THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEMOCRACY

by Jim Kelly

To replace a house,
it is ill-advised
to randomly weaken
the foundation.

To tamper with gas lines
while informed only
by ignorance.

To pull wires
without knowing
where they lead
or what they serve.

To rip out windows
and collapse
the hand-designed,
custom wooden frames.

To remove the roof
during rain
before the expensive,
antique floors
are protected.

To pull down walls
without understanding
how weight is distributed—
how each beam,
each brace,
each hidden support
helps hold up
the whole frame
of Democracy.

And some now shout:

“Damn the building codes.”
“Damn the building plans.”

As if survival itself
were an inconvenience.

As if restraint,
inspection,
and measured repair
were enemies
instead of protections.

Forgetting:
a reckless demolition
does not always end
with open sky.

Sometimes
it ends
with collapsed Democracy.

Jim Kelly is a California poet whose work explores democracy, race, and social justice. His poetry has appeared in Litro Magazine, Urban Pen Magazine, and Urban Poems.

THE MAD HATER’S TEA PARTY

by Lisa Shulman

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

“I’m throwing a Party,” the Mad Hater decreed,

“And it’s only for those of Certain High Breed.

The workers and riff-raff will not be allowed

We’ll clear this Great Land of such unwanted crowds.

We’ll send them all packing to back where they came

And build big border walls in Liberty’s name.”

 

He wanted the people meek and afraid,

Instead they came chanting and dancing, they prayed.

They flocked to the aid of their neighbors and friends,

They poured through the streets, angry crowds without end.

 

“Criminals!” the Mad Hater shouted with venom,

“Violent assassins, we’re going to get ‘em!”

He called out his proud boys, his goons and his gnome,

Said, “Smash their car windows, crash into their homes.

You’re breaking no laws if you do what I say,

My Words are the only Law you must obey.

But these people with cameras and signs in their hands

Are the worst of the worst, destroying our Land.

Arresting them all is how we stay Free,

Anyone is a traitor who doesn’t agree!”

 

The people still came with their banners and songs,

Would not be defeated, they knew right from wrong.

 

Then, “Off with their masks!” the large crowd declared,

“Let’s see why these big men are so terribly scared

Of children and mothers and men holding phones,

It makes them all trembly right down to their bones.

Their pepper and guns are no match for such threats

As inflatable frogs and knitters in sweats,

And pink dancing sharks and sweet unicorns,

And kids banging drums and blowing on horns!”

 

With all this distraction, this hullaballoo,

The Hater was pleased by something he knew.

He rubbed his small hands and gave a sly smile,

“At least they’ve forgotten about those damn Files!”

 

 

Lisa Shulman is a poet, children’s book author, and teacher. Her poetry has appeared in Sheila-na-gig, About Place, Anacapa Review, Inkfish, Kitchen Table Quarterly, ONE ART, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Fragile Bones, Fierce Heart. A Pushcart nominee, Lisa teaches poetry with California Poets in the Schools, and workshops for women in recovery.

PANTOUM: THE TALIBAN TALI-BANS WINDOWS

by Steven Croft

No more open casements, no more moments at windows

Bring back the view of flowers and the love-burned orchards

Buildings now a punishment, knowing prisoners love windows

Talibs say: "Seeing women through windows is an obscene act"

Bring back the view of flowers and the love-burned orchards

To bodies now haram, faces now haram, our voices now haram

Taliban warn: "Seeing women as women is an obscene act"

Captive in darkness, dark-bitter roots till these walls come down

To bodies now haram, faces now haram, our voices now haram

At breast, our babies, throats filled with milk and woodsmoke

Captive in darkness, seeds for flowers, till these walls come down

No more subterranean, no more cavemouth blocked

At breast, our babies, throats filled by milk and woodsmoke

In the candlelit square of mirror, I hope myself, hopeless

No more subterranean, no more cavemouth blocked

But for the world I've stopped hoping, hope tombed long ago

In the candlelit ghosts of windows, I see myself hopeless

My pain bleeds down the panes, alone with my punishment

For the world will not see us, our hope tombed long ago

For the world will not see us, it stopped looking long ago

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

POEM FOR A YEAR IN UKRAINE

by Shih-Min, Sun

 Ironing   stained glasses
   scruffy, growth of magnitude  soul   
         of every somber
     night  comes forth
     suspended on this land
                        flood of 
                                       living , gasping
                          corpses
 rise and walk : bend
            pick 
                                                                                                                              one shoe up
           fold : clothes / string / dirty nails   unbuckle
                    crusted toes with blood, frosted
                                                                                                                                            moon   black
                                                                                                                      eye of the city   inflamed
                     a year
                                                                                                                     with a year   icy mud   feathers plank
                                             perishable but closer   underneath
 
                                              *

                             When  
                                                                    forest call
                           on each step 
                                                              streaks
                                upon walls, walls 
              birds depart, river sink
                             to depth of the country, the land   all turn into: prayers and songs
 
                                                    the orchard 
                              of life
                      respirate   unceasing
                                                                                              glare   now: wide open

Shih-Min, Sun lives and writes in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work has appeared and will be presented in publications including, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, Dadakuku, Rural Fiction Magazine, Wordpeace and has been selected for Atlanta Review 2022 International Poetry Competition in Merit Award. She started writing while working abroad, inspired deeply by family, teachers, and friends. She loves writing as a way to interpret still life and scenes of bond through language. Visit her on Instagram: @aura_a_u_r_a

ESCAPE PLANS

by Barbara Simmons

 

We do it without thinking, sighting those red block letters, 

reassuring our leaving places we have found ourselves,

or, more precisely, where we’ve found ourselves lost, 

in theaters, malls, relationships, 

those gathering spaces where, 

not sure sometimes why we're there, 

we fold away small notes to self, including routes by which we’ll leave.  

It's been a year since we took leave

from what? Routines, connections, worn out paths of

customary comings, anticipated goings,

a year of changing patterns, forswearing the habitual,

creating novel ways to meet, to share, to love, to spend

time trying not to think where we should have been, 

envisioning new plans to leave the here and now

without abandoning ourselves. What's left

when signs are not available? The word itself lies next to

others in the dictionary, including existential, 

become new guides for taking leave, and flight, and hold

of who we are

as we discover what

it is to paint our own way out of boxes, out of corners,

over all walls that restrict our freedoms

finding what we've missed seeing, how we've missed living.

 

 

Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston, now resides in California—the coasts inform her poetry. A graduate of Wellesley College, she received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins. Retired educator, she savors smaller parts of life and language, exploring words as ways to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, and try to understand more. Publications have included Santa Clara Review, Hartskill Review, Boston Accent,  The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, 300 Days of Sun, Capsule Stories, and Journal of Expressive Writing.

21 GRAMS

by Alan Catlin

“Mountains are hard to climb

thus walls are your friends.

Learn your walls.”

            —Bukowski

“We laugh at your walls.”
Drug cartel tunnel rats.
Digging from one safe house
to another safe house.
Under border fences, razor wire
enclaves, ICE patrol car roads.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels for shrink wrapped
pure. White death by the pound.
Powdered snow by the kilo.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels under prison walls.
Two and half miles of digging.
No problema.  Cell to freedom
service. “Viva El Chapo!”
Viva Empire of the Opiates,
Reign of terror Take Two.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Steel stanchion impediments
where concrete is called for.
Easily breeched by purchased
at Wal-Mart, Home Depot,
Lowe’s, metal cutting tool department.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels for coyote caravans,
pay the tolls, travel the underground
railway. “Refugees show us the green,
hombre and we deliver the goods.”

“We laugh at your walls.”
US Army supplied terror cells
of the night.  Drug enforcers,
Zeta killers, Sinaloa lackeys,
CIA trained Torquemada’s.
Slipping under barriers, walls.
Mescal high, take-no-prisoners
instructed, rape and pillage experts,
mercenaries for moola, hostile
and loathsome, heartless as
the street criminals they once were,
laughing at walls.

Find a tunnel and fill it, ten more
are dug. Once you are in The Life,
The Life is in you, there is no looking
back, no escape possible: one foot in
Sodom, the other in Gomorrah.
Not point in last wills and testaments:
no one will bury you when you are killed
unless the tunnel you are in collapses.


Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books, most recently the chapbook Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance (Presa Press), a series of ekphrastic poems responding to the work of German photographer August Sander who did portraits of Germans before, during, and after both World Wars.

BREACHING WALL

by Gil Hoy

The viability of the Trump administration's border wall has come under fire as all eight prototype structures have failed at least one breach test. The eight border wall prototypes in Otay Mesa, California were assembled in early 2017 after an executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security to build the border wall. The news comes as the administration prepares to potentially declare a national emergency to jumpstart construction of the wall along the U.S.’s southern border. —ArchDaily, January 14, 2019

There is many
a living thing

That doesn’t love
a wall.

Like hunters, rabbits
and yelping dogs

Like the pine trees
and apple orchards

Like human beings—
Who are not cows—

And quirky elves don’t
like them much either.

The frozen-ground-
swells beneath can crack

Even the strongest stone.
And there are many gaps

Between the stones
nonetheless. You can

Rub your fingers rough
and raw by placing
and replacing

The fallen stones.
Mr. President:

I see you walking in the darkness.

An old, rough savage-stone

Firmly grasped in each
armed hand.

Like an aged hypothermic man
who is lost

and cannot find his way

Like your crotchety, stubborn
neighbor beyond the hill.

Mr. President:

Spring is coming.
Let’s walk the lines:

Remove the walls
separating pines
and trees bearing fruit.

Pull up the stakes,
fill in the ditch, until
not a trace remains.

Mr. President:        
Forget your father

He was so very wrong.

Good walls, like selfish men,
make bad neighbors.


Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer who studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared most recently in Chiron Review, TheNewVerse.News, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, I am not a silent poet, The Potomac, Clark Street Review and the penmen review.

TRUMPET MINISTRATIONS*

by Jennifer Davis Michael




Perhaps the application
of an ear trumpet

to amplify the cries
of a ravaged nation.

Or the sounding of a blast
heralding the doom
of democracy,
the triumph of bombast.

The ancient shofar
has yielded to tweets—
“My button is bigger”—
braying for war.

Jericho town
had beautiful walls
until Joshua bugled
and they all fell down.

John of Patmos heard seven
trumpets, unrolling
the scrolls of apocalypse,
unveiling heaven.

Our manacled minds
check Facebook and hope
for Shelleyan prophecy:
can spring be far behind?


*After mishearing the phrase “Trump administration” on the radio.

Jennifer Davis Michael is professor and chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, specializing in British Romanticism. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Reviw, Cumberland River Review, Literary Mama, and Mezzo Cammin, among others. She has also published a book of criticism, Blake and the City (Bucknell, 2006).

BEGIN OVER AGAIN (BOA) BUDGET

by Tricia Knoll

Image Source: Hasbro

Whoever coined that penny-dreadful acronym BOA played too much
Monopoly. Report to Jail. No go by go. No payment for the work
you did, for what the artists painted beneath the bridges, for the songs
that mothers wet with milk dripped into their baby’s mouth or
that fathers moaned as regrets of what they hadn’t done to help,
you know, the sounds you could hear once in a while on public radio.

The beginners-again movement men whacked all the monuments
to pieces, loved it that Ramses’ head showed up in a sewer works hole.
When they carved out human services, they cared not a whit
(and I have it from a very reliable source that whit is much smaller
than bit), that zombies, the victims of flesh-eating cut-backs,
careened around downtowns with nowhere to go, washing in McDonald’s
restrooms, or giving up and pitching a tent in the graveyard
next to the wild sweet peas and the four-leaf clovers.

You won’t have this. You won’t have that. That refrain echos
in the school yard recess warning bells and the sirens that get people
to the hospital emergency rooms where they might be treated
depending on their documents. If they are legal people.

You will have bombs and walls. Lots of bombs and because we have big
sticks, we can use them wherever we want. We don’t have to lend them
to friends because the nations we once called friends aren’t very nice.
We can keep them all for ourselves. The BOA men don’t believe
it will go nuclear. BOA work, choking and squeezing, is not noticeable
to the average person who doesn’t care about tax returns or Putin.
The hungry might feel tightness in the gut. The sick or the less abled
may make unhealthy comparisons to the old play board
where they did collect $200 every once in a while.

What you will notice is how BOA men get new black suits,
gleamy gold badges, and red hats with bills

to keep the sun from blinding them.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet who has been writing poetry of protest for some months. Her collected work includes Ocean's Laughter (Aldrich Press) and Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press).

BUILDING WALLS

by Megan Merchant

I have seen the most beautiful walls painted by children,
walls with crowds of hands shaped into doves and flowers
tall. I have seen the most beautiful walls sledged by exhausted
fathers who wear the stucco-dust home and lull their babies
into sleep with tales about how they gutted that great beast.
I have seen the most beautiful walls dressed for carnival, lined
with stars, and helmets in remembrance of our fallen. I have seen
the most beautiful walls drenched with ivy, an accord with nature,
water dripping into buckets down brick. I have heard the word
wall in a thousand clumsy ways, the buzz saw and hammer
being cleaned in the toolbox of his mouth, the easy-dirt of his words,
where we tunnel. I have seen the way men resurrect walls to keep
the light out, too afraid to meet the eyes of a woman directly. Because
he knows she has learned to see around the symbol, that it is not a greater
means of division, or a blockade, but a chance to climb, to see people
holding hands from a different perspective, high enough that their
bodies blur into one.

Megan Merchant is mostly forthcoming. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press, 2016 Book of the Year), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Prize, Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming 2017), four chapbooks, and a children’s book with Philomel Books.

DUNGEONS FROM DRAGONS

by Dennis Etzel Jr.

Asmund wakes me up for another game
as the sun tries rising in another December
morning I try to rise he says he likes to wake up
in a little dark time not too early
looks out the window over our back
yard over our Kansas our country
waking up I’ve never woken up in such a dark time
these gradual small wake-ups to dungeon builders

as our resistance is set to dismantle walls Asmund asks
if this little dark time is okay for me to wake up in
I say yes let’s go downstairs with your brothers to sit
navigate the dungeon together keeping the dragons
from getting further ahead as we search for a secret door
for freedom I show my sons how to throw the dice

Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches English at Washburn University. He has an MFA from The University of Kansas, and an MA and Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Kansas State University. He has two chapbooks, The Sum of Two Mothers (ELJ Publications 2013) and My Graphic Novel (Kattywompus Press 2015), a poetic memoir My Secret Wars of 1984 (BlazeVOX 2015), and Fast-Food Sonnets (Coal City Review Press 2016). His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, Tarpaulin Sky, DIAGRAM, and others. He is a TALK Scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council and leads poetry workshops in various Kansas spaces.

THE OGRE WHO PROMISED US THE WORLD

by David Spicer

Adapted from a DonkeyHotey caricature.

I denounce the day the ogre who promised
us the world arrived, disturbing the village’s
decorum. I witnessed his ancient resolve
as he scolded and attacked the town leaders
to the students’ cheers and drumbeats,
ignored the fact that the shylocks’ siege
had doomed us. He wanted those who
murmured against him imprisoned, chuckled
at and dismissed Vera—his experienced opponent
for Mayor—called her a typist for the shylocks.
He gestured like a conductor of a mad orchestra
in his speeches, pointed at his audiences like
an angry mentor, declared victory to thunderous
fanfare when defeat seemed certain. After we
expressed hope but asked how he’d fulfill his
guarantees, he twitched, paced the interview room,
beet-faced. The day I met him, I had returned
from singing hymns in German trenches,
an asthenic figure, searching for a hero
and ready to serve, and dazzled by his gruff
wail and white-haired pledges: free goldfish
for the children, higher wages for all, a jail cell
for the untouchable shylocks. But he offered no
solutions for our bombed houses without walls,
only those vows that tumbled from his mouth
like the fantasy sausages we loved, before the elders
voted for Vera, who destroyed him at the polls,
and he vanished into the sleepy hills he called home.

David Spicer has had poems in Yellow Mama, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, concis, Jersey Devil Press, The American Poetry Review, TheNewVerse.News, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart, is the author of one full-length collection of poems and four chapbooks, and is the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.