, Austria, Skara Brae, and other fascinating locations. Dixie’s work has been published in anthologies such as the true crime collection Off the Cuffs. Dixie lives in Colorado with her husband and two formerly feral cats.

A FOLLOWING

by David Feela

Cartoon from HubSpot at Mashable.

If you like me
I promise
to like you.
If enough of you
follow me
a social platform
will emerge
constructed of
digital timbers
sturdy enough
to hold the weight
of a million
similar minds.
We don’t have to be
indistinguishable,
so long as
you approve of
what I say.
I don’t know
where you live
or even have
the time to find out
but truth conforms
to no geography.
Let’s just say
it’s sufficient
that our thoughts
are linked. 
Connect me
with others
and we’ll grow
a constituency.
Like me.
We’ll be a multitude.


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.

VIEW FROM ABOVE (A CAROL)

by Melissa Balmain 

"Argh," the herald angels sing,
"Who's this guy who thinks he's King—
Grabbing gold (and other stuff),
Kicking Dreamers in the duff,
Lobbing incoherent tweets,
Flitting off to golf retreats?

"Argh," the herald angels sing,
"How'd they pick this ding-a-ling?

"Christ, it really frosts our gourd,
Seeing such a threat ignored—
Any day, he'll twitter, 'Hey,
Rocket Man, it's bombs away!'
But what do his minions do?
Say, 'Enough' and stage a coup?
No, they simply kowtow while
He's got crazy on speed dial!

"Argh," the herald angels shout,
"Earthlings, while you can, get out!"

Melissa Balmain is the Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (Winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

WHAT WE COULD'VE BEEN DOING

by Lylanne Musselman

A Wrinkle In Time just in Time

Not fighting on Facebook about the NFL
about whether it’s unpatriotic to kneel—
causing all the false patriots to yell.
Not waking to new Twitter rants,
nor shaking our head over the latest
faux pas that crazy man said.
Not dreading each day more than the next
knowing we’ve lost ground; feeling put under
some endless voodoo hex.
Not fearing nuclear war with Kim Jong Un,
nor wondering which leader is the largest loon.
Not having our country purposely divided,
or seeing the news media accused of being one-sided.

We wouldn’t be worrying over losing our healthcare,
afraid of facing the next health scare.
Not feeling that just to get through each day
we’d need a round of whisky or a special little pill.
Not losing hope of preserving nature’s beauty
because of corporate fracking and looting.
We wouldn’t have to plot every minute
of how we can resist, feeling relief
only because so many of us persist.
Not wondering if losing net neutrality will affect our say,
or which famous male is the biggest pervert, still.
Instead, each day we suffer some new low
from Mr. “Make America Great Again”—our crisis
of electing the 45th President from a TV reality show.

Lylanne Musselman is an award-winning poet, playwright, and artist, living in Indiana. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Poetry Breakfast, TheNewVerse.News, Ekphrastic Review, and Rat’s Ass Review, among others, and many anthologies including Resurrection of a Sunflower, poems to honor Vincent van Gogh (Pski’s Porch, 2017).  A Pushcart Nominee, Musselman is the author of four chapbooks including the recent Weathering Under the Cat (Finishing Line Press, 2017). 

THE NOW PRESIDENT

by Alejandro Escudé

Stiglich cartoon via The Mercury News

“With Twitter as his Excalibur, President Trump takes on his doubters, powered by Diet Coke and long spells of cable news.” —The New York Times, December 9, 2017


Why? They ask. Where’s
the logic? Reason ditched
like an old password.
Meaning based on smirks,
each a swift calculation,
a brand. We worship
Smith's invisible hand.
It does what it does,
its will is indefatigable.
All is genius or craziness.
One could think gambling,
and think of battleships.
Not the scathing solitude
of Churchill but that
of Truman and the bomb.
Yet, that can’t explain
Twitter, the chaos whims,
the bitter word-bones,
the lobbing of stones at
the webbing of Democracy.
To sunlight we gaze
amid echoing gunshots
and plead for a harkening.


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.

A FRIEND BREAKS HIS RENAISSANCE SWORD ON A PAPAYA

by Kristina England

Any fruit can hide the fierceness of its rinds.
We should never believe the weapon invincible.

Record low temperatures today, risk of frostbite,
hard wind claps bathroom vents.
It's like they're cheering on the cold.

President of United States accuses former president
of wire tapping, calls him "sick," then berates
Arnold Schwarzenegger on Twitter
for being a "pathetic" reality show host.

Brain hurting from malnutrition,
I reorganize the living room two times,
split myself in half, one part here,
one part looking back at what we had.

Sometimes the chance of turning
to salt is more rewarding
than the alternative.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her writing has been published in several magazines, including Gargoyle, Silver Birch Press, and Tipton Poetry Journal.

ALTERNATIVE FACTS

by Kristina England

Cover created by Tim O’Brien, Professor at Pratt Institute and President at Society Of Illustrators

1.

Hate crimes are increasing in schools.
That's a lie, Mother stammers over the phone.
No, it's a fact.
Well they deserve it,  
putting "Black Lives Matter" stickers
on the back of their cars.
Of course they matter . . . 

2.

The drought outside is not a drought.
The planet is not warming.
It's just a dry spell.
Let it go. We'll be fine.

3.

Pink hats.
More than one million?
Pwah.
There were no pink hats.
Even if there was an "alleged" march,
it's obvious they didn't vote
anyway.

4.

Mother puts shackles on my hands,
says it's the latest fashion,
says to be happy where I am.
Silent, stay, good girl.

I am in a room with no mirrors
no windows, no way of reflecting.
I shed tears into my hand,
look for hope in a cupped pond,
but the water has seeped,
through, skin cracks in
white-walled room.

I start chanting, release me, release me.
Mother fixes her crown and says,
There's no prison here.
We live in a castle made of ice cream.

I chant louder and louder
until I can hear a frenzy of pink hats
chant in unison.

Mother frowns, asks a servant
to bring her another reporter's head on a platter.
And cut off these daughters' ears.
All of them, the servant asks.
All of them, she says,
then goes back to tweeting about her day.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  She is a writer and photographer.

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. 

AMERICAN LUST STORY

by Penny Perkins

There’s a boy. And there’s a girl.
                                    And you might think just from that set up that this is a story about the attraction between them.
                                    Or at least a story about the boy being attracted to the girl. Because often times in these boy/girl stories we don’t see what the girl wants or feels, only (or mainly) what the boy wants or feels.
                                    But, be relieved, this is not that story.
                                    Because, in this case, the boy is actually a manboy, a damaged boy trapped in the body of a perverted man, and the girl (there are many) is an actual girl, in some cases as young as 13 or 14 years old. The manboy has been soliciting for sex with girls ages 13 through 16. And, in this time and place, what he is doing is technically illegal, technically against the law, but it happens all the time, a lot more than we “good people” want to know about or educate ourselves about. But this specific time with this specific manboy—which is rare given how frequently this type of activity goes on—the manboy is caught. Being the historical moment that it is, the buying and selling of girls is facilitated a lot by technology and the internet, which does leave a footprint (omg, caveat emptor!) that the police can use as evidence to charge him. The manboy has left a thick trail of emails and texts and search engine histories and images downloaded onto smart phones and computer hard drives. The police confiscate these things from the manboy’s home and digital forensics sink him. The cache of electronic artifacts of his lust implicate the manboy on his illegal, criminal proclivities for young flesh. “Middle school girls are hot,” he is quoted as saying to a female reporter. To be sure, he is gross and his statement is gross. But, given the huge numbers involved in the criminal activity of buying and selling young girls, there are clearly a lot of manboys who agree with his assessment.
                                    Probably none of these incidents with the manboy in question would have been any note at all to the general public, except for one thing: The manboy sells sandwiches for a living, and has gotten very rich doing so, but now the sandwiches are mad at him for associating their “eat fresh” product with something that is distasteful and not very fresh at all. As it turns out, the sandwiches themselves also have a digital footprint and they use it against him: their twitter feed washes their hands of him and they tweet tweet tweet to let the public know they are against the eating of underage sandwiches. On the other side of irony town, though, their website proclaims that every sandwich has a story. It’s just that the sandwiches didn’t want the manboy’s story to be their story. Can’t blame ’em. Lo and behold it sucks to make a manboy a millionaire hawking your feel-good sandwich story and then go have him turn around and use that money to sate the appetite of his curious, criminal desires. Yeah, that sucks for the poor sandwiches. Not good for franchise business. But it really, really sucks for the girls, the underage girls, the girls he raped, and it sucks for all the other disenfranchised girls bought and paid for, sold and sliced like sandwiches for the manifold manboys of America.


Penny Perkins holds an MFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. Her short story “Car Ride Through Corn Fields (1975)” was chosen by Manuel Muñoz as the winner of Beecher’s Magazine 2014 Fiction Contest. Her short story “Gut Feelings” was a finalist for the Reynolds Price Prize in Fiction as a part of the 2015 International Literary Awards sponsored by the Center for Women Writers. Recent short stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Pine Hills Review, Waxwing #5, and HOAX #10. Other publication credits for fiction, poetry, and non-fiction include Salon, Conditions, The Portable Lower East Side, Curves, Girlfriend No. 1, and Book, among others. She currently lives in northeast Florida and teaches at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.