PURPLE HEART ARMY VETERAN SELF-DEPORTS

by Morrow Dowdle

The quiet girl I’d admired on the playground

defended me against a boy with rough grasp  

and bad breath. Ended with her knee scraped, 

 

dark with embedded mulch. The boy 

ran, exiled from swing and slide.

That spring, I gave her a locket 

 

from the five and ten, real sterling plate. 

Not a partial heart, with zig-zag edges, 

I trusted her to take the whole. And wasn’t she 

 

the bearer of some universal principle:

What you shed for someone incurred a debt.

In the military, I spilled not one red drop—

 

still, the discharge, honorable. Still, years later, 

thanked by strangers. What did I do? 

Sat in the clinic. Tried to save the wounded 

 

from an aftermath I could hardly fathom. 

There is a man, now, up in the air. 

A slick plane flung between continents.

 

My friend and I pricked our thumbs with a needle, 

pressed them together. Citizens then, of each other. 

Not enough to make a man homeless,

 

he must be motherless, childless as well.

His body belongs to no country.

His body gone, with its generous blood.

Morrow Dowdle is the author of the chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and has work appearing or forthcoming from New York Quarterly, RATTLE, ONE ART, and Southeast Review. They run a performance series which features historically marginalized voices and are an MFA candidate at Pacific University.

THE WRONG HOUSE

by Thomas R. Smith

dedicated to Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis

“Wrong House” by Tala Madani (2014)

Say it’s the city, late evening, dark.
You’ve stopped to pick up your brothers,
thought you had the right address,
but now you’re unsure, seeing the pale
man the other side of the glass door.
Something in his hand, something shiny
in his trembling hand. Raises it,
a flash, the sound of glass
breaking, you breaking.

Say you’re in the country. It’s easy
to get lost on those dirt back roads.
Your car pulls into a driveway, but
the number is wrong. Turn back out.
From a nest of darkness
in the trees, bullets spit, one
catches you where you sit. Your
friends get you to a hospital, 
too late.  You’re gone.

Say you’re a country. Thought you knew
the Address, confident in your way
around the shining city. What brought you
here to the door of this horror movie?
Who armed the frightened old man,
the violent sociopath? Why has your
heart taken so much lead? Are you
wounded but alive, or dead? Why do you
keep showing up at the wrong house?

Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. His most recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press).

BUT

by William Aarnes

Art by Clara Lieu

The guy who’s keyboarding these lines

wants to hope that the world would be better—  

more hospitable, less deadly—
if people agreed to do without guns.

But I’m the dread in his head, dwelling      
on how many guns are already loaded,

how many aimed, how many already fired,
piercing lead already in the wounded, in the dead,    

my thoughts having shot their way through    
his fingers on to his computer screen:

“Time to buy a gun or two?  Or stockpile
an arsenal?”  Sure, he’s already deleted

those thoughts. But I’m the dread in his head. 

William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

SCHOOL SHOOTING

by Harold Oberman

Kentucky School Shooting Is 11th of Year. It’s Jan. 23. Clockwise from top left: Wake Forest University campus on the morning of Jan. 21, after a fatal shooting the night before; emergency crews responded to Marshall County High School after a fatal shooting on Jan. 23 in Benton, Ky.; law enforcement personnel gathered outside a high school in Italy, Tex., after a shooting on Jan. 22; police officers at the Net Charter School in New Orleans on Jan. 22 after a shooting. Credit Clockwise from top left: Ben Powell; Ryan Hermens/The Paducah Sun, via Associated Press; KDFW Fox4, via Associated Press; Emily Kask. —The New York Times, January 23, 2018

Two students dead, 12 other people wounded
in Kentucky high school shooting. 
—Headline in The Washington Post, January 23, 2018

Who even writes the story now?
Headline: “School Shooting . . .”
Is there a designee at a desk in the obit department
That fills in the blanks?
Blank dead.
Blank wounded.
Blank rounds from
Blank automatic weapons.
Insert rampage or chaos.
Insert tragedy and heartbreak and close-knit and unbelievable and backpack and student and child.
How do you describe the indescribable?
Form 2018.
Blank this shit.
Headline: “School Shooting . . .”
The ellipsis trail off like bodies.


Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet living and writing in Charleston, S.C. His work has recently appeared in TheNewVerse.News.

FOURTH OF JULY 2017

by Susan P. Blevins

Sad Food Face Canvas Print  by Smetek

I could not celebrate this year
the lonely clamor to feed the hole in our
hearts with hot dogs and hamburgers,
hoping for alchemical miracle, from
simple-minded barbecue to
manna from heaven to feed our wounded
hearts, but instead all we ate turned to
bitterness and regret, leaving a
mouthful of ashes and dust,
uneasy and hungry still, listening to
the bands, watching the fireworks
in all their frenzied attempt to heal the
mockery of 2017’s Independence Day.

Susan P. Blevins’s blood pressure is up since last November. She is sure the country will have serious health problems in the next four years unless an antidote is found.

DUNKING

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Thursday,March 19, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.

DUNKING
by Richard Spilman

Back when you were fourteen, small
and new to that school, three toughs
cornered you in the boys’ john, shoved
your head into a bowl of yellow water,
and when they let you up you screamed
bloody murder, hit anything your arms
could reach. To shut you up, the big one
put his foot on your neck and told you
what they’d do. You believed and cried.
Hands in pockets they left one by one
Silently, as if they’d watched a man
betray his friends for a moment of breath.
You dried off, picked up your books,
and went to class. You didn’t tell, and
the teachers didn’t ask about you wet shirt,
and the kids already knew your disgrace.

That was the last time you ever cried.
Not when you were wounded in war,
not when your wife left telling you
she couldn’t love a man so closed off.
You make money trading commodities.
You don’t buy and sell goods, you buy
and sell futures—someone always wins,
someone loses, roulette with wheat and gold.
You trade in illusions, in rises and falls
on a screen created by phantom sales.
Investors like fish rise to your bait.
At the reunions you bring your latest,
her blonde youth a testament to your
prowess, but they laugh behind your back.
For them, your collar is forever yellowed
with piss, your eyes rimmed with tears.


Richard Spilman is the author of In the Night Speaking and Suspension. He lives in Hurricane WV where he is discovering that a bathroom above a garage makes for a frigid winter.

DUNKING

by Richard Spilman

Back when you were fourteen, small
and new to that school, three toughs
cornered you in the boys’ john, shoved
your head into a bowl of yellow water,
and when they let you up you screamed
bloody murder, hit anything your arms
could reach. To shut you up, the big one
put his foot on your neck and told you
what they’d do. You believed and cried.
Hands in pockets they left one by one
Silently, as if they’d watched a man
betray his friends for a moment of breath.
You dried off, picked up your books,
and went to class. You didn’t tell, and
the teachers didn’t ask about you wet shirt,
and the kids already knew your disgrace.

That was the last time you ever cried.
Not when you were wounded in war,
not when your wife left telling you
she couldn’t love a man so closed off.
You make money trading commodities.
You don’t buy and sell goods, you buy
and sell futures—someone always wins,
someone loses, roulette with wheat and gold.
You trade in illusions, in rises and falls
on a screen created by phantom sales.
Investors like fish rise to your bait.
At the reunions you bring your latest,
her blonde youth a testament to your
prowess, but they laugh behind your back.
For them, your collar is forever yellowed
with piss, your eyes rimmed with tears.


Richard Spilman is the author of In the Night Speaking and Suspension. He lives in Hurricane WV where he is discovering that a bathroom above a garage makes for a frigid winter.

THE FALL OF MOSUL

by George Held

Refugees flee the city of Mosul. The delicately balanced relations among the many communities were permanently shattered in 2003. Photograph: Str/AP. The Guardian, June 13, 2014.

Take it back, we left it,
We will not summon the troops
To fight again for it,
We will not countenance

Another long drawn out
Battle on your homeland,
The corpses, gutted and bloodied,
Strewn, like trash, on the ground.

Mosul is Assyrian, Kurd, Iraqi,
Turkmen, Shabak, Shi’ite, Sunni,
And the oil refinery earns more
Per hour than the marketplaces

For fruits of paradise, leather toolers,
Carpet merchants’ stalls
And sheep-herders’ pens
Combined do per year.

Mosul, you fell in 2003
And now ISIS (not
The Egyptian goddess
of magic and life),

initiates in the sacred order
of hatred and arch violence,
Have achieved the latest fall
Of Cheney and Bush,

Who on 3 May 2003
Declared from ship’s deck
“The Battle of Iraq is over,”
But that mission will never

Be accomplished despite
4,447 American dead,
32,000 wounded plus
Thousands with PTSD

And other extreme debilitations;
Plus one trillion dollars
(Think what this sum could mean
For schools, bridges, healthcare).

Now 68% of Americans
Polled feel no obligation

(<F obliger) to help Iraqis
After we destroyed their country:

No noblesse, no oblige;
No ligature (the “lig”
In “obligation”) tying us
To this desolated land.

Mosul, Baiji, Samarra—
All fall on the road to Baghdad.
(Where are Crosby and Hope
When we really need them?)

Where can we find any hope
In stopping the ISIS advance?
Will the fall of Mosul end
In the union of Syria and Iraq,

A wide swath from the Med
To Iran, the destabilization
Of the Middle East, a threat
To Turkey and Israel?

Where are the leaders
Who can reverse America’s
Knee-jerk reliance on military
Solutions to geopolitical problems?

Is the fall of Mosul a milestone
On the road to the fall
Of (God bless) the
United States of America?


George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out soon from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.