ALL HALLOWS' EVE

by Lillian B. Kennedy


The night the dead
come home to roost
like this
picture from Abu Ghraib. Who
wears the dunce cap now?
Who

dances the puppet’s fractured stance
in the Headless Horseman’s cloak?

What barrage of boots
lines up for recruits’

cornucopian buses
to explode? Whose

birthright blood
or apostolic relic? All Hallows

Eve, the haggard faces,
the rent fabric

of embers like scopes
in the desert. The long procession

of Good Friday chants
bearing up crosses

transatlantic, noosed
in the KKK. Who

rigs up the tortured
to look like wizards? Who

names the saints
of eves that detonate days?


Lillian Baker Kennedy, author of Tomorrow After Night (Bay River Press, 2003) and Notions (Pudding House, 2004) practices law and lives in an old cape bordered by wild roses in Auburn, Maine. A part-time instructor at USM L-A, Kennedy is a Pushcart nominee and graduate of Stonecoast’s MFA program. Kennedy’s poetry has been anthologized, exhibited and published in numerous small presses and is forthcoming this fall in the Comstock Review and Puckerbrush Review. An interview, critical essay on poetics and some poems are available online.

CONSIDER THE PEPPER

by Laurie Kuntz

On a Friday afternoon in southern Jerusalem ,
17 year-old Rachel Levy was entering a Supersol market
to buy a pepper for the Sabbath meal.
Another girl, 18 year-old Ayat al- Akhras, a Palestinian suicide bomber,
also walked into the market alongside Rachel Levy.

the soil is tilled
pepper plants
gingerly grow

in a measured line of ground
side by side, yet apart
under desert sun and rain
its bellied shape ripens
to fireball red
a plump season of sweetness and spice
the weighty stalk peppered
in greens and red leans to ground
    the pepper easily falls,
over soiled lands into toiled hands

consider the pepper
consider the possibilities
    the soil is tilled,
                                                the soil is stilled.

Laurie Kuntz’s bio is as elusive as her estrogen levels. Sometimes she remembers she is a poet and sometimes not. During her five minutes in the sun Laurie has done the following: She is the winner of the 1999 Texas Review Chapbook Contest and her chapbook, Simple Gestures, is published by Texas review Press (2000). Blue Light Press published her chapbook, Women at the Onsen, in 2003. Edwin Mellen Press published her poetry collection, Somewhere in the Telling in 1999. She is the author of two English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) books, The New Arrival, BKS. 1 &2(Prentice-Hall, 1982, 1992). She was the editor of the University of Maryland's Asian Division's literary magazine, Blue Muse, and was a contributing editor to Hunger Mountain Magazine. Currently, she is a contributing editor for RockSaltPlum online literary magazine. In 2003, three of her poems were nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. More on her life and poetry can be seen on lauriekuntzpoetry.homestead.com. Pining for the tropics, she works and writes in Northern Japan.

THE DEMOC RAT RACE

poeArtry by Charles Frederickson



Amazing trail blazing democRAT RACE
    VIPer sniper venomous campaign-in’ asps
        Wriggly debate shedding scaly glisten
            iPod split p’s & q’s spilt soup

Run Hillary Rodham Clinton run
    Arkansassy First Lady Prexy-in-waiting
        Bill’s better half frosty cupcake
            Skirting domestic affairs pantsuit issues

Barrack to Future Movin’ On
    Helloha all-American-do / will-do O+ transfusion
        Oprah’s fave physically morally fit
            Minus sneer Cheney’s cuz McO’bamawitzson

John Edwards cutie pee-can pie
    Veep designate Gored by bull
        Photogenic memory cool hair conditioner
            Declaring war on split ends

Gov Richardson borderline macho honcho
    Old West New Mex-Max-Mix-Moxie
        Buffalo Bill pushing Hispanic button
            UNity ambassador North Korea nogo-gotiator

Christopher Dodd revitalized Peace Corpse
    Joe Biden time ready-to Delaware
        Dennis Kucinich Don’t Gitmo Satisfaction
            Gravel-blind ex-spurt don’t Alaska


Dr. Charles Frederickson. Name: D. Mentor Stan Doubt; Nickname: Nun; Address: Genial Devilry State of Denial; Zip: B9-1-1; Phone: Taco Bell; Faxhole: telepathetic moonsense UFOcult; Sexile: manimal; He-male: e-diot dot commie; vagabondAge: Ironic; Blood: Taipei; Vision: 20-20-20; Religion: Born Against trance-incidental Vegetation; Education: U-Nique BSer IV Leak Overachiever; Major: Mickey Mouse Pad Commuter Séance; Club Memberships: A, AA, AAA, AAAA, AAAAA; Special Abilities: Unmentionable Listless Hypist; halluciDate: Blind Man’s Bluff TGIF.

HOW DO YOU PLEAD?

by John E. Simonds


A generation only cares so much
for those who’ve passed
and shuffled to the door.
Courtly courtesies and step asides
give way in time to retro scorn
for things the elders left undone,
failed to do enough about,
didn’t see as problems—
asbestos, landfills, toxic waste,
tobacco, landmines, poison sprays,
abattoirs, unequal pay in tropic lands,
children tricking tourists to survive,
neighbors butchered for their faith or looks,
prisons, mental bins some states ran like zoos,
park creatures warming on sidewalk grates
blood past dried before we knew it spilled.

I don’t think we realized…
Actually, it was the law…
What choice did we have?
People seemed to like living with their own…
(inside the red-lined blocks
where banks wouldn’t lend and
Realtors kept the market in their lock box…)
Women don’t need to make as much because
(a) they’re single (b) their husbands work…
Migrants, happy to be getting paid at all…
The barbed wire protected both sides…
We tore down all those trees to print your books…
We got more done with the doors closed…
If the hammer hits them right, the cattle never feel a thing…
That’s humane slaughter; our oxymoron wasn’t gored...
It was stuff we sprayed to get rid of the leaves…
Always done that way, but it could never happen now…
Following orders led us to believe…Who knew?

Our bads, results of well-meant tries
that read today as compromise and later, lies,
on tomorrow’s courtroom screen,
as cascading bones and socketed skulls
plowed on the blades
of war-crime excavators
unearthing evidence, Exhibits A through Z,
in bulldozed piles of horror.

Initial frowning doubts (you knew about this, right?)
sour to annoyed (how could you let it happen?)
as the past becomes a body count
of benign neglect morphing to atrocities,
then atro-states and atro-nations of the planet,
places where we red-lined our misgivings
but waited for the world to change us...
waited for the law to make the changing safe.


John Simonds is a retired Honolulu daily newspaper editor and former mainland journalist who has lived in Hawaii since the 1970s.

PRIMARY CAMPAIGN, 2007

by Nancy Kenney Connolly


They say they’ll pray on it, these mamas,
pray that God will tell them what to do,
the world is changing, this is a new beginning,
they will kill him, black man not supposed to
be sitting in that chair, ain’t anyone can stop it if
God wants it, they will kill him

Same as ever they have done these mamas
pray—for sons they know be safer
in the shadows—for sons they only sabotage
to save: this is not your blue-eyed end of town,
here forsythia survives by ruthless pruning
of its blossoms, O, let us pray


Nancy Kenney Connolly lives in Austin TX, though she will soon move to the Chapel Hill area of NC. Her poetry has been published in such journals as Asheville Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Concho River Review, The Lyric, Sycamore Review, and many others. She has three books, most recently Second Wind, and a chapbook, I Take This World, winner of the Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest.

AFTERMATH

by Wayne Crawford


There has never been a Department of Creativity,
a Secretary of the Arts, a Narrative Surgeon General.
Never an empire dedicated to peace, a nation
unified by love. We’ve always lived in the After:
After the Department of Defense. After war budgets.
After war.
After the most powerful governments of this day
became the most prolific arms dealers of all time.

II.
A steel door is a trick; A litter of Golden Retrievers,
eyes bright, tails wagging, scamper out. A raised deck,
plain-surfaced except for a half-dozen embedded shower
heads, a trap.

I’m watching a “Special Report” on chemical warfare.
These pups breathe the spray: tails stiffen, faces sink,
bodies tremble, one leg and then another collapses.
Bewilderment glazes their eyes during their thirty seconds
until death.

We could be next. The single-engine dustcropper we see
through our kitchen window circles low over our homes
at 7:00 a.m. We could be dead before the eight o'clock news.
Or we could sit on our east-facing patio while morning
warms us, our coffee steams, and our creamy Danish
sugars our appetite for another day.

III.
Our current leaders approve so large a war budget, they
threaten to bleed dry domestic programs that pump
our economy with human resources. Maybe: They are
drawing up a list of our first born, our most famous, our
intellectual leaders, scientists. They already ban poets
from the White House unless they promise to speak well
of the president’s policies, or not at all.

I read that we are enemies of their holy war--their war
against us, whose lives are less valued than oil fields, landfills,
the quarter acre on a nowhere cul de sac to be
developed by a sleezy investor, who will, like strip miners
of the past, turn land into dead holes, leave a mess no one
can redeem, and move on, pockets full of paper on which
is printed, “In God We Trust.”

Our leaders say, there are no innocents among us. We are
with them or we are wrong and must be silent. The only
true patriot is a capitalist pig. Everyone else: a sinner.


IV.
The carpenter aims his magnetic tool at a plaster
wall to locate its studs. I wish it were that easy for
archeologists to identify and unearth the road to peace,
but that road is buried deeper than memory, beneath
one civilization after another that reigned and waned.

We can’t return to the infancy of Cain and Abel:
Before there were marked men. Before we needed gurus
to tell us peace was within ourselves. Before
governments determined who would live in peace, hired
and holstered citizens as peace officers because there was
no peace without them. Hired and holstered citizens
to soldier because there was fear and insecurity without them.


V.
It’s normal to burn forests, flood land, claim what is ours
for ourselves and what is others for ourselves too. Genocide
is our most recurrent activity. It is normal, military capabilities
that, in seconds, can kill yellow labs, destroy green crops,
ignite natural disasters one hundred times worse than Katrina,
rocket Earth into a black hole. It is normal
when you live in the After. In the aftermath,
there are no never-neverlands.

VI.
Sitting on the patio this evening is almost perfect, cool
autumn, slight breeze, no mosquitoes, fish playing
in their pond, hummingbirds on Honeysuckle blooms,
butterflies on Zinnias.

I wrote checks this afternoon for my estimated taxes,
one for the state, another for the U.S. Treasury. I no longer
credit peace as a possibility. Mornings, before I eat my sweet
Danish with my designer coffee, sitting in my chair
at my table on my patio, my plate is half-
filled with sugar, half with greed.


Wayne Crawford manages the online literary journal, Lunarosity, and is co-managing editor of Sin Fronteras/Writers Without Borders, an annual anthology of New Mexico writers and others in that region. His work has appeared in New Verse News before, as well as in Mannequin Envy, Shampoo, Motherbird, and many others. His latest publication, a book-length collection of poetry, Sugar Trail, was released in September 2007. Sugar Trail can be purchased (and exerpts read) at www.zianet.com/lunarosity/crawford.html.

CALIFLAGRATION

by David Feela


In the hills the homes
grow on trees.
Real estate is a dominant species
with conifers and oak
crowded out so that swimming pools
stay warmed by the sunshine.
When the fires started
picture windows broadcast the flames
as if they were high definition television.
When the winds gusted
the crowds would not be contained,
half a million fanned like smoke
into church basements, sports stadiums,
motels, and relatives’ homes.
The newscasters cleared their throats
and folded their hands:
Everything humanly possible
had been done, is being done,
still needs to be done.
The governor spoke calmly
with a smile on his face,
an expert in the business
of acting.


David Feela is a poet, free-lance writer, writing instructor, book collector, and thrift store pirate. His work has appeared in regional and national publications, including High Country News’s "Writers’s on the Range," Mountain Gazette, and in the newspaper as a "Colorado Voice" for The Denver Post. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Inside/Outside Southwest and for The Four Corners Free Press. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments (Maverick Press), won the Southwest Poet Series. A new poetry book, The Home Atlas, will be released in 2009. His web page can be viewed at www.geocities.com/feelasophy.

DESTRUCTION OF THE CONSTITUTION

by Liane Ellison Norman


The column on the porch-
riddled by carpenter ants
and the leak that poured

into wood from the plugged- up
gutter-leans ready to fall away,
while the porch roof sags.

It's tricky to fix at this point.


Liane Ellison Norman won the Wisteria Prize for 2006, awarded by Paper Journey Press, for her poem "What There'd Been." She has also been published in the journal Rune, in Voices From the Attic (Carlow University Press, 2007), in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and Pittsburgh City Paper. Her first book of poetry, The Duration of Grief, was published in 2005 by Smoke & Mirrors Press, which also published her novel, Stitches in Air: A Novel About Mozart's Mother (2001). A biography, Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight (1990) and Simpleton Story: A Fairy Tale For a Nuclear Age (1985) were published by PPI Books.

THE SURGE

by Barbara Daniels


To the young, everything’s history, even
this morning, ripe-peach sun at the horizon
pounding an empty ballfield with heat,
August firm in its aims and mission.

In 415 BCE Athenians sent a doomed
expedition to Sicily, expecting a welcome.
When all was lost, they doubled their numbers
to many thousands. Fleeing men broke

at a river and fought each other for mouthfuls
of water already crimson with gore. The young
stir in their bedclothes, tousled, dreaming.
In their sleep, their beds move like boats

on rising water. I half turn away when a TV
general tells of a splendid strategy, lightning
tactics, the glorious dead. Swallowtail butterflies
drift in a surge of sunlight. At a purple coneflower,

a hummingbird stops, sipping the sweetness.
It’s an immature with splotched iridescence,
returning from sleep to hot orange light. And
Athens? It lost everything, ships, land, lives.


Barbara Daniels' book, Rose Fever, will be published by WordTech Press in 2008. The Woman Who Tries to Believe, her chapbook, won the Quentin R. Howard Prize and was published by Wind Publications. Her poems have appeared in The Louisville Review, Natural Bridge, Tattoo Highway, and many other journals. Barbara Daniels received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

PHYSICIAN OFFERS FREE VASECTOMY FOR BRONCOS TICKETS

by Rochelle Ratner


1.

Ride 'em, Cowboy! That's what kept going through her mind on the long drive from New York to Colorado. On their second date he'd impressed the hell out of her when he mentioned his waiting room had seats from the old Mile High stadium. She's lived here barely six months and the Broncos make it to the final playoff. He assures her he knows his way around the ticket scene. She's already bought new jeans and her first pair of cowboy boots. She also knows, of course, they can't afford scalper prices. Her husband's just getting his urology practice started. It never crossed her mind that he performs vasectomies, or that any man in Colorado would want one.


2.

And now it’s the Rockies turn. Winning seven straight playoff games, almost unheard of. Football’s more his interest, but if he could get tickets between first and home it might be fun. or more than fun. Whatever “fun” is in these hyped-up steroid days. Newspapers spread out on the table, it’s hard to think straight. His thoughts turn back to football. He thinks of Michael Vick. He thinks about castration. He thinks of men wanting vasectomies reversed, whose wives leave them anyway. He can’t get Vick’s dogs out of his mind. He thinks, this year, he has nothing to offer.


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.

THE BIG LOOPHOLE

OR, MATTHEW 19:24 REVISED


by George Good


George Washington was first in peace and war
and in his countrymen's hearts came before
John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, et al--
that's Latin for the names we don't recall.
A second George was middling and lukewarm--
he did a little good, perhaps more harm.
The voters spewed him out and swallowed Bill,
a sometimes sugared, sometimes bitter pill.
Now Poppy always wanted Jeb to run,
but born again from rehab rose this son--
we'll call him George III--to follow dad.
And thus we come full circle from a bad
monarch to a worse chief executive.
"Since it's more blessed to receive than give,
to help the rich get richer with this ax
I'll clear their path by cutting every tax.
The poor are always with us, so why not
reward those folks who drew the lucky lot?
If Caesar's close to you, you'll render less.
Go thou and win more money and--God bless!"
Here's Christianity with loopholes, friends.
The thing about the Bible is--it bends.
Now watch that needle's eye as it grows big
and lets pass through a camel--or a pig.

George Good has published previously in New Verse News as well as Light, The Evansville Review, Iambs & Trochees and Contemporary Rhyme.

ANN COULTER'S PRIVATE MOMENTS

by Stephanie Woolley-Larrea


The curtains drawn
the television off
she fixes a mug of herbal tea
sinks into the overstuffed couch--
cat paws on hardwood,
patchouli candle burning,
stacks of novels near her feet.
She twirls her blonde hair into
a haphazard ponytail, blinks
her blue eyes, happy to be free of
makeup and smiles. “Good day?”
her lover asks, not looking up
from her book, taking Ann’s head
into her lap, stroking her cheek
absentmindedly as she turns the page.
Ann shrugs, “Just like any other.”


Stephanie Woolley-Larrea is a mother, writer and teacher living in Miami, Florida. She writes both poetry and prose, and doesn't play favorites. Her work has been published in Sentence, Mipoesias, Gulfstream, and Florida English, among other places.

IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS

by Helen Tzagoloff


The valuable lesson of handwashing before and between examining each patient is today honored mostly in the breach.

--New York Times, June 20, 1995

Numerous studies have shown that busy hospital workers disregard basic standards of handwashing more than half the time.

--New York Times, October 17, 2007

Women in the streets begged
the police to leave them alone --
Viennese hospitals were certain death.
Better here in a muddy ditch,
or sewer with rats.

Why were the women dying
after giving birth in the hospital,
but not at home in the absence of
the latest in medical care?
asked young Doctor Semmelweis,
observing his fellow doctors and
students examining sick women,
examining their corpses, examining
healthy women, examining them sick,
examining their corpses, examining
healthy women, coming back
to examine them sick or dead.

Gentlemen, he said, if you would
wash your hands, mothers would
live to care for their babies.

His superiors scoffed, told him to stop
this nonsense about washing hands.
They couldn’t waste their valuable time
on something unpreventable. A miasma
settled in the wombs and did away
with society's undesirables, women
unfit to be mothers. Doctors must not
interfere with nature's way.


Helen Tzagoloff has worked as a microbiologist and often writes on subjects related to science and medicine. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Blueline, New York Quarterly, PMS and other journals. She was the First Place Winner in the Icarus International 2002 Competition in honor of the Wright brothers. She lives in New York City.

BIPOLAR MELTDOWN

poeArtry by Charles Frederickson


Crisis of confidence glacial breakaway
    Noxious whitehouse gases no limits
        Massive icebergs hidden below surface
            Cracks revealing abysmal credibility gaps

Harsh CIA interrogations topless secrets
    Terror suspects barraged with humiliating
        Painful physical ill-conceived psychological tactics
            Waterboarding simulated drowning sadistic mind-games

Bent funhouse sideshow mirror distortions
    Warped values emotional roller coaster
        Derailed friction on collision course
            Loop-the-Loop thrill ride suffering whiplash

Unethical Age of Manic Depression
    Drip-drip-drip scandals unbecoming deluge
        Nothing too extreme mood swings
            Cruel uncivil rights inhuman wrongs

Technology capable of improving standards
    Conscientious objectors mass destruction weapons
        Potential for goodness gracious evildoers
            Grounded rusty anchor common decency

Moral is there are none
    If WE can do it
        To THEM why won’t THEY
            Do the same to US


An ARTiculate uinVERSEalist, heretical believer, pragmatic idealist and visionary enabler, Dr. Charles Frederickson’s seasoned wonderland intrepid wanderlust has taken him to 206 countries, images and impressions of each presented on http://www.imagesof.8k.com. One-man art gallery shows in Chicago, Bangkok and Amman, as well as dozens of magazine covers and graphic arts illustrations. His innovative poem & picture PoeArtry combos are ongoing Poem of the Day features @ listenandbeheard.net as well as progressive political viewpoints at newversenews.com. Current exhibitions of his artwork can be viewed at ascentaspirations.ca, abovegroundtesting.com and poetrycemetery.com.