SCALES OF JUSTICE IN THE COURT OF LAST RESORT

by Rick Pongratz

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Let’s say there’s no judge,
it's just us, you and me,
and all of our peers, 
deliberating, pontificating, confabulating. 

Awaiting our verdict,
segregated in the balcony, sit
two made motherless in Minnesota 
next to two made fatherless in Utah,
and our children, with all of their peers.

Opposing solicitors dance before us, 
profiteers play up our fears, 
until we are hung—and together, 
pile more dead upon the plates,
to lie with all of our peers.

The left and right arms of our scales
tilt and totter with each fresh body,
the chains grown too taut, 
not made for the weight of revenge.

Rick Pongratz is an emerging poet. His poetry has appeared in Rattle and is forthcoming in Frogpond. Rick works as a mental health clinician and currently studies creative writing at Idaho State University.

EPITAPH FOR ALICE MUNRO

by Gifford Savage

My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him. In the shadow of my mother, a literary icon, my family and I have hidden a secret for decades. It’s time to tell my story. —Andrea Robin Skinner, Toronto Star, updated July 15, 2024. Photo by Steve Russell.

We mourned her passing,

those of us eclipsed by her shadow,

who place words on pages

in vain attempt to come close 

to her masterful levels of wit,

humour and care.

Amongst the greats of short-story fiction,

she was honoured and celebrated,

commemorated in glowing eulogies.

Lifted to the heights of genius

in obituaries dwelling on achievement.

Perhaps we can understand

why they didn’t mention the unmentionable,

those writers who loved her words so much,

for whom Her stories are life itself.

A month later it all fell crashing down to earth. 

What the tributes had carefully left unsaid,

what they had known since the verdict in 2005.

This mother who wrote so powerfully

about the complications of everyday life,

who wrote from a feminine perspective

of girls and boys, of men and women—

while all along, beyond the pen and page was

the guilty abuser she protected,

the dirty secret held close,

the terrible reality denied,

the Nobel prize gathering dust,

the little girl she had betrayed,

no longer a child, bravely breaking her silence—

along with our delusions of greatness.

Gifford Savage is from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His poetry has been published in various journals, including The Storms, The Bangor Literary Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Agape Review, and previously in The New Verse News. He was included in the Community Arts Partnership anthology "Across the Threshold," has performed his poetry on local television station "Northern Visions TV," and was winner of the Aspects Festival Poetry Slam 2022.

CONVICTION IN XXXIV MOVEMENTS

by Erin Murphy

Altoona, Pennsylvania—May 30, 2024

 

I.

We are sitting in a tavern by the railroad tracks when the verdict is announced.

 

II.

A wave of gasps ushers in a hush as patrons scurry to check their cellphones.

 

III.

Like when a hawk swoops through a copse of trees and all breeds of birds chirp warnings, then fall silent.

 

IV.

Overheard: I’ll bet all the jurors were Democrats.

 

V.

In our town, 2020 election signs are still staked in lawns like tombstones.

 

VI.

When we moved here, people asked Whose house did you buy? Surely they knew the previous owners, went to church with their parents, played football with their brother or cousin.

 

VII.

Overheard: Hot damn! He’ll raise even more money now!

 

VIII.

Here, even the rain moves slowly. Some days it’s pouring in our front yard and dry in the back.

 

IX.

A few evenings ago, two women with clipboards came door-to-door encouraging registered Republicans to vote. Wrong house, I said and urged them to Take the rest of the night off—better yet, the rest of the year.

 

X.

Overheard: He can just pardon himself.

 

XI.

Overheard: I don’t think he can pardon himself for a state crime.

 

XII.

Overheard: When he’s re-elected, he’ll change the law so he can pardon anyone he wants.

 

XIII.

Spitting distance from this bar in 1855, the first spark of the Civil War when two men leapt from a moving train: runaway slave Jacob Green and slavecatcher James Parsons.

 

XIV.

Overheard: He’ll send ’em all back to where they came from.

 

XV.

Overheard: Do not pass go, do not collect $200!

 

XVI.

Overheard: More like $200 million—that’s how much they’re stealing from us.

 

XVII.

Overheard: laughter.

 

XVIII.

Townsfolk confronted Parsons, demanding he prove Green wasn’t a free black, and in the scuffle, Green was able to flee. Parsons was charged with kidnapping, infuriating the South.

 

XIX.

Mason Dixon Line.

 

XX.

Blood line.

 

XXI.

Toe the line.

 

XXII.

Cross the line.

 

XXIII.

Line one’s pockets.

 

XXIV.

Bottom line.

 

XXV.

Flatline.

 

XXVI.

New York Herald headline, Jan. 31, 1856: “Threatened Civil War Between Virginia and Pennsylvania.”

 

XXVII.

From the Herald article: The common courtesies of life, good-neighborhood…should have been sufficient to induce the State of Pennsylvania to aid the people of Virginia to enforce the rights of her citizens to such property.

 

XXVIII.

Earlier this spring, a local middle school cut “Lift Every Voice and Sing” from its choral program after parents complained that the song was “divisive.”

 

XXIX.

Let our rejoicing rise/

 

XXX.

High as the list’ning skies

 

XXXI.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us/

 

XXXII.

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

 

XXXIII.

Overheard: That judge better have a good bodyguard.

 

XXXIV.

And yet. Last month we landed in L.A. during the solar eclipse. Under the baggage claim atrium, I pulled out the sleeve of eclipse glasses I’d packed just in case. I looked up. There it was: what Wordsworth called something night and day between. Is there a word for the urge I felt to share it with all my fellow travelers? As weary passengers came down the escalator, I offered them glasses, summoning the word sun in every language I knew: sol, soleil, sonne. Some hung back skeptically as others eagerly pressed the dark lenses to their eyes. Flight attendants and pilots from Russia, Korea, Poland, Japan, Tahiti. A man with a handmade ukulele. A maintenance worker with a walkie-talkie. Parents, children, young adults who ran to retrieve their grandparents in wheelchairs. Tio, you have to see this! one teen told her uncle. A boy said Mommy, Mommy—the moon is like Pac-Man taking a bite out of the sun! Even a few skeptical passengers shyly came around. So many ohhhhs. So many smiles. So many faces tilted toward the same sky.

Erin Murphy’s latest book of poetry, Fluent in Blue, was published by Grayson Books in April 2024. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. 

AMERICA'S CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD

by Pete Mackey

I bring my gun to keep others safe

with my gun but if my gun 

makes you feel unsafe 

I feel unsafe about my gun 

and will use my gun 

to keep myself safe

from you with my gun 

because

Pete Mackey is a previous contributor to The New Verse News, and his poems have appeared in numerous other publications including, in 2021, Bangalore Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Third Wednesday, Panoplyzine, Eclectica, The Dewdrop, The Drabble, and Global Poemic along with a Pushcart Prize nomination.

ONCE AGAIN REALITY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Source: Puzzle Warehouse

Once again reality

Has collided with fantasy.

Once again the truth

About America

Has crashed into 

Our pretty beliefs

About the basic goodness

Of our nation under God.

And once again 

All the old cliches

Will be hauled out—

“Sure, we’re not perfect,

We make mistakes sometimes,

But at the end of the day

We’re still lucky to be living

In the Land of the Free

The Home of the Brave

From Sea to Shining Sea

Amen.”

And little by little

Memory of the latest grotesque injustice

Will fade.

We will go to the movies,

Watch the Super Bowl,

Have dinner with friends,

Take our kids to the park,

And recede back into 

The collective dream

Of America the Good.

And we will be shocked 

All over again

The next time a cop murders a black kid,

The next time a governor

Poisons a whole city with contaminated water,

The next time a hospital 

Throws an indigent patient 

Out onto the street,

The next time

A vigilante gets away with murder.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals.  His most recent book is At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality, from Main Street Rag Publishers.  He podcasts poems on aging at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife, Cynthia, in northern California.

DUNCAN AND BRADY

by Julian O. Long

after the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict

 

Speaking of ’lectric cars,

once at a Fort Worth stop sign

a lowrider lifted a fender

like a dog might lift his leg to piss

and flipped me the bird as he took off

laughing around the corner.

That was long ago, but he knew what

he meant—and he loved it.

 

As the uptight white boy I was

in those days, I may have deserved

his contempt. These days I’d like

to blow him a kiss on the wind he stirred,

as he spun out that souped-up Chevy.

Would it were so, amigo,

would it were so.

 

Staggerlee remembers Xmas

but King Brady, he lies dead

and the ghost of old St. Louie

flew past my naked bed

when the rage for George Floyd started

up and down my street,

and the high-tailed carriages

came and went all night

breaking in the windows

knocking down the door

startling me in bed on the second floor... 

 

Busy now, containing Russia,

smug in my alabaster pink

pragmatism, I rejoiced in my country’s

apparent arrested decline. Cop who murdered

Floyd will go to jail, I thought. We threw out

the bastards who stormed the Capitol, I said—

forgetting only too eagerly

Republicans’ settled intention

to lynch the rest of us, La Migra still

lording it up at the border, catching runaways

jury finding Rittenhouse ‘not guilty on all counts.’

 

Nothin’ for it but the blues?

James Baldwin’s Staggerlee let pent up anger, blues remade,

hiss out of him like rancid air from some hack’s

rubber tire.

 

Seem like King Brady never died,

Duncan shot him,

doctor found him dead

but he just raised his hammy fist, took that doctor by the throat

and growled, “Sumbitch, you know I cain’t be killed!”

 

We’ll not overcome this last lynch mob—they’re us;

we’ll watch polite and passive as the Good Old US steals

away down Dixie one last time; no matter clawhammer steels

 

ring out from edges of fields

to tell it again

how we’ve all of us been—

 

yeah, we’ve been on the job

too long... 

Julian O. Long is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. His poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

LAWS OF THE LAND

by Linda Gelbrich

Source: Northwest Arbor Culture

In this country a young white man
goes to trial for shooting and killing
two people and wounding another at a rally.
Today he is declared—not guilty.
 
In this same country a black voter
tries to cast a ballot,
unaware she is ineligible to vote,
goes to prison for five years,
 
and a black man is in prison for decades
for a murder he says he did not commit,
is now declared innocent by prosecutors,
but authorities say his release is not a priority.
 
Perhaps this is why
some of us write about trees,
about persistently blooming geraniums
and cosmos, even about squirrels that pester,
 
about the regular appearance
of the sun and moon.      


Linda Gelbrich lives in Western Oregon among many trees.  

THIRTEEN

by Mark Danowsky

                    for Adam Toledo 

I tell you the worse version 

So you'll tell me 

It wasn't as bad as I say 

He wears the same 

underwear I wear 

Inside-out 

For reasons that 

Embarass me 

He wears a fake luxury belt

Like one I bought as a half joke 

Except I know better 

Or tell myself so 

The blood is in his mouth 

But that's not where we can look

So we look below the neck 

Above the waist 

Fearing every in-between

I see the branding in my dreams 

because like Charli says 

I want it all 

Even if it's fake 

This is not fake—

The child run down 

Shot bloody 

Shot through

Shot dead 

I have avoided watching

More than I feel I am allowed to admit 

Design tricks me down this rabbit hole 

& so I see & do not understand 

& have to see again & again 

& from other perspectives

& it is written  

None provide a verdict 

A child of thirteen dead 

& I know no more only more 

That this dream we claim is a mirror 

Shattered by lost souls 

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry and Senior Editor for Schuylkill Valley Journal. He is author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press). His work has appeared in Bird Watcher’s Digest, Cleaver Magazine, Gargoyle, The Healing Muse, and elsewhere.

THE CONDITIONAL CASE FOR CONVICTION

by Diana Cole

A patron of a laundromat near Cup Foods watching the Derek Chauvin trial on Monday. Credit: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times, April 6, 2021

for George Floyd

 

 

Nothing can be true, so the dog barks all night

          missing the man who feeds him.

 

Into the fire go the stars. If the garbage is collected

          in the morning, the moon will go too.

 

Without evidence of insects, birds have nothing to eat.

          He’s talking so he’s fine.

 

Nothing but a man, a sizable guy who loves his Mama, 

          who lost his Mama.  

                                    

I kneel in case the sun will intervene in time.

          Inside the car, the back seat is a thick darkness. 

 

A black man could get lost if the air is handcuffed.

          Even if he pleads 20 times, he is under the influence,

 

under suspicion, under the knee, undertaken.

          All for 20 dollars, supposing that, even if, as long as… 

Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has had poems published in numerous journals including Poetry East, Spillway, the Tar River Review, the Cider Press Review, GBH Public Radio, Friends Journal, Verse Daily, and the Main Street Rag, and upcoming in Crab Creek Review. Her chapbook Songs By Heart was published in 2018 by Iris Press. She is an editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal and a member of Ocean State Poets whose mission is to encourage the reading, writing and sharing of poetry. 

FUGITIVES

by Philip C. Kolin

Drawing of fugitives running from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Image source:  A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (The Maryland State Archives, Annapolis MD and the University of Maryland College Park, MD)

Black blood rushes from city
after city; running is now a crime,
guilty or not, the verdict is the same
and so is the punishment; backs
broken, heads smashed,
necks choked, chests exploded,
organs silenced; hope ended.
There is no escape, no plea, no trial.

Every black man is now afraid he wears an invisible
target only dashboard cameras can capture.
Hanging-noose ropes are strung around
the killing scene; black sons set in  buckled asphalt.
The community  fears that American history has
reversed itself, the  Fugitive Slave Acts
reenacted.


Philip C. Kolin, University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the editor of The Southern Quarterly and has published more than 30 scholarly books on African American playwrights, Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Also a poet, Kolin has published five books of poems, the most recent being Reading God's Handwriting: Poems (Kaufmann, 2012), as well as hundreds of poems in such journals as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Louisiana Literature, South Carolina Review, Christian Century, Spiritus, Seminary Ridge Review, America, and has co-edited Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (Southwest Missouri UP, 2006) with Susan Swartwout.

TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN, BOY

by Joe Pacheco

If you’re black, don’t ever stop
In a store down Florida way,
If your radio aint turned down low
This is what they’ll say

Turn that music down, boy
Turn that music down
Pistol packin’ white man
Is here to stand his ground.

He won’t step back with the gun he’ll pack
He’ll just fire another round.
Unless you choose to not refuse
He’ll be forced to stand his ground.

Turn that music down, boy
Turn that music down,
Pistol packin’ white man
Came here to stand his ground.

He didn’t cry to see Jordan die
But ordered pizza in the town.
With his “fiancée” he drove away
And later wolfed three slices down.

Turn that music down, boy
Turn that music down,
Pistol packin’ white man
Came here to stand his ground.

“It’s murder one they found no gun.”
Was not what the jury found.
“Attempted” is the best you’ll get
When a white man stands his ground.

Turn that music down, boy
Turn that music down,
Pistol packin’ white man
In Florida stands his ground.


Joseph Pacheco is a retired New York City superintendent living on Sanibel Island.  His poetry has been featured several times on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Latino USA and WGCU. He has performed his poetry with David Amram’s jazz quartet at the Bowery Poets Café and Cornelia Street Café in New York City. He writes a poetry column for the Sanibel Islander and his poetry has appeared in English and Spanish in the News-Press. In 2008 he received the Literary Artist of the Year award from Alliance for the Arts. He has published three books of poetry, The First of the Nuyoricans/Sailing to Sanibel,  Alligator in the Sky and most recently in June, Sanibel Joe’s Songbook. 

THE MAGNITUDE OF MURDER

by Kristina England

JORDAN DAVIS

1.

In Florida, a man is found guilty of attempted murder,
though the boy he shot did not survive.

The argument:
first degree means premeditation,
not acting on fear.

But isn't racism some form of preparation,
some form of an excuse?

2.

My grandmother once forbid my sister
from marrying a Puerto Rican,
because all their men "are cheats."

My sister married him anyway.

And (eventually) my grandmother
admitted to her own wrong doing,
but not until after there were
too many ghosts to bury.

3.

The man says the boy had a gun.
The boy MUST have had a gun.
But the only weapon that day
was a mind bent by societal beliefs.

And yet, the magnitude of murder
is weighed on the loudness of music,
the amount of time it took to reach for a gun,
the minutes till the man fired
all those assumptions
at a boy in the wrong parking lot
at just the wrong time.

4.

And what of the man?

He earns no name in this poem.
He belongs where the boy has mistakenly gone:
in a grave that needs no remembrance,
but rather loses its meaning over time.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her fiction and poetry is published or forthcoming at Gargoyle, New Verse News, The Story Shack, The Quotable, and other magazines. Her first collection of short stories will be published in the 2014 Poet's Haven Author Series.

AFTER THE VERDICT

by David Radavich

Howard University Medical Students (Image source: Carmar Descamento-Park)

There’s no end
to the battles.

My heart
can’t take
so much fighting,

yet it goes on
spinning
and spinning

like silk
of a forgotten
tapestry.

I am not alone.
You are not alone.

The ramparts
are worth climbing.

The ramparts
are life,

the moat death,
slow and inexorable.

We must
carry our swords

as if we
were masters,

cross the
infested waters,

call out
justice
to the wind,

sing our
blood home

in unison
climbing high

into
the fortress.


David Radavich’s recent collections include 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 new collection, The Countries We Live In, will come out later this year.

THE VERDICT IS IN

by George Salamon

"We Are All Trayvon Martin," the protesters chant as Zimmerman walks.
We were all Berliners once, and New Yorkers as well.
But we won't be everyone who's gunned down or knifed or drowned
By man or by state, by religion or by hate.
We were not, and still are not, the girl just sitting on her Chicago porch,
Or the one on the bus in Jerusalem, and the one in the sandy refugee camp.
Murder is too much with us.
When it comes to its victims, you takes your choice
And common humanity goes begging.


George Salamon lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri.