THE PRESS SECRETARY FORGETS HIS LINES

by Judith Terzi

President Obama said Friday that White House press secretary Jay Carney will be stepping down from his job and be replaced by deputy Josh Earnest. ‘It's been an amazing experience,’ Carney said after Obama's announcement. ‘Just so fulfilling’.”  --USA Today, May 30, 2014

Yes, Michelle and B went out for pizza. Yes,
macaroni. They're in Baltimore. That's

where my mother was born. Well, really,
she was born in Annapolis; her father

worried sick she'd marry a sailor. We're
fundamentally all from Baltimore,

aren't we? We are all on the same page. Even
Vlad. He flew in last night. Staying

in the spare closet. I mean closest bedroom
to the rest of the O's. Yes, he can.

He can recite couplets from the Rubaiyat. He's
a real gadabout from Siberia to the gulf

stream waters, from D.C. to Donetsk. Yes,
I believe he believes that this land

is his land, folks. Yes, two-thirds of Americans
fundamentally believe in didactic melting.

Yes, I believe that at the end of the day, we're all
on the same page at the end of the day.

No, man, I don't believe we've ever met
a Talisman close up in Baltimore. No,

no, I don't believe in direct talk with anyone.
I've lost my water bottle. Does anyone

happen to have a jug of bread, a loaf of wine?
A bow-wow? My water bottle walked off

with Joe. Slipped down the neck of a crane.
My keychain has disappeared, too. If you

see one with rhinestones and an owl and a million
keys, bend down and pick it up. No, no,

no, no pussy cat. Yes, I believe there's a recent
recall on carbon emissions. Yes, over

a million first-time visitors to the website over
the weekend. Now that's a real rhinestone.


Judith Terzi is a poet living in Pasadena, California. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Centrifugal Eye, Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo), Pacific Coast Poetry Series' Los Angeles Poetry Anthology (Beyond Baroque), TheRaintown Review, and elsewhere. Her latest chapbook from Finishing Line is Ghazal for a Chambermaid. A former high school French teacher, she also taught English at California State University, Los Angeles, as well as in Algiers, Algeria.

PASSION SKY

by Martha Landman

This is the incredible moment when a huge volcano erupted in Indonesia sending ash spewing an estimated 12 miles into the sky. The powerful explosion took place at Mount Sangeang Api in the Lesser Sunda Islands - an area that plays host to 129 active volcanoes - and sent a distinctive spaceship-shaped ring of pyroclastic smoke high into the air.  The photographs were taken by professional photographer Sofyan Efendi during a commercial flight from Bali to the fishing town of Labuan Bajo in West Nusa Tenggara province. Scores of farmers who work but do not live on the island were ordered to leave and not return until the volcano has finished erupting, said Muhammad Hendrasto, head of Indonesia's National Volcanology Agency. There are not believed to have been any deaths or injuries as a result of the eruption. Authorities have had Mount Sangiang Api - which means 'Mountain of Spirits' in Balinese - on high alert for almost a year, he told China's Xinhua news agency.  The volcano sits in Indonesia's notorious 'Ring of Fire' - an area where a large number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur in the basin of the Pacific Ocean. It has 452 volcanoes - 75 per cent of the world's total. --Daily Mail (UK), May 30, 2014

The sky is a passion tower
A vertical breath from the bosom of a fire God
Voluptuous love-plumes bellow like a death sentence
An inferno of justice

Where are the birds, the planes?
Entranced by elemental fury, farmers hover in the shade and
offer incense and a thousand goats to the gods
who enrich their soil

The sky is a love sculpture
Tangled clouds of fairy floss assault the atmosphere
Rivers flow in lava, arisen from the mountain floor —
Tomorrow’s saucers fly —
The sky is passion.


Martha Landman writes in North Queensland, Australia. Her most recent work has appeared in Jellyfish Whispers.

FRAGILE COSMOS HANDLE WITH TLC

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Gaze turned skyward illuminating darkness
Lunarocity casting spellbound enchanting aura
Craving purposeful radiant cosmic challenge
Seeking nobly valiant worthy goals

Vast tapestry of quilted nothingness
Tiny dusty speck barely visible
Hiding behind own shadowy existence
Gritty round pearl cultured quintessence

Ethereal overcast sky catching breath
Straightening uphill crooked winding path
Imposing windswept membrane floating rhythms
Horizon contour gracefully bent curve

Virtually uninhabitable planet killing off
Humanimal strays passing as friends
Looking beyond hostile uninviting vacuum
It’s okay to have flaws

Glistening astral pinpoints seeping through
Murky chaos fixed focus blurred
We’ve come long way to
Discover own vulnerable self-indulgent extremes

Firmament freely embracing world peace
Sunbeams impartially gushing forth hope
What we share far more
Valuable than what divides us

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

DONETSK IN EASTERN UKRAINE

by Phyllis Wax

Ukraine's rebel movement was plunged into crisis on Thursday, when pro-Russian fighters backed by armoured personnel carriers seized the movement's headquarters in Donetsk and destroyed the barricades protecting it. The surprise move by a group called the Vostok Battalion, a heavily armed rebel unit that has been involved in fighting against the Ukrainian army, sparked speculation about an internal coup within the fractious rebel movement. There was also speculation that the move could have been an attempt by the leadership to purge undesirable elements with the Donetsk Peoples' Republic. Key rebel leaders, who were not in the building when the fighters arrived, insisted they were still in control and that they had even ordered the operation. "This is a police action directed against looters," a rebel source close to Alexander Borodai, the prime minister of the self-declared republic, said on Thursday afternoon. "There is no coup. Everything is under control." --Roland Oliphant in Donetsk, The Telegraph, May 29 2014

Not a tractor on this farm field
but a turreted tank,
a lumpy blue blanket and
close by a khaki tarp
sprouting a clenched hand
at one end.  All around
a new spring crop
is pushing through.


Phyllis Wax muses on the news and politics from a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI.  She's been widely published, recently in The Widows' Handbook:  Poetic Reflections on Grief and Survival from Kent State University Press.  When she's not writing you might find her escorting at a local women's clinic.

NO LONGER CONFINED

by Johnnie Clemens May

Molested as a child
And mute for six years,
Yet you, with regal voice
And erect frame,

As an adult sang sweetly.
Never, once released, did you cease to ascend,
Giving so many fledglings silken wings.
Even Elijah could not work as many wonders.
Love was the creed
On which you based a life
Unlike any other’s:

Rich in word wisdom,
Insistent that the dove would soar,
Persistent in your dance of affirmation.


Johnnie Clemens May has an MFA in poetry from Pacific University and teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College in Arizona. 

AD ASTRA

by Bradley McIlwain

“A new meteor shower sparked some celestial fireworks late Friday and early Saturday (May 23-24), amazing stargazers across North America even though it did not reach the spectacular "meteor storm" levels that some had hoped for.” Photo: A small Camelopardalid meteor streaks through the northern lights as the Milky Way shines overhead in this stunning photo by stargazer Gail Lamm from Balmoral, Manitoba in Canada on May 24, 2014. Credit: Gail Lamm   --Space.com, May 24, 2014

A wolf sings
out my back gate
where does he go
at four a.m.?

The undergrowth
is cool, calming.
Tonight, we are
both prey

to the sky gods,
hungry meteors
dripping from the
womb

a golden apple
waiting for the
sleeping hero
to awaken


Bradley McIlwain's poems have appeared in The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly, The Open Mouse, Platform Magazine (Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia) and in anthologies such as Love Notes: A Collection of Romantic Poetry from Vagabondage Press (2012) and The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly Vol. 2 (2013). His poems have previously appeared in The New Verse News.

CALIFORNIA SHOOTING: STATEMENT BY RICHARD MARTINEZ

Our son Christopher and six others
are dead.           Our family
has a message for every parent out there.            You
don’t think it will happen           to your child
until it does.

Chris was a really
great kid. Ask anyone
who knew him. His death           has left
our family           lost
and broken.

Why
did Chris die? Chris died
because of craven,
irresponsible politicians
and the NRA.

They talk about gun rights.
What about Chris’s right
to live? When
will this insanity stop? When
will enough people say,

‘Stop this madness, we don’t
have to live like this.'
Too many have died.
We should say to ourselves:
‘Not          one           more.'

MEMORIAL DAY 2014

by George Held

These (mostly) young men and women

Have fought and died for our freedom –

Nasty business, but someone has to do it –

So the least we can do is honor them

Once a year on Memorial Day, which,

Sadly, fell on May 31st, making

A floating holiday, so in our wisdom,

And eternal quest for convenience, we

Fixed it on the last Monday in May, this year

The 26th, leaving the 31st to end

The month on Saturday. So on the 26th

Let us march in or watch a parade

To honor our (mostly) young at-the-time-

Of-their-death veterans of our wars. Amen.

An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND: ISLA VISTA, 2014

by Marjorie Maddox

Aftermath. Photo by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times. “Seen through a bullet hole, IV Deli Mart owner Michael Hassan cleans up his store near UC Santa Barbara. A gunman fatally shot someone there.”

     “Authorities on Saturday afternoon removed three bodies from the apartment of the suspect in Friday night's shooting rampage that left seven people dead in Isla Vista, near UC Santa Barbara.” --LA Times, May 24, 2014

On this weekend for honoring the dead,
more dead, the radio blasting updates
between ballads, Beach Boys, the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic.”

Friday night post-graduation
in a college town not unlike ours,
sorrow drenched in war songs and the same
bloody questions we’ve mourned before,
each grief mounting beyond what we feared
possible, and possible again,
the way the radio keeps blaring
Sousa, worse-case-scenarios drumming still
worse long after we’ve tried
to turn the knob, silence the sound waves,
to finally and forever
disconnect the throbbing beat
between each patriotic wave
of the half-mast flag.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book,  Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version).

FOOTNOTE TO THE UNOFFICIAL BEGINNING OF SUMMER

by Howie Good

Image source: Crane Lake Nature Blog

Poem inspired by “Black-Throated Blue Warbler: Listen, Stop and Watch” by Dave Taft, NY Times “City Room” Blog, May 16, 2014

You don’t
need to call
yourself
a bird-
watcher

Anyone
can take
a cue from
the black-
throated blue
that last
night’s winds
blew in

This wasn’t
something
I’d experienced
before –

new leaves
and buds
and a buzz
that sounded
maybe not
to others
but to me
just like
“I’m-so-lay-zee!”

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the 2013 chapbooks Echo's Bones and Danger Falling Debris, both from Red Bird Chapbooks. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.

SHOULD NEVER

by Jay Duret

On the grassy plains of Siberia 42,000 years ago, a baby woolly mammoth fell into a sticky mud hole and choked to death, leaving her mother to grieve for her. Now this little mammoth is the star attraction of [London’s] Natural History Museum’s Ice Age exhibition, which opens [May 24]. Because of her riverbed location, her body was . . .  pickled by acids formed by bacteria that entered her body soon after death, which was then frozen in permafrost. . . . Her DNA is well preserved and there are very few samples of this type of mammoth. --Daily Mail (UK), May 21, 2014

Image source: SingularityHUB

 I.

Should never
I see that now.
Twisted by logic
Played by logicians, swept
By the force of cunning argument.
Should never.

Debate will do that.
The river of words
Slow, languorous even, at the edges
Where you first step in.
Gently seductive, gently urging,
Gently gently gently down the stream.
But further, towards the sluicing middle, the current
Irresistible. The logic, the argument, the hard claw of debate.
Irresistible.
I was carried down the stream.
I am sorry.
Should never.

I blame Google.
It is one thing, after all, to search for words.
We do that.
We are human; we have no choice.
But pictures? Images?
This should be taboo.

Once I saw you I could not straighten my thinking.
I knew the arguments, heard the debates,
I have a mind that can hold opposing ideas in balance.
In equipoise.
But the swoop of your ivory. Its magnificent curl.
The rich dignity of your coverings.
As a people, we dream of a coat like your colossal swinging fur coat.
We hear in dreams the deep poundings of your stride
Turning tundra to grassland, step by booming step.

To see your image was to fail you.
Should never.
Should never have brought you,
Woolly Mammoth, Woolly Mammoth,
I should never have brought you back.

II.

I was born in a glass tube in a clinic in LA
Cloned from a morsel of DNA, that DNA exhumed
From a nugget of amber,
Or a bubbling tar pit, or a fossil in the Dakotas.
My papa, not mammoth, not woolly,
A balding man in a white lab coat
With bad breath, like he stunk inside,
Like all humans.
Stunk inside.

I don’t speak human.
Human sounds won’t pass my mouth.
We took a vow, my brothers and sisters,
Even as we dwindled,
Even as the light that burned within us
Flickered
We would never utter words that had been spoken
By humans or their kind.
Poisoned meat. Poisoned grasses.
The rapaciousness of hunters.
The voraciousness of human hunger.
You hunted us down. You ate us up.
All of us.
Extinction.

I know why it is you brought me back.
I know what it is you want.
The debate, the logic, the business with Google; all lies
I know why you brought me back:
You want me to blow life into you.
You want me to give a gift of words.
But I won’t speak them.

To be extinct is to be beyond words.
Beyond any words, beyond all words,
Human words, mammoth words, it doesn’t matter.
I am beyond words.
I am dead to words.
I don’t speak human.
I took a vow.

Jay Duret is a San Francisco writer and illustrator. His stories have appeared in many online and print journals. He blogs at www.jayduret.com and welcomes feedback at jayduret(at)yahoo.com. 

TO A DRONE

by Mary Cresswell

The Justice Department will publicly release a secret 2011 memo that provided the legal justification for the killing of American terrorism suspects overseas, according to a U.S. official, following extensive pressure on the administration to do so. --Karen DeYoung and Sari Horwitz, Washington Post, May 21, 2014 [Image source: World Mathaba]

Sonnenizio on a line by William Blake (‘To the evening star’)

Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening
swooping nefarious above our lives
like some fairy tern. When we know
to pay the fare, you help us, sure –
but if we don’t, you go feral,
throwing us to the wolves, a fair cop
in some snoop’s book. The ferryman
collects our words, ferrets out
our fairweather friends and foes
and provides a fair copy to those
who think their welfare under threat.
In classic times, the Pharos did better,
keeping ships on course, sailing fair.
Spying on us is none of your affair.


Mary Cresswell is from Los Angeles and lives on New Zealand’s Kapiti Coast. Canterbury University Press will publish her fourth book, Fish Stories, next year.

THE PROFESSOR SAID

by David Plumb

Image source: UTPA

I teach soldiers
back from war.
I hear so much silence.

I see such glow
pale suchness
pride, a slim yes
a nod, an offset
remark or two.

They sit in when
Muscle-sharp
A pin drop, a cut
A dark brow, a tuft
A quick smile.

Somewhere in the room
I have soldiers who
ask without asking
What now?


David Plumb has worked as a paramedic, cab driver, cook, tour guide, and adjunct professor. 
Writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Outlaw Poetry Network, Sport Literate, Beatitudes 50 Years, 100 Poets Against the War, Salt, Blue Collar review, Gargoyle and One Paycheck Away. The author of ten books, he volunteers for the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and is past director for a homeless shelter.  Will Rogers said, “Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” Plumb says, “It depends upon the parrot.”

THE METHOD DOESN'T MATTER

by Kristina Cerise

One in three people say that if lethal injections are no longer viable — because of drug shortages or other problems — executions should be stopped altogether, according to the survey of 800 adults by Hart Research and Public Opinion Strategies for NBC News. But many others are open to more primitive methods of putting prisoners to death: 20 percent for the gas chamber, 18 percent for the electric chair, 12 percent for firing squad and 8 percent for hanging.        --NBC News, May 14, 2014

The thirst for death
will not be sated

The clinical tidiness
of a needle
administered by a gloved hand
is not necessary
to keep the conscience clean

They are comfortable
with the mess of
murder

Gas ‘em
Fry ‘em
Shoot ‘em
Hang ‘em

Lead pipe or candlestick
it doesn't really matter

The calls for death
are louder than the calls
for decency

For every one that hesitates
two salivate


Kristina Cerise is a Seattle writer committed to searching for meaning in the madness.