CANVASSING

by Mark Williams

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

If a man’s home is his castle,

he reluctantly lowered his drawbridge. “Is she

a Democrat or Republican?” he asked us.

 

Manicured lawns, foot-high grass.

Porches with fishing rods, feral cats.

“She had three litters before she was fixed.”

 

A woman on oxygen. A man with a cane.

A woman using a walker

who agreed to put up a yard sign.

 

“I always vote Republican.”

“I vote straight Democrat.”

“I’m not registered.”

 

We were offered water, beer;

given thanks, directions, advice,

even hand-wipes. We learned

 

of dogs who’d been rescued, the price

of a condemned house. One woman’s grandson

is studying classic literature in Italy.

 

As for the king of his castle, he said,

nay, shouted, “Get off my land!” which,

as far as he was concerned,

 

wasn’t made for some of you and me.

Mark Williams's poems have appeared in The New Verse News, Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, as well as The Southern Review, ONE ART: a literary journal, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the collections, Carrying On and Life. He and his wife, DeeGee, live and canvas in Evansville, Indiana. 

MESSENGER RNA

by Claudia Gary

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

Vaccine doing its work

sent signals overriding

emotion, music, words,

hunger, desire—but only for

one day, that messenger.

Soon there would be sunset 

with orange hues to mark

the hours that made up

a day of gratitude—

vaccine, then first-day voting—

two gifts! Will I recall

such joy? And will the volume

of voting be sufficient

to stop that other virus?

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online.

VOTING IS FAR MORE POWERFUL

by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

with apologies to Emily Dickinson

Who is leading national polls?
Harris has been ahead of Trump in the national polling averages since she entered the race at the end of July, as shown in the chart below with the latest figures rounded to the nearest whole number.

Kamala Harris: 49%

Donald Trump: 46% —BBC, October 9, 2024

 

Voting is far more powerful
Than Trump's attempt to rise.
So many times this sinking man
Attempts to reach the skies.
So push him down forever
To that abhorred abode,
Where hope and he part company—
His dreams morosely stowed.
The felon's sneering visage,
Most odious to see,

Let's shun without compunction
As an adversity.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 300 poems in places including American Atheist, The American Scholar, Better Than Starbucks, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Down in the Dirt, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Free Inquiry, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, Options (Rhode Island's LGBTQ+ magazine), Politics/Letters, The Providence Journal, Scientific American, Sparks of Calliope, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Your Daily Poem. She has also had nine previous poems in The New Verse News.

POWER OF THE VOTE

by Paul Brassard

Public Domain Photo by Simone D'andrea altered by the poet using GIMP image manipulation software.

Paul Brassard is a retired teacher of high school students with behavioral challenges. He has been writing poetry and fiction since he wrote his first short story Honolulu Calling at the age of twelve. Paul has been writing a personal haiku, senyru or haiga every day for the past several years as a method of self-reflection or in response to current events. He writes his short stories and poetry at his home in South Portland, Maine, which he shares with Patti, his wife of 50 years. His writing has appeared in The New Verse News.

2045

by Zev Shanken

AI-generated image by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

In the year 2045 my great grandson will ask
what it was like when people really believed
they were in charge if they watched the news,
called in C-Span, and voted.
 
Well, son, I’ll say, you’ve read about when
everyone in Europe knew their place in 
Christendom and thanked God 
for giving life meaning?
 
Yes, grandfather. The Dark Ages. 
 
Well, son, that’s what it was like.
Only in our day we had History
and thanked our Founding Fathers. 
 
Did you pray?
We voted.

 Zev Shanken’s  two full length books Memory Tricks (2016) and If I Try to be Like Him, Who Will be Like me? (2019) are available on Amazon. The New Verse News has published three of his poems in the past.

I AM ALWAYS PROUD... AFTER ALL

by Nan Ottenritter

 

I am always proud when I exit my private polling booth.

To get there, I walk between candidates’ signs,

show I.D., fill out a ballot, watch my paper ballot 

slide into the machine, await its successfully recorded

message, slap an I Voted! decal onto my vest, 

lift my head high, and walk out.

 

After all... so many worked and died for this democracy.

They work still and will believe until the end.

After all... so many throughout the world cannot

do what I just did.

After all... my father landed on Omaha Beach for this.

After all... forces are at play to bring Ukraine to its knees,

Navalny to his death, and democracy to ruin.

 

I still believe in us.

 

After all the many young and spiteful congressmen and women

walk our Capitol’s halls, spewing hate, sucking up greed.

After all profess to understand government, yet have no clue

about how it works, nor possess a will to learn.

After all the verbiage they shout through speeches, they

lack a critical gene that helps them to be critical and think.

They lack a will to listen, a drive to understand, compassion to act.

 

After all that has been done for me, for us.

After all the forces set upon us to destroy,

how can I not cast my vote, lift my head high,

and think, It doesn’t get any better than this.

Nan Ottenritter is a poet and musician who lives in Richmond, VA. Her works have appeared in the TheNewVerse.News, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Artemis Journals, Poets Reading the News, Life in 10 Minutes, Poetry Society of Virginia Anthologies, and As You Were: The Military Review. Her 2021 chapbook Eleanor, Speak is available through Finishing Line Press and Amazon. Nan teaches writing, performs, and is a member of the Poetry Society of Virginia. She voted in Virginia on Tuesday.

EARLY VOTING

by Martha Deed

When the six year-olds in Miss Rumsey's first grade class elected Truman
one girl was practically the only one voting for Dewey.  She was embarrassed
and outcast. Her parents could not be convinced to change their minds
and she grew suspicious of polls.  Her place in life improved only slightly
in '52 when everyone agreed on Eisenhower and in '56 she won a quarter
from her Presbyterian father when the General defeated Adlai Stevenson
despite her father's prediction Ike would die before Election Day.  He fortified
his flawed opinion with a coin. And so it goes. Each election more savage
than the last. Each more desperate.
Probably Goldwater wouldn't have dropped the bomb. 

But now the grown-up child knows what desperation really means
when you have to vote with Gunslingers who think Others are Crooks
and Scoundrels and maybe Immigrants or Black, Have No Souls,
and Want To Eat Babies. When she voted today (early voting to avoid the rush),
no one stood outside armed-to-the-teeth. The election workers looked
like librarians. They were soft-spoken and gave clear instructions
like her second grade teacher Miss White who taught her pupils
how to tie their shoes and zip up their snowsuits so she wouldn't
have to do it herself. The election workers are not allowed to do it themselves.
They say The ballots have two sides. Color your choices inside the lines.

Martha Deed's poetry has appeared in The New Verse News and most recently or forthcoming in Moss Trill, Mason Street, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Grand Little Things, The Skinny Poetry Journal. Her poetry collections Under the Rock (2019) and Climate Change (2014) and a third collection forthcoming from FootHills Publishing. She is a retired psychologist who makes trouble with poetry inspired by crises and other mishaps around her house on the Erie Canal in Western New York.

AMERICA SINNING

by Robert Knox

via Demcast

Walt Whitman heard ‘America Singing’

I’m hearing things as well,

some of them sadly off-key.

In Texas those who run the place

like the last rodeo of the unforgiven

want to make voting hard to do

for those who have already run the obstacle course

     of history,

returning the privilege of suffrage to a comfortable,

white-sheeted nightmare 

from back somewhere before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

 

We once stayed (in our day; not Walt’s, not King’s)

in Florida, next to the motel where they poisoned the pool

to keep those they did not wish to see at the polls

out of their purely chlorinated water as well.

Everybody out of the pool! 

and nobody at the polls.

 

‘Some better day,’ as we so often say, we will look back

shaking our heads in horror

at what our fellow Americans got up to.

Sorry, sun-sick Florida, hypocritical Texas,

I am voting you out of the club.

Fly the battle flags of your disgrace all you want,

but you are no longer part of my America.

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, and Boston Globe correspondent. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. They have also appeared in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, Eunoia Review, and Unlikely Stories. His poetry chapbook Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty was nominated for a Massachusetts Best Book award. He is the winner of the 2019 Anita McAndrews Poetry Award.

LINES

by Diane Vogel Ferri

People lined up in their cars at a food distribution site in San Antonio, Tex., in April 2020.Credit...Credit: William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News, via Associated Press and The New York Times.

My wall calendar helps me to visualize

my life, the plans I hold dear, the people

I must see so they also see me

At first the lines were through the

scribbling on my calendar,  an oddity,

disappointing at most—a temporary month

Sometimes there were two lines,

an X-ing out, a permanent loss

I catalogued the failures in my journal

Then the lines were of standing humans

waiting to vote, car-lines of hungry children

waiting for the food school had denied them

lines circling the parking lots for tests,

lines at the border, lines at the shelters,

lines at the unemployment office,

lines in the streets to confront the wizard 

behind the curtain, asking when we will be normal? 

But he was a fraud, a canceler of science, of truth

Freedom was not taken by a government

freedom was not taken at all, only

innocent lives, their coffins in orderly lines

The lines are now for a miracle,

for we who are left, whose lives have not

been crossed out, who are free to live.

Diane Vogel Ferri is a teacher, poet, and writer living in Solon, Ohio. Her newest novel is No Life But This: A Novel of Emily Warren Roebling. Her essays have been published in Scene Magazine, Raven’s Perch, Yellow Arrow Journal, and Good Works Review among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Wend Poetry, Her Words, Rubbertop Review, and Poet Lore. Her previous publications are Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), The Desire Path (novel).

A PRESIDENT SO VILE

by James Penha

The New Yorker, July 20, 2020

"The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday." —The Washington Post, July 19, 2020

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” —Sherlock Holmes

If America were ever
to have a President so
vile and blasphemous

to his oath—to preserve

and protect—he’d seek

at every turn of a poll

by means unfair and foul 

to dwindle rival voters

especially those of color…

should a pandemic come

to rage, like him, against

minorities and raze the poor

particularly, might he not ignore

or even encourage a plague

he deems allied to his future?

James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News .

ON FUTURES FOREVER TANGLED IN A SYSTEM OF FLAWED KNOTS

by Jen Schneider

Florida Rights Restoration Coalition policy coordinators Sharon Madison, right, and Kellie Atterbury present Cynthia Craig with a receipt showing her last court payments have been paid at the Richard E. Gerstein Justice Building in Miami in early March. (Scott McIntyre/For The Washington Post)

Washington, July 16, 2020 (CNN)The Supreme Court on Thursday said Florida can enforce a law barring ex-felons from voting if they still owe court fines or fees that they are unable to pay associated with their convictions. The unsigned order likely means the law will be in effect for the November election, although the court did not declare the law to be unconstitutional or limit ongoing court challenges. Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan dissented. "This Court's order prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida's primary election simply because they are poor," Sotomayor wrote in the dissent. "This Court's inaction continues a trend of condoning (disenfranchisement)," she added.


She sat in her beat up Chevy on the right-hand side of the road. Window down, radio up. Oldies streamed ribbons of light in the unseasonably cool air. Beatles and Bruce, mainly. Billy Joel, too. Piano Man got her fingers moving. Her left arm dangled, fingers tapped the exterior car door panel. Striking notes a few inches above the door’s deeply dented exterior. Not unlike the beat she’d use for nightly rituals when imprisoned. She and the girls had a system. Tap, Tap, Tap. Intentional pauses and extended rhythms. A form of Morse code—of sorts. Everything was some sort of something in there. Generic and off brand only, of course. No matter. Always made them feel smart - smarter than the system. Only now, she realizes the system had them all along. Damn fines awaiting her release. The others’, too. Piles of unopened envelopes—stacked on the linoleum kitchen table. Most yellowed. Some stained in coffee, soda pop, and a mix of bitter jams. Never did understand how they expected her to pay those fines. Not until she could find work, that is. And even then. Didn’t they know she had babies to feed? Especially after having fed the mouths and egos of grown men for far too long and in far too many ways. Late at night, she and the others would dream of release day. Lofty talk of voting. Making change. In many ways the dreams got them through - and out. No matter most of them should never have been there in the first instance. Out was always the goal. On the other side, where the sun’s rays beat down on open backs, freshly washed heads, and bare feet - no socks, no shackles. Only to once again be silenced. And tied to a system with no conscience. She wasn’t having it. Sat curbside for upwards of six hours on primary day. Planned to do the same come election day. Until she’s welcome behind the curtain. No doubt, she’ll push buttons wherever permitted. Wherever tolerated, too. The passersby didn’t want to hear her talk. She knew it, but spoke no matter. Their voices mattered. Of course they do. As does hers.

When systems lay bare their many flaws and faults that serve only to penalize those for whom change is most needed, and work only to silence the voices of those for whom there is no recourse, and far too must resignation for there is too often no other way, on whom does the opportunity to speak rest and on whom does the responsibility to act fall—yet too often falter?

Signatures are checked
as licenses are confirmed.
Go ahead, Sir. Please.

Old fines resurface
to silence a right to vote.
Not today, Ma’am. No.

Dusty curtains drop
as inside voices whisper.
Seal the status quo.

Red painted fingers
tap as outside voices speak.
Time for change is now.

Jen Schneider is an educator, attorney, and writer. She lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Philadelphia. Her work appears in The Popular Culture Studies Journal, unstamatic, Zingara Poetry Review, Streetlight Magazine, Chaleur Magazine, LSE Review of Books, and other literary and scholarly journals.

WHY THEY DID WHAT THEY DID

by Lisa Vihos

It was a little over week ago today,
that legislators in Wisconsin gaveled in,
gaveled out. 17 seconds in which
they would not consider
the governor’s request.

During a deadly pandemic,
under a stay-at-home order,
how can we ask the citizens
of our fair state, to risk
their lives to vote?

Not only can we ask,
the legislators said,
we will demand, and gain
the support of our brethren
on the highest court in the land.

April 7, 2020, mark the record,
SCOTUS kicked Wisconsin
in the balls, under the bus,
out the window along with
12,000 absentee ballots

that could not be returned in time,
because they had not been received
in time, even though so many
had been requested by good
law-abiding folks way back in March.

No matter, we are closing down
this right, they said, knowing that
with only five of one hundred eighty
polling places open in Milwaukee,
they could effectively

suppress the vote. Because,
as the chief thief and narcissist
among them had pointed out—if ever
we should expand early voting
or voting by mail—“you’d never have
a Republican elected in this country
again.”  


Editor's note: screenshot of an April 14 tweet—

Lisa Vihos is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous journals both print and online. Author of four chapbooks and editor of two anthologies, she is poetry and arts editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal and an organizer for the world-wide movement, 100 Thousand Poets for Change. She lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

SUBLIMINALITY

by Gary Glauber

More U.S. service members have been transported out of Iraq for medical treatment and evaluations following Iran’s missile attack on military facilities there, the Pentagon said Tuesday, nearly two weeks after President Trump and defense officials initially said no one was hurt. —The Washington Post, January 22, 2020. Photo: U.S. soldiers stand at a spot hit by Iranian missiles at Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq days after the Jan. 8 attack. (Qassim Abdul-Zahra/AP)

In those not-so-olden days,
they might kneecap you into submission
or try to shame you into changing your ways.

Today, the persuasion’s more subtle,
minds are changed without realizing
things encountered in media stream.

They float by like invisible balloons,
banners that point the way with
bold exclamations you’ll never remember.

Alone in the voting booth,
just you and your conscience
and inexplicable urges compelling you.

Foreign powers are acting poorly,
proving psycho-statistical truths,
gaining control from within.

Reading a mind isn’t necessary
when subtle control is relinquished
and a shocked world wonders

how nuclear winter has emerged
from within, not without,
fighting wars no one ever sees.

The new truth is contrived fiction.
Believers vehement with denial
conjure revisionist history,

spew touted party sound bites,
and daily break what others revered
on battlefields of public opinion.

This wall of boulders
grows larger over time
until no one quite remembers

or cares who it was
that cast the first stone
or the life we had before.

And we the unsure
in the chaos of uncertainty
fear the worst world war,

not knowing that bombs
of ultimate destruction
have already dropped.

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog, and strives to survive modern life’s absurdities. He has two collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press) and Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and a chapbook, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press).  A new chapbook of surreal poetry, The Covalence of Equanimity, a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize, is now available from SurVision Books.

EIGHT HAIKU FALSE-STARTS

by Jenna Lê

Photo: Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar, November 5, 2019

my split ends crackle
in the dry November air

my goose-down coat’s nudged
my cheeks out of existence

my hairy calves scritch
inside my long underwear

the polling place lights
sweat yellow in the distance

the 5 PM sky’s
already blueberry-dark

voters in their booths
crouch walled apart like bento

I mouth my own name
through lips pale as pickled shark

the election judge
smiles sweetly nonjudgmental

Jenna Lê is the author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018), which won 2nd Place in the Elgin Awards, and Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear or are forthcoming from AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Rattle, and West Branch.

POLITICIAN

by Howard Winn

The doorbell rang once politely
and he was already smiling
when I opened the front door
while his hand reached out
in welcome as he said my name
and we agreed that I was
in fact that person enrolled
in his political party and ready
to vote when the time came
for we must throw the rascals
out not having voted to put them
in at the last election day when
we with the best intentions lost
out and in fact we were right
for fraud and personal gain has
been revealed although we
wonder if the voters read or
care as we stand in the doorway
agreeing how right we were
the last time even if the majority
did not know or pay attention
so having concurred we shook hands
once again and he turned into
the rain to try the next registered
door and I went back to lunch
wondering if our conversation
had mattered since the opposition
was not there to hear our wisdom
exchanged since they were our
beliefs and not their convictions
as it seems always the case
and once again we talk to ourselves

Howard Winn's work, both short fiction and poetry has been published in Dalhousie Review, The Long Story, Galway Review, Antigonish Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, 3288 Review, Straylight Literary Magazine, and Blueline.  His B. A. is from Vassar College. His M.A. is from the Stanford University Writing Program. His doctoral work was done at N.Y.U. He is Professor of English at SUNY.

READING HOUELLEBECQ THE NIGHT BEFORE EARLY VOTING BEGIINS

by Katherine Smith

If this emptiness were all that was left
I would spend the rest of my life reading
paranoid fantasies late into the night.

Instead of going out early to see the leaves
of the cherry trees turn a creamy peach
I would read every night till three the words of the hero

who rarely stepped out of the Sixth Arrondissement
of Paris, a place I happen to know quite well.
I would drink cocoa and fall under the spell of a clash

between fascists and the Muslim Brotherhood
the critics call satire. But I’m pretty sure
the writer believes far more in his dark story

of veiled women, cowardly professors, conspiracies,
than he believes in me, his American reader,
a middle-aged woman in the suburbs. This morning

I regret losing myself in his tale. Dew has already dried
from the late blooming roses. My face sags. I shower,
and accept that my thoughts are unlikely

to persuade anyone. Dependably sane
and despicably naïve, I start my car, drive
to the Frederick Senior Citizens’ Center

to cast my ballot during early voting.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003; her second Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, appeared in 2014.

MIERCOLES NEGRO

(Black Wednesday)

by Thor Bacon 

So is the baker guilty, too,
who baked the loaves
served at the Last Supper?

Am I also tinged
if I sell diamond earrings
to an adulterer?

And, if I stay quiet,
not sure what to say exactly —
am I party to the flames and rubble?

The election will solve nothing.
Still, we have to vote.
Still, we have to ask each other, "Why?"

And today, Wednesday the 19th, I hear
shouting and weeping down the crowded caminos
of my virgin's heart.

Thor Bacon is an American poet whose work has appeared most recently online at International Times, and in print with The Aurorean.  He resides in Michigan, working as a goldsmith.

AFTER THE ELECTION

by Joan Mazza

Watercolor by Suzanne Mays-Wentzell

The sun should be out, beaming cheer
in celebration of a win for equal rights
and a president who tells the truth,
but today is gray and dreary, forecast
for wind and rain, maybe snow.

I didn’t stay up all night like some, tired
of the angry words, too angry, too,
at those who vote against their interests
for a man who lied and lied. I went to bed,
resigned to cope with heat or cold,

no matter how the winds of voting blew.
I rose to learn the winners, and asked
again what shelters we might find
when I still worry about the safety
of our vegetables and drinks, the air

we breathe. Taught to pray for happy
outcomes, for wisdom in our leaders,
recovery from illness, grief, addiction,
I know no one’s listening to wishes
no matter how cold and dark life seems.

Through weak morning light, the ground
is littered with this year’s leaves. Signal
to go inward, grateful for this home, space
where darkness means silence, warmth,
and no one shouting what god wants from me.


Joan Mazza has worked as a psychotherapist, writing coach, certified sex therapist, and medical microbiologist, has appeared on radio and TV as a dream specialist. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/Putnam). Her work has appeared in Kestrel, Stone’s Throw, Rattle, Writer's Digest, Playgirl, and Writer's Journal. She now writes poetry and does fabric art in rural central Virginia.