TO BUSH

by Michael Graves


It is not dream that troubles you, the self assured.
At night, you do not stand
After difficult descent
Among accusing shades
Of soldiers sent to sacrifice
Who murmur of incompetence,
Hungry for the world they left.
Neither the blinded, crippled, blasted dead,
Nor the legless, armless wounded rise from beds
To surround you in your sleep.
They do not speak within the words you speak:

You move and talk and look
As though you were an empty glove
Upon the hand of a puppeteer.


Michael Graves is a widely published poet and has a full-length collection Adam and Cain (Black Buzzard, 2006) nominated for a PEN Osterweil Award. Graves was the recipient of a substantial grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation in 2004.

LAURA BUSH DREAMS

by Mary Ann Mayer


Laura's Pretty Dream:

The cool air dark with roses;
restive, the mothers’ brow;
the fields festive, bombed
to Adam. More rapeseed
please! More garlic scapes
and hybrid teas, their pink tops
spliced onto horny stock
in time to blossom for you,
Laura, rose-cheeked Laura…


Laura's Ugly Dream:

Take him outside.
Smoke him. Loser.
Bite him, deadbeat.
Kick him, muslim.
Loser, knife him.
Bowels, pity.


Mary Ann Mayer lives in Sharon, Massachusetts. Her first book of poems, Telephone Man, was published in 2005. Her work has appeared in two anthologies, is forthcoming in the online journals Shit Creek Review and Umbrella, and in Raven Chronicles themed issue, Citizen, Subject, Slave. Before turning to poetry, she practiced occupational therapy for thirty years.

INTELLIGENT DESIGNER

by Mary A. Turzillo

The Creation Museum, a project of the socially conservative religious organization Answers in Genesis, mocks evolutionary science and invites visitors to find faith and truth in God. It welcomes its first paying guests -- $19.95 for adults, $9.95 for children, not counting discounts for joining a mailing list -- just weeks after three Republican presidential candidates said they do not believe in evolution.

Opinion polls suggest that about half of Americans agree. They dismiss the scientific theory that all beings have a common ancestor, believing instead that God created humans in one glorious stroke.

--Washington Post | May 27, 2007

Of course he, or she, or it didn’t know enough
to make nature seamless so we could trace
how atoms went to molecules, molecules to peptides.
Too stupid to make it work intricately
without a clumsy “intelligent design” hand fumbling the plan.

Of course he, or she, or it couldn’t figure out in advance
whether this fertile egg was destined to venture living.
No, it’s easy to mess up his, or her, or its plan,
so easy that you have to call it sin.

Oh especially sin to fight death
or to trace root complexities of its opposite.
Oh, where would mystery be?
You have to have mystery!

And he, or she, or it never made anything higher than the moon
which is why we shouldn’t build golden ships.
Galaxies are just fuzz; that’s the way it should be.
The universe is oh say a hundred miles high.
Forget Mars, comets, stars.

That’s it. He, or she, or it wouldn’t have skill
to make it so you’d never see fingerprints.

Nothing is bigger, more complex, or older
than you imagine. That would be blasphemy.

Or is it just that you have to make him, or her, or it
smaller and stupider than you are, so you get to explain
the meaning of everything, to keep our heads bowed
lower than yours, so we revere you
not him
or her
or it.


Mary Turzillo's “Mars Is no Place for Children” won the 1999 Nebula, and An Old-Fashioned Martian Girl, her first novel, appeared in Analog. Among other magazines, Asimov's, F& SF, Cat Tales, Interzone, SF Age, Weird Tales, Oceans of the Mind, Electric Velocipede, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet have published her fiction and poetry. Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, her poetry collection, will appear from vanZeno press this year. An Emeritus Professor at Kent State University, she founded Cajun Sushi Hamsters and has taught in NASA's Science through Arts. Her favorite people include her son, Jack Brizzi, Jr., and her husband, writer-scientist Geoffrey A. Landis. Website: www.maryturzillo.com.

RECRUIT

by Paul Nelson


Of last spring's lambs, at ease by the shed,
the brown ram will not go in for frost-soft apples,
not for grain, and it's this one pisses the fruit,
the thickened chard I've strewn on the ground,
and still butts the oblong bag of the one big ewe,
his eyes so dark and wide-set that he looks at nothing,
takes it all in with dead, dis-focused confidence,
stamps a delicate hoof, veers, moiling as if
he knows I intend to kill him, as if I were God.
He shoulders through the flock as he pleases,
tosses dollar leaves in the air while others
are keen to climb the ramp. This one must be first,
caught, cut, bled and taken to the hoist.
The rest will sleep, graze, calm, once he is.


Paul Nelson is gainfully retired as Prof.of English and Director of Creative Writing for Ohio University, five books, many magazines, AWP Award for Poetry, NEA Fellowship, now trolling off the North Shore of O'ahu.

SMALL THINGS

by Mike McCulley


A tiny moth flutters in a spiral
between my chair and the bookcase,
disturbed into the early light, the flutter hunts
out a dark place to be alone

for meditation. Out in the garden
a frog croaks to attract his love’s attention,
he’s been croaking for three days
but she doesn’t answer. A mosquito flies

around, looking for me again. To escape
the bustle and clamor I put on a hat
and walk the trail to Bottle Beach.
On the windy beach a feather curl

wildly tumbles along over the sand,
separated from its bird the curl is headed
for lonely oblivion among the broken shells
in the beach grass. Above my hat

the sky is filled with onerous clouds.
A mattress heavy with dark thinking
mulls over broken dreams, lost loves,
sudden falls, dancing with eyes closed.

The mattress doesn’t mean anything
when a flower can’t find a bee.


Retired from educating / rewired for recreating / pastime birding, / part time wording. Mike McCulley posts his tweedledum at wordanger dot blogspot dot com.

MAY 15, 2007

by Jill Lange


I.
Today, Carol stopped by to tell me
Jerry Falwell died.
Carol is middle aged, a competent lawyer.
She tells good jokes.
I wait for the punch line. She smiles,
“No, really, he died.”
I say, “I don’t like Jerry Falwell, what
do I say now?”
She says, “Me neither. But it’s true.”
And she leaves.

II.
It’s supposed to rain tonight, maybe
even a storm. I’m on the upstairs porch
drinking wine, watching white lilacs
and wind chimes dance in the breeze.
Jerry Falwell blows in. Why? I hold my glass,
hear myself say, “Here’s to you, Jerry Falwell!”
Why? He has that smirk. He’s up in heaven.
But I won’t see him again. No way.
Feminists, ACLU card carriers, Democrats, Jews,
Buddhists, pagans, gays, and immigrant
peace activists ... we don’t go there.
We’ll be somewhere else, no doubt telling
stories with Mark Twain and Chief Seattle.


Jill Lange is an attorney, poet, and activist in most of the ways that have inspired Jerry Falwell's sermons.

CLEAN

by Judy Kronenfeld

Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc.
Homicide
Suicide
Accidental death

--Truck seen on the freeway.

Let them come like priests in white robes
and tenderly cleanse
the buttocks of the four-year-old
who shat in his pants, pressing his ears
against the scream of F16s
flying low over Gaza

Order them up for the smashed skull
at Haditha, the intestines’ spill
out of back wounds, the graffiti-scrawled
house where “democracy
assassinated a family”

Let them restore
the “accidentally” killed
children fleeing on the road
from Marwaheen, obeying
blasting loudspeakers into
their deaths

Order them up for the spattered mall,
the hall, the checkpoint, the crossing,
the wall

Order them up for the broken-necked
girlfriend, left to drown in their tub
by the returning Marine
Order them up
for his crazed pain

Order them up for the port-a-potty
splattered with blood--
any soldier’s whose wife’s “bad news”
is the last strain

Let them “with utmost respect” take down
the three “smart,” “creative,” “committed”
prisoners who hanged themselves
with bedsheets and clothes in Guantanamo,
their act “not desperation”
but “warfare waged against us”

Let them remove the bindings
around the necks, the plastic bags
over the heads, let them
wash out the shot-through mouths
of men revenged, let them re-leaf
the golden dome

Let the war presidents and prime
ministers and militia leaders,
for whom war is holy
or righteous, abstract,
mathematical, even joyous,
somehow made clean
in the mind,
be each given one small toothbrush,
and the sentence:
scour this blood.


Judy Kronenfeld has taught in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside since 1984. She is the author of a book and two chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being Ghost Nurseries (Finishing Line, 2005), as well as a book on Shakespeare, King Lear and the Naked Truth (Dule, 1998) Recent anthology appearances include Red, White & Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (Iowa, 2004), Regrets Only: Contemporary Poets on the Theme of Regret (Little Pear Press, 2006), and Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach, 2006). Her poems, as well as the occasional short story and personal essay, have appeared in numerous print and online journals; her most recent poem credits include DMQReview (Disquieting Muses Quarterly), Spoon River Poetry Review, Free Lunch, 2RiverReview, Pebble Lake Review, and Poetry International.

GALILEE

by Michelle Bitting


for Dorianne


She speaks of blackberries, sweet multitudes of them
outside the house, stepping through the door
to be swallowed by a bulbous green tide. So flush
the blooming waves, neighbors spend Sundays
stooped about yards, hacking unruly nubs,
dark-fruited vines. Jam for eternity she says,
wonders why local markets overcharge
for what's manifold, rampant.

Makes me think of that Fat Cat oil exec,
thick-jowled one from Exxon
with lopsided lips. Who can forget
those seeds-for-eyes, the cartoon-huge cheeks
full of steaming smug loaves,
his ugly mug flooding the internet when
he greased millions during a presumed crisis?

What if plenty were enough, the crowded mouth
of one relieved by another too tired, too hungry to speak?
What if Jesus hadn't been such a loser,
had made disciples middlemen? Imagine bread
and fish wrangled, wrung through sweetheart pacts--
the profit crops, women and wine dealt, in the end,
to an elite few, while thousands grovel on hot
and dusty shores, swept away,
in time, by a sea of shimmering opulence.


Michelle Bitting has work forthcoming or published in Glimmer Train, Swink, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, Narrative, Small Spiral Notebook, Nimrod, The Southeast Review, Many Mountains Moving, Passages North, The Comstock Review, Poetry Southeast, Vox, Rattle, Gargoyle and others. She has won the Glimmer Train, Rock & Sling Virginia Brendemeuhl Award and Poets On Parnassus Poetry Competitions. Formerly a dancer and a chef, she volunteers extensively with the hungry and homeless. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, actor Phil Abrams, and their two children. Visit her website. She says, "At this point, I write because I have to. There is just no other way to survive."

NYC TICKET SAYS MAN RAN LIGHT IN ROWBOAT

by Rochelle Ratner


Leave it to the newspapers to get it all wrong. He was pulling the
rowboat behind his car. But he didn't run the light, he was turning
the corner. The trailer lurched when he hit a pothole, and it might
have dented a car parked near the corner. He didn't stop to look.
His wife was slumped next to him in the front seat, having trouble
breathing. They never made it past Columbia Presbyterian
Hospital, let alone to that lake up in Westchester. By the time the
ticket reached him she was in a coma. He read it to her, mixed in
with get well cards from their friends and neighbors, but she
showed no reaction so, he doesn't know, maybe he just left it there
on the windowsill, maybe he tossed it into the trash. She's the one
who filed everything neatly, paid the bills on time, sent donations
to the PBA, the Police Athletic League, and the Red Cross.


Rochelle Ratner's latest poetry books include Leads (Otoliths Press, 2007), Balancing Acts (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006), Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, 2006) and House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003). She is the author of fifteen previous poetry collections and two novels (Bobby’s Girl and The Lion’s Share) both published by Coffee House Press). More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage.

GOOD GRIEF

by Charles Frederickson


Mother Universe grieving lost sons
        Eerie cries bewailing inconsolable sadness
                Dispirited global despondency thickly veiled
                        Outlandish hooded ghosts graceless saviors

        Wrathful demigods committing mortal sins
                Double talk gibberish forked tongues
                        Unanswered prayers divine intervention denials
                                Adverse kismet misfortune fatal kiss-off

                Netherworld impulses brotherhood of hate
                        Unholy outsiders bent on revenge
                                Twisted vines mourning glory shrivel
                                        Purple heart funnels trumpeting taps

        Hard to imagine why wherefores
                Mothers are supposed to outlive
                        Firstborn heir apparent survivor guilt
                                Sinking quicksand no footprints left

We all must learn how
        To love other people’s children as our
                As our own sharing commonplace
                                        Lonely planet
demonstrating
heartfelt compassion


Dr. Charles Frederickson is a Swedish-American-Thai pragmatic optimist, idealistic visionary and heretical believer who has wandered intrepidly through 206 countries, an original sketch and poem for each presented on http://www.imagesof.8k.com/. This maverick e-gadfly is a member of World Poets Society, based in Greece, with 200+ poetry publication credits on 6 continents, such as: angelfire, Ascent Aspirations, Auckland Poetry, bc supernet, Blind Man’s Rainbow, Both Sides Now, Caveat Lector, Cordite Poetry Review, Dance to Death, Decanto, Eclipse, Flutter Magazine, Greatworks, Green Dove, Indite Circle, International Poet, Listen & Be Heard, Living Poets, Madpoetry, Melange, Newtopia, Planet Authority, Poetisphere, Poetry Canada, Poetry of Scotland, Poetry Stop, Poets for Peace, Poetry Superhighway, Pyramid, Sage of Consciousness, Stellar Showcase, Subtle Tea, Sz, The Smoking Poet, T-zero, Ya’Sou! Ygdrasil, Zafusy.

COOKING UP A POLICE STATE

by Earl J. Wilcox


Ingredients:
One U S President.
One Chief of Staff Andrew Card.
One Absent Yet Present Vice-President.
One First-Term White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales.
One Blanched Attorney General John Ashcroft.
One Fast Acting US Attorney General James Comey.
One Fast-Fading Surveillance Law.
One Karl Rove.

Prepare the intrigue by removing the gall bladder from a blanched Attorney General John Ashcroft in hospital; marinate with sedatives.

Add a dash of Bourne-brand thrillers.

Separate two or three yokels—a Card and a Gonzales will suffice, though any number of others with same textures and fermenting qualities would do for a pinch—from the White House since the President and the Rove should remain tasteless in this recipe.

Arrange yokels onto a bed of Ashcroft, there to rise with the pale signature of Ashcroft on to prolong illegal wiretapping and other surveillance procedures.

Take care not to allow a drop of Comey to enter the bed of Ashcroft prior to the addition of the yokels, for Comey will harden the Ashcroft against the normal action of the yokels.

Results will vary with this recipe and may not be evident for three or more years after preparation. Some ingredients such as the Alberto and Card may lose their fermentation. Card may no longer rise to the level of Chief of Staff, having been removed from the White House pantry, and the memory enzymes of the Alberto, serving subsequently itself as Attorney General, may conveniently perish. Further complications that may hinder full enjoyment of this dish: if the fomenter---Rove---is asked to testify in any Congressional hearings, it doubtless will rise to the occasion and fail to provide enough fermentation to suit the House's appetites. Ultimately, most diners during this political season may find the dish filled with maggots and learn to choose more carefully the commander-and-chef.

Earl J. Wilcox founded The Robert Frost Review, which he edited for more than a decade. His poetry was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

THE ONE-ARMED ECONOMIST

by Charles Reynard

"Give me a one-armed economist!"
--Harry S. Truman

When they spoke of predators, prisoners
(and their dilemmas), free riders, yellow
dogs, toxins, adverse selections, moral

hazards, it sounded like our candy-ass
normative values disintegrating
on sharp stone shoals of unforgiving facts,

like kindergarteners caught in a Freddy
Krueger film. All that we needed to do:
find the one-armed economist somewhere

between ad coelum et ad infernos,
to drive us in his special purpose vehicle,
fueled by CAT bonds, out of the nightmare

on Wall Street to the efficient frontier
where we learn minimum wages did not mean
to cause joblessness, nor was it intended

that increased fuel economy causes death.
We hope at last it’s there near the end
of our exquisitely short attention span

where we find equilibrium, i.e. the point
of no regrets, where we dig up the black
box for judging, found with the recipe:

put in the facts, add a notion or two
of law, shake well, the answer tumbles out.
On the other hand, even if the box

is not found, we will exist there, consoled
by this new way of thinking (remember
thinking like a lawyer, the ornament

of argument, wretched proofs of our gift),
knowing that the cost of living has not
yet diminished its popularity.


Charles Reynard serves as a Circuit Court Judge in Central Illinois . His poems have appeared on WGLT Public Radio’s Poetry Radio, also in the anthology Where We Live: Illinois Poets (edited by Kathleen Kirk, 2003), the 2004 Emily Dickinson Awards anthology by Universities West Press, the literary journals AfterHours, Crab Orchard Review, Kaleidowhirl (on-line), as well as National Catholic Reporter. He is co-editor (with Judith Valente) of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (2005, Loyola Press). He was a finalist for the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for emerging poets in 2003 and a recipient of a Jo-Anne Hirshfield Memorial Poetry Award in 2007.

THE DARK MATTER WITH THE WHITE HOUSE

by James Penha

"Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope

have discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter . . .

The ring's discovery is among the strongest evidence yet

that dark matter exists."
-- May 15, 2007 hubblesite.org

Dark matter is not readily visible because it neither emits nor reflects light or truthful radio signals. Its existence explains anomalies seen in the motion and direction of the administration. Dark matter can be detected only indirectly, e.g., through the bending of light and truth. Dark matter may consist of dust, mirrors, and roving gas formed of ordinary matter, or of vice-presidential MACHOs [Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects], nonluminous bodies such as burned-out stars, black holes, and intellectual dwarfs; the discovery of a large concentration of white dwarfs in the halo surrounding the White House indicates that these burned-out stars could represent as much as a third of the dark matter in the administration.

Other theories hold that dark matter is made of subsidiary particles that played a key role in the formation of the administration, possibly the low-mass theoretical particles called WIMPs [Weakly Interacting Massive Particles]; these may be the so-called cold dark matter found as clumps in cabinet positions throughout the administration. Clumps have been found in two distinct regions: around a powerful office in the center of the State Department and, in larger amounts, around the entire Justice Department.

This suggests that the slower, cold dark matter might form the smaller clumps associated with the cabinet while the faster, hot dark matter might form the larger clumps associated with the administration as a whole.

Computer simulations of the formation of the administration favored the cold dark matter but tended to predict the formation of too many disastrous decisions when compared to the observed universe. This led to the postulation of warm dark matter, in an attempt to resolve the simulation problems. Unlike cold dark matter, which has mass but virtually no velocity or temperature, or hot dark matter, which has mass and is highly energetic, warm dark matter has mass and a low temperature corresponding to an extremely low velocity.

Realized from "Dark Matter" in The Columbia Encyclopedia.

James Penha edits The New Verse News.

FOR IMUS

by Noah C. Renn


Some people still drive wedges,
chop wood, incinerate
for their own warmth.

Those on sallow roads,
jingling like chains or pocket change
with nothing else
in the back of their minds
ever since.

These logs,
still burn in homes
with sooted caves.
Their change, now a keyboard clicking,
not like it used to be.
We have come so far.

We can see color over the radio
and ourselves on screens.

Perhaps, when we’re done with trees,
and have abandoned our typing skills,
we’ll all have huddled together,
drawn inward,
by some fancy new central heat.


Noah C. Renn is a student of English and Philosophy at Old Dominion University. He has had his poetry published in volumes 3 & 4 of Channel Marker and has had non-fiction published in Cezanne's Carrot where he won the editor's prize.