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.

DROPPING THE PILOTS

 by James Penha

The last of nearly 100 whales that beached on the southwestern Australian coast were euthanized Wednesday after a second day of frantic, but unsuccessful efforts to rescue them, authorities said. The pod of long-finned pilot whales stranded themselves Tuesday on Cheynes Beach east of the former whaling station of Albany in Western Australia state, south of the capital Perth. Despite the efforts of 100 wildlife officers and 250 volunteers wearing wetsuits to protect against the Southern Hemisphere winter cold, 52 stranded whales died on the beach. The remaining 45 were euthanized Wednesday after efforts to lead them to deeper water failed…  Pilot whales are highly social animals and maintain complex familial relationships with their pods from birth. Drone footage released by the state government showed the whales clustering and forming into a heart shape before stranding themselves on the beach. —AP, July 27, 2023

James Penha edits The New Verse News.

THE DOOR

by Katherine West

"But it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station—including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day—to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.”  —Barack Obama, May 29, 2020

There is a door—
someone has left it open
just a little bit
so a band of light
runs along the floor
to where we stand in the dark
touches the feet
of the first in line

I can tell this makes them happy
even though their backs are to me
something about the relaxed
line of their shoulders
the ease of the way they turn their heads
this way
then that
confident
it won't be long now

The band of light
doesn't touch my feet—
I'm about halfway down the line
even if I stood on tiptoe
or craned my neck to one side
I couldn't get a good view
through the door

So I look at the line—
it starts out white with reflected light
then gets darker and darker
the further away it reaches
down the dim hall where we wait—
the first in line are clear cut
their collars
their buttons
outlined in light
but the ones behind me blur
into a single
black
unmoving
cloud

I wait for someone to step out of this cloud
to show me details
beautiful details
of finger and face
soft lips
the curve of forehead
I wait for the music
of speech
laughter
for an empty space
inside me
to fill

Then I feel it
a weight
in the space that is not empty
a weight that shifts
like a child
impatient to be born—
then it kicks
something bursts
and I see
hundreds of eyes meeting mine—
candles, stars, constellations...
we all move at the same time and the line
is broken


Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness, performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov, and teaches seasonal poetry workshops that revolve around "wilderness writing."  She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and TheNewVerse.News  which recently nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize.

AFTER THE INAUGURATION, EVERYTHING IS PORTENTOUS

by Allison Blevins

Photo by Fletcher Gravy

I think about the absolutes of motion when I’m naked,
how a pendulum swings, how a scale unbalanced
must wobble, how my skin ripples, weight unsteadies.

Something alive is buzzing in the kitchen, leg
against leg, string against bow, the sound
of nothing, boxed and electrified.  A blackness

circles in the sky above my son’s school most afternoons.
I could say blackness as if dawn or sleep
or blood rising to air were sinister, but the feeling

on my skin is more like dust, fine and granular, settling
even in my throat.  I could say the circling and flapping
and cawing will alight as sediment, in the corners,

in the morning, after God has closed his eyes,
after God has opened them again.  My children
cannot see my body unclothed.  When I walk naked,

I am emperor.  I parade the living room, parade
an ocean of blind children.  The images they steep in
invisible.  On the playground at my son’s school

children in puffed and quilted jackets gather and ring
around a solitary boy.  The children silent, the boy’s mouth
buzzes, all the feathers, dark and rustling, fall from above.

Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte and is a Lecturer for the Women's Studies Program at Pittsburg State University and the Department of English and Philosophy at Missouri Southern State University.  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as the minnesota review, Sinister Wisdom, Pilgrimage, and Josephine Quarterly.  She lives in Joplin, Missouri, with her wife and two children.

RESISTANCE

by Joan Colby



You learn to build strength
By resistance. Hoisting the 10 pound weight
With your shattered wrist,
Screwed and bolted into a titanium plate
Inscribed with a disaster you’re
Overcoming.

If passive resistance means folding
Your hands in the semblance of prayer,
The resistance you are practicing
Is one of cold steel clutched
In your fist and lifted
Like the torch of liberty.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.