HENSLEY, WEST VIRGINIA

by Ann Malaspina

50 Years Into the War on Poverty, Hardship Hits Back --NY Times, April 20, 2014

The yard is mud
with a rug on the grass
and playset without swings.
There is a stove on the porch,
a bike on the steps,
twin satellite dishes on the tin roof.
I wear my granddad's slippers
and my own jeans
and I tell the dog to jump
for his biscuit
but the cat's hungry, too,
and everyone else
is still asleep.
My long hair swings
when I turn.
The dog barks again.
The sky in the trees
is white like
this is the beginning
or is this the end.
I don't know which.


Ann Malaspina’s "Counting" was published in The New Verse News in 2009.  She is a poet and children's author living in New Jersey.

THE REASONS WHY

by Kristin LaTour

South Sudanese rebels seized a strategic oil town last week, separating terrified residents by ethnicity before killing hundreds, the United Nations said. "We believe that at least 400 people were killed in Bentiu in the past week," said Toby Lanzer, the top United Nations official in South Sudan. Before the attacks, some rebel commanders broadcast messages on local radio warning certain groups to leave town. "Others broadcast hate messages declaring that certain ethnic groups should not stay in Bentiu and even calling on men from one community to commit vengeful sexual violence against women from another community," the U.N. Mission in South Sudan said. At one hospital, Nuer men, women and children who refused to cheer the rebels were killed, according to the United Nations. --CNN, April 23, 2014

We killed them because it seemed the best thing
at that time, that time being one where both sides
were firing guns, in the context of having guns
that can shoot fast and accurately, bullets traveling
through walls and doors like jets puncturing clouds.

We killed so many because they were not stopping
not even to reload, just hurling fire and metal at us. Or
they were running away and we gave chase, falling on
their necks with our teeth. It wasn't until after we saw
they had no shoes, no weapons, but the blood was sweet.

We killed the women and children for aesthetic reasons.
Their genes were not the same as ours, not entirely, and
our skin is fairer than theirs. Their skin reminded us of stones
and the sky during a storm. Falling rocks and lightning
are dangers. The land seems brighter now without them.

We killed even the crops and livestock because it was a drought
and the fields were dusty, the leaves curling. No one would eat
such miserable gleanings. The chickens and pigs left foul
odors we could not stomach, and the rare cow was bloated
and called for milking. We didn't like the sound, so mournful.

We killed the songs and dances, the ceremonies and paintings
because they reminded us too much of our own when we were
far from our homes, sleeping in abandoned factories and keeping
watch over the night with just a small fire burning. We remembered
our wives and mothers voices and steps, how the priest blessed us.

Kristin LaTour's poems have appeared on The New Verse News and in journals like Witness, Fifth Wednesday, Adanna, dirtcakes, and Rock and Sling. She has three chapbooks, the most recent being Agoraphobia from Dancing Girl Press, 2013. She teaches at Joliet Jr. College and lives in Aurora, IL.

GEORGE BUSH PAINTS

by Louise Robertson

Putin by Bush

This is what we artists and open mic 

worshipers have hoped for

all this time with our journals

and rants and sketches, to see

someone so Republican at the altar of

art. One sees the scratchings, 

like our own attempts at the cave wall.

Hands stained red. The trick

of dimension is like a whole extra grade

level. The trick of expression--

however easy to start--

so much harder to get exactly right.

I want to take him to workshop,

talk to him about getting the bones

of it down first. What could this man know of bone

and muscle and ligament

having ignored so much gore in his path:

the scraped and scalloped wartime bodies,

the skulls looking like so many bladders

emptied of their gray and red and black,

the rubble made out of parlors and

kitchens? If that introspection

can come from making art,

if that is one of life's most elusive gifts, if that

is the divine in the human coming out,

I have to say, George: finally.

Louise Robertson has earned degrees (BA Oberlin, MFA George Mason University), poetry publications (Pudding Magazine, New Verse News, Parting Gifts) and poetry awards (Mary Roberts Rinehart, Columbus Arts Festival Poetry Competition -- twice). She is active as a poet and organizer in her local Columbus, Ohio poetry.

FOR FASHION SAKE: RANA PLAZA REMEMBERED

by Darrell Petska

The bodies of a man and woman as they embrace in their last moments from the collapse of a garment factory in Rana Plaza building.
Photo by Taslima Akhter   |   Savar, Bangladesh   |   April 25, 2013
Image source: Raw Journalism

Rana Plaza a year on: did fast-fashion brands learn any lessons at all? Some 1,133 garment workers died yet profits from cheap clothes have soared.
--The Observer, April 20, 2014

A year after Rana Plaza: What hasn’t changed since the Bangladesh factory collapse.
--The Washington Post, April 18, 2014

If spirits ascending outworn bodies
sing life's value

then what a chorus a thousand raised
though Rana Plaza crumbled
to the indifferent click of dice
and money's soulless shuffle!

One year on, millions of hands
operating millions of sewing machines
in thousands of Rana Plaza lookalikes
make hand-to-rack clothes fast,
cheap, and disposable--apparel
and their makers mere commodities
valued a day then shed
for the next fashionable thing

cherished dreams and personal lives
of laboring souls be damned.
Torn from families and home,
Rana's dead remind us still

life and love abide in our hearts,
not our closets.


Darrell Petska, writing from Madison, Wisconsin, is a freelance editor in adult education who previously worked as a mental health caseworker, nursing home evaluator, and university editor. Past publications include Modern Haiku, Verse Wisconsin, ProtestPoems.org and others.

WALLS WE CAST

by Steven Alvarez

Image source: Mexington, Kentucky

favors busy fifty-two distraction
doing everything i have to get--
they don’t have to figure out what it feels like--
stands for—but don’t want--
needs--
fits that their face prison expansions--
let their dreams . . .
partly  . . . bc
analogy for
a march to downtown mexington is going to be forty miles on saturday . . .
over & see
how we can be in getting media--
tonight—say yes on its own supporters--
symbol that it takes to get the treatment that
hand unwilling to respect—i
united it--
carports please or abt this
set--
last two days but we don’t know
in the coming days--
incident did
just as much support as we’ve seen so far . . .
arms up--
to what it takes--
responses voted for that matter--
going to be a response—is that
the thing that’s been going on--
word for word deportations over
the king & finding the . . . here . . .
happy here at the back--
it’s so much easier to go on phone . . .
out . . . these . . . deportables . . .  in mind


Steven Alvarez is an Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. He is the author of the novels in verse The Pocho Codex and The Xicano Genome, both published by Editorial Paroxismo. His chapbook Six Poems from the Codex Mojaodicus won the 2013 Rane Arroyo Prize sponsored by Seven Kitchens Press. 

NIZHONI, A YOUNG NAVAJO

by William Roland Rozar

Image source: Indian Children's Program

                                 April is Child Abuse Prevention Month 
                                        --Navajo-Hopi Observer, April 22, 2014


  This is my poem
                              This is my song
    I beat it on my drum
    My father beats me everyday
    He says it will make me strong
    And that someday I will pass my strength
    On to my children
    Who I will make strong.
                              But I just hurt,
    All the time,
                              And want to run away
    To leave and never return,
                              That also hurts,
    I must find a place
                                Where no one
    Can touch me.
                                This is my song
    I beat it on my drum.


William Roland Rozar is a poet who lives and writes in Eugene, Oregon.

THE STOWAWAY

by Anne Graue





Scaling the fence in San Jose
he smiled at himself,
proud to have not taken
that first drag in the seventh
grade when his friend Gavin
held out the pack of Marlboros.
His breathing was easy now,
and he felt his sneakers
hit the tarmac with some give.
He smiled again
circling the phrase "Homeland Security."
His comb in his back pocket,

he jumped inside the well
of the landing gear, finding
a place to roll his adolescence
into a position that might
outlast the flight, his unconsciousness,
his conscious act of defiance--his parents'
frantic search for their son gone
missing, who was a good kid, didn't smoke
or do drugs, who was smart enough,
who knew that hitching a ride inside
the outside of a 767 was a possibility.
His body folded up easily above the wheels--

he woke in paradise, combed his hair,
remembered how the noise was so great
and the cold was so numbing.


Anne Graue writes poetry and teaches online from her home in New York's Hudson Valley. Her poems have appeared in Paradigm, Compass Rose, Sixfold Journal, and The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly, and she was a finalist in the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award competition for 2013. She has written reviews of literary magazines for NewPages.com.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, BORN 450 YEARS AGO TODAY

by Earl J. Wilcox

Image source: Elephant

. . . Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!
But soft! but soft! aside: here comes the king.
                                            --Hamlet 5.1

Rapper from Avon:
Yo, you stun our souls, our mate.
Sing on, man, sing on.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

LEGAL ARGUMENTS

by David Chorlton

Tucson, AZ  -- The Arizona Department of Water Resources has approved a massive groundwater pumping project that will drain the Upper San Pedro River in Southern Arizona. This decision comes despite opposition from the property owners along the river and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and ignores the project’s impact on the birds, wildlife, and local residents and businesses that are dependent on a healthy river. --Earth Justice, April 16, 2013

A river soaks slowly into statutes
piled upon it by way
of the arguments
that a hundred year supply
of illusions is guaranteed.

By paragraph and case law
the current is diverted
while promises are laid
instead of foundations
for houses for whom

the weather forecast is running
dry. With cufflinks shining
like spring runoff
a developer listens closely
to his counsel say

that taking away the water
will have no adverse impact
on the river, begging
the question whether language
can outlast meaning.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and still sees his surroundings with an outsider's eye. This helps his writing projects, which include a new poetry collection,"The Devil's Sonata," from FutureCycle Press.

ENCIRCLING LOOM

by James Grabill

Amniotic drops of prehistoric dew on the canyon rim walls luminesce with light in the brain.

Complex otherness floats in womb-pulse swaths crossing the Pacific in adaptations of bodily cells.

Under blinding stars, electrical ancestral stories pour down through the small houses of losses and gain, where future scarcity looms and a dark-violet eyelash carries more weight than we know.

As the road goes out on its own, the root in a seed will decide. Where daylight drives the atmosphere, a shirtless boy swims in the sea of air. The cradle collides with shadow and magnetic lineage in current encircling turns.

As overflow sleep expands and contacts in the spectrum, the unfinished complex mind has an eye for complexity in the world.

Isn’t this where separation from the whole grew opposable thumbs and set off on the road coming back?

What part of the whole would being exclude? What animals haven’t loved and feared this air?


James Grabill’s poems have appeared in numerous periodicals such as Stand (UK), Magma (UK), Toronto Quarterly (CAN), Harvard Review (US), Terrain (US), Seneca Review (US), Urthona (UK), kayak (US), Plumwood Mountain (AUS), Caliban (US), Spittoon (US), Weber: The Contemporary West (US), The Common Review (US), and The Buddhist Poetry Review (US). His books of poems include Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone and An Indigo Scent after the Rain. He lives in Oregon, where he teaches 'systems thinking' relative to sustainability.

SERENITY SERENADE

by The Bangkok Bards Saknarin Chinayote & Charles Frederickson

Let reality be reality spontaneously
Flowing wherever it so chooses
Find bliss stay a while
Pause to reflect harmless pleasures

Accept what is desiring less
Achieving more relax trusting reanquility
Feeling oneness with natural quietude
No whistles horns sirens alarms

Good humor helps lighten burdens
Genuine smile soothing calming influence
Cheerfully attracting keeping devoted friends
Disposition antidote for depressing angst

Inhale exhale it does help
Breathe in deep hold it
Silencing overactive imagination which never
Knows when to shut up

The quieter you become the
More you’re able to hear
Filter out noisy stressful static
Concentrate on inner consciousness tranquility

Filling emptiness with overflowing nature
Commit energies to environmental awareness
Planet balancing equilibrium passed on
Future generations spoiled brat legacy

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

AN UNJUST LAW

by Gil Hoy

The drawn-out execution of Dennis McGuire has prompted many to question lethal injection in Ohio. McGuire's execution took about 25 minutes; a state expert said he expected it to happen in a matter of minutes. -- The Plain Dealer, January 26, 2014.

Can’t get Ohio out of my
head, damn.

Took 26 minutes to kill
him, some new-fangled
poison not the usual,
a half-baked horror show.

Sour drugs flowed through
blue veins, the prisoner
strapped to a gurney gasped
vacant eyes staring,

rattling,
nose snorting,
choking almost guttural--
like food stuck in your
windpipe
on and on, convulsions.

By all accounts, he was
a horrible savage man

25 years ago,
raped, tortured and killed
a young woman with child,

just married, still to live
and be enjoyed.

So nothing cruel or unusual
here, an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth,
Lex talionis, as prophesied.

But this death more
like a Macabre blunder
at a public square picnic
hangin’ from days old,
when the man’s head
in the too-tight hemp noose
might come clean off,

Minute after lingering
minutes, following terrible
60 second minutes
Strangling from the inside,
a mammal gasps for breath.

Heard that his blood in the
crowd had to cover their ears
and wipe their tears from
soaked ashen faces,
I say listen up, after what he did.

If you agree, show the
video play-back to your son,
so he can see what we do,
though slow suffocation
is not for the squeamish,
something to Hide?

Murder: premeditation
and unlawful killing,
the state does you one better,
premeditation and ceremony,
and who are we
to tell the state what to do,
sounds AOK to me.

Much ado about nothing.
Throw to hungry lions
crush ‘em with fat elephants,
devoured by wild sweaty-toothed beasts
does the trick
tear them apart by Galloping horses,
burn him like an over-cooked
headless turkey for your Thanksgiving roast,
crucifixion, decapitation, boil until cooked.

Firing squad? Pass the loaded Gun
please, stoning? A duplicitous
contest to see who casts the first
stone. Disembowelment, OK,
dismemberment, tie him to a
cannon and set the charge, so cool

your mouth just drips with blood
like a stale English Pudding,
gas, hangings, electric chair,
That covers it.

But somewhere I read and
believed to the marrow, now
shaking terrified: turn to him
the other cheek also, or we
will all be Toothless and Blind.

No one’s listening or caring
anymore,

Blood red Hearts disgorged on a
winding cobblestone trail that leads
to a distant dream
That our eyes don’t hear anymore
and that tastes forgotten anyway.


Gil Hoy is a trial lawyer in Boston, and grew up in Brookline, MA. He received a B.A in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. degree in Government from Georgetown University, and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Gil is an elected member of the Brookline Democratic Town Committee, and served as a Brookline Selectman, the Town's highest elected office, for 12 years. Gil is married, with three children, and lives in Brookline, MA.

CHURCH CALL

by Antony Johae

Image source: City-Data

It was Orthodox Easter and the church was full.
The chanting of prayers stretched into the night.
The celebrants sat, then rose to sing
Crossing themselves in three-fold Love.
They awaited the glorious hour of twelve
When Christ would rise in saving Grace
And all would cry that He was risen.

Next to me a man with a phone
placed between us on the pew
he looking down at it constantly
and when his hand stretched out to it
it lit as though at his command,
then out when he withdrew his hand
as though its charge had gone – and slept.

He turned to me when the mass was done,
shook my hand with a friendly grip.
“Emad’s my name, I’m Syrian born.
And you, I think, from London – right?”
I told him I came from Colchester town
but he’d heard only of the Manchester team.
We chatted for a while about this and that
the church emptying as we sat.
Then he made to go. “Your phone,”
I said, it lying silent still.
Aghast at his forgetting
he picked it up and it at once
lit up, he whispering keenly,
“I’m waiting for a call from God.”


Antony Johae is a freelance writer and divides his time between Lebanon and England.

THE OTHER NINETY-EIGHT PER CENT

by Laura Rodley

28th Annual Alma Spinach Festival, April 19, 2014

Migrant worker’s hands stained green
from picking spinach, green leaves
full of iron he cannot eat, washes
his hands in a bowl in his room
sleeps on a bare mattress on the floor
window glass broken, curtains frayed
their once brilliant yellows whitened
with sun that only tans his face
deeper, squints his eyes when
he walks back out to the rows of spinach
washing his hands in the sprinkler
set for the plants, not allocated
for him, the chuckwagon rolls in, sells
warm bagels and cream cheese, hot coffee
but not Columbian like he drank at home,
the drops of mercy that carried him through
the morning, saving money for his daughter’s
communion, the priest's drops of mercy,
holy water touched to her forehead
to protect her, keep her from a future
like this where he bends his back to the hot soil
the green leaves he cannot eat;
they are for sale, not for him.
Maybe at home the corn he planted
has come up, maybe his conchita
has already picked them, or his son,
what he would give to go back home,
only drops of mercy now
the sweat that rolls down his face
ten o’clock sun and it’s already eighty degrees,
and the spinach needs picking before it wilts.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.