BEST FACE FORWARD

by George Held

Image: Selfie by Kresten Forsman

Reinvention, America’s
Most alluring cosmetic, now
Flourishes on social media.

Depressed or bored with how
You look, just change the foto
On Facebook and take a bow

With the newly enhanced you to
Wow your followers and friends;
Just watch the “likes” pile up, the “So

Cutes!” and “Awesomes!” making amends
For your blues and boosting self-esteem
Until some new rejection sends

You to take an iPhone selfie that you deem
A darling reflection of your best self-image,
Just the photograph that will redeem

You in the eyes of others, make you the rage
Of the moment on Instagram, whatever.
Yes, the chance to reinvent our visage

Proves again the genius of the founders
Of “Face”book – long may its format last
While we forever change our pictures

To meet the faces that we delete so fast
Online, blowing off each other’s horns,
That we have lost our sense of the past.

Try as we might, we cannot be reborn
Like our faces, however cosmeticized,
And inevitably age turns its scorn
 
On all of us. When you’ve compromised
Your pilgrim face and bookmarked your still life,
Your soul cannot try on another size.

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.

WALLENDA

by Joan Colby

Discovery has set November 2 for Nik Wallenda’s Chicago skyscraper tightrope walk. Using dozens of cameras positioned across the city and on helicopters, Discovery will follow Wallenda’s attempted two-part walk, without net or harness, at night, in one of the windiest sections of Chicago. For the first part of the crossing, Wallenda will walk about two city blocks – uphill rising to a 15-degree angle – from the iconic Marina City’s west tower to the Leo Burnett Building at more than 50 stories above the Chicago River. It will be the highest skyscraper walk in the history of the “Flying Wallenda” family and the first time Nik has attempted a tightrope walk at such a steep angle. The second part of the walk will span from the Marina City’s west tower to the east tower. --Deadline Hollywood, September 16, 2014






The windy city in blustery November
Is what he’s chosen, desiring like Houdini,
The drama of the unattainable.

Cables strung between Marina Towers,
Two wedding cakes of glass and steel.
Difficult placement for right angled

Dwellers, but he’s struck with the motif:
Midwestern schmaltz inviting round beds
Reminiscent of the center ring

Where his forefathers erected human pyramids
In vaulted air and learned the sentence
Of failure could be irrevocable.

A triple feat is what he’s devised,
Another wire stretched across the river
To a skyscraper square as the equation

He plans to solve. Famous as a wind-tunnel,
This route will test the nerve
Of trembling watchers

Whose challenge
Like his, is what
In the world they long for.

Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

THE BASEBALL SEASON'S

by Earl J. Wilcox

The San Francisco Giants celebrate wild-card clinch in their clubhouse following their 9-8 win against the San Diego Padres at AT&T Park in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2014. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

after e e cummings

defunct
which used to be far fewer games
   but now we play almost
intoNovemberwearingovercoatsandmittensingames
   during April and October
the Jeter circus has left town
   along with Zimmerman’s no hitter
Trout’s tantrums Puig&Pujhols' slambamthankyouma’am
   and what I want to know is
how do you like your wild card now
   Mr Selig


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.

ERASING HISTORY

by Janet Leahy

Image source: 7NewsDenver

"A newly conservative board for the Jefferson County School District, which is Colorado’s second-largest, raised the possibility of pruning the curriculum of books and material that could be seen to exalt civil disobedience and promote unpatriotic thoughts. Where does that leave the civil rights movement? Vietnam?" --Frank Bruni, “The Wilds of Education, NY Times, September 27, 2014

"The organization that oversees the Advanced Placement curriculum, whose history course is being defended by massive, ongoing student protests in a Denver suburb, has now said that it backs those protests. The College Board’s Advanced Placement Program supports the actions taken by students in Jefferson County, Colorado to protest a school board member’s request to censor aspects of the AP U.S. History course," said a statement from the College Board released on Friday. --HuffPost, September 27, 2014


In Colorado
students march with teachers protesting
the school board’s agenda to change
the AP history curriculum.
Why teach evolution, climate change,
the civil rights struggle, the exploitation
of Indigenous People?
Why teach critical thinking?
Just erase the chapters of the past that might
cast a negative light—
the bombing of Hiroshima, slavery.
Rip whole chapters from history books.
Red-flag for omission accurate facts
that show Americans
treating others as less than human.
The scholarship of history in question.
Yet these students
keep their eyes on the prize,
demanding an education aligned with truth,
knowing
ignorance is not bliss.


Janet Leahy writes poetry in New Berlin, Wisconsin.  A member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, she has two collections of poetry, The Storm, Poems of War, Iraq and Not My Mother’s Classroom.

THE ARTHUR MURRAY STUDIO IN MOSUL

by Christopher Woods

Has gone dark and quiet and sad,
But still the dancers come,
All ages, both sexes, sit in chairs,
In circles, or in lines facing each other,
No longer allowed the art of movement.
But imagination still breathes deeply
As they imagine dancing a polka,
Foxtrot, recall the smiles of partners
Taking each other’s hands, or holding
A lover close as a song ends.
No music here now, but who can forget
A glorious Strauss waltz, a sensual samba.
Still, they cannot, will not, surrender.
So in the ballroom gloom,
They silently, defiantly,
Hum Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Over the din of madness
In the street outside.


Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Texas.

DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE

by Martin Elster

This is an illustration of water in our Solar System through time from before the Sun's birth through the creation of the planets. (Image source: Bill Saxton, NSF/AUI/NRAO via Science Daily) “Water was crucial to the rise of life on Earth and is also important to evaluating the possibility of life on other planets. Identifying the original source of Earth's water is key to understanding how life-fostering environments come into being and how likely they are to be found elsewhere. New work from a team including Carnegie's Conel Alexander found that much of our Solar System's water likely originated as ices that formed in interstellar space. Their work is published in Science.” --Science Daily, September 25, 2014

The molecules commingling in your glass

once swirled in clouds of interstellar gas,

surrendered to a leisurely collapse

and drenched a world whose pair of crystal caps

interns them under sleds and fleecy shoes,

while warmer zones allow them to infuse

the stems and stalks of your Kukicha tea

or trickle up your favorite apple tree.

A cornice softens on the Matterhorn,

hastens toward Green Lake to be reborn

a mirror amid the heights, evaporates,

condenses in a stretch of blue, then waits

for drops to fuse and fatten, fall and land

on forest, field or the parading band —

a rill of resonances drifting down

the central boulevard of some small town,

each drumming hand, each fifing lung, each brain

brimming with primeval, living rain.

Martin Elster, author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in such journals as Astropoetica, The Flea, The Martian Wave, The Rotary Dial, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan. Martin’s poem, “Walking With the Birds and the Bones Through Fairview Cemetery” received first prize in the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014.

AUTUMN EQUINOX

by Howie Good

Image source: Country Wives

A swirling cloud of rocks & gravel
sweeps along the ground,
& before I have time to develop
a plausible theory about it,

the woman staggers up to me,
an eye missing, a hand gone,
a brittle blue flower tucked saucily
behind her remaining ear,
& I suddenly know of what the future consists:

a certain unrest in all there has been,

the desire to rescue scrap
& then serve celebratory champagne
to saints & alcoholics,

an unpremeditated encounter
at the breakfast table with an apple, pears,
a heart cut with a cake knife.


Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press.

MOVING FURTHER UP THE COAST

by Laura Rodley

Image source: Professor Potts

Clear balloon like creature, submarine shaped
with small yellow orange and pink dots draped
along its body, tiny beads for eyes
and tendrils on its bottom, a surprise
swishing through the salt sea water, small as
my hand disappearing into morass
of bright green sea lettuce waving on rocks
but tide is leaving and this creature balks
from swimming with current into the sea
squishes against rocks covered with wavy
green troll hair, but he’ll dry up in the sun
and die if he doesn’t hurry up and run
into tidal sluice, so I herd him out,
guide him with my hand towards ocean, turned about,
this squid moving up the coast, weather’s burst,
hotter, never seen one before, my first.

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.

AND SPLINTER

by Mark Danowsky

Image source: CNN, September 22, 2014

Obama Says Airstrikes Go Beyond ISIS --NY Times, September 23, 2014

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! -- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"

History is a lesson in repetition.
I know I’ve heard that said before.
Just like I’ve heard about us arming
and training rebel groups before.

Later, it almost goes without saying,
we will be forced to send more troops,
our troops, guns to combat guns
we sent the rebels we trained
since now they’re in charge
and causing us problems
because they will not give up
guns or beliefs
for our idea of democracy.

Look, we do what we have to
for others, in a well-known exchange
of autonomy, independence, hell
even free temptation
to be insular, given the dynamic
nature of our global community.

It’s an exponential market out there.
No one wants to be picked on
today, check out foreign policy
in Switzerland and France.
Most of us want greater good
in spite of mistakes made
and made again
in pursuit of good.

Evil cares little for mistakes
finding factious home
among the fractures
becoming legion
as we must in desperation
to eradicate this menace
by division.

Mark Danowsky’s poetry has appeared in Apiary, Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red River Review, Right Hand Pointing, Snow Monkey and The New Verse News.  His poem "5am Summer Storm"won Imitation Fruit’s “Animals and Their Human’s” Contest, in 2013. Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mark currently lives in a van down by the Susquehanna River. He works for a private detective agency and is assistant copy editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal. 

SINNED AGAINST

by Kit Zak

For fifteen seconds they streaked across the TV
three gals sporting signs for Ray
boobs pressed against t’s in baiting provocation
pom-pomming their support
for Ravens’ player Rice (only the latest)

maybe it happens in infancy
ingrained in DNA
the girl-child, Adam’s cast-off rib
second best/ split tail
cheerleading their hearts out

maybe the father preferred sons
or he submerges the mother’s weak ego--
witness the daughters, their voiceless smiling
how some touchstone for female being
repeats/repeats

ritualized violation
in one hundred and twenty countries
girls as young as five
held down by fellow females
their womanhood razored or knifed
and if they survive
proclaimed pure.                                                                                                        

uncounted nuns minioned to priests
unequal for centuries
tonguing their shame
as ‘the good father’ dispenses the wafers                                                                                                  
and we, who have been tattooed to serve
smile and offer tea.


Kit Zak retired from teaching and threw herself into some environmental projects in sea-threatened Delaware. She has published poems in The New Verse News, California Quarterly, A Time of Singing, The Blue Collar Review, and The Broadkill Review as well as several anthologies. 

HIMALAYA RHAPSODY

by Stefanie Bennett

Tsering Tsomo, speaking on behalf of the Society for Threatened Peoples, highlighted the recent shooting in Kardze, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (Sichuan Province) as a recent example of the People’s Republic of China being caught in a downward spiral of violence in Tibet. . . . Exercising its right to reply, the PRC accused NGOs of turning a “blind eye” and trying to politicize human rights. --Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, September 18, 2014

Your tears have a way of working.
The miracles they perform
Are dispatched to the authorities.

You say you mean peace. I say war
Is of more value. You do not intend
To harm me... it's said over and again.

Convince me!

String up those genocides for
All to see. Spit out
The eyes... take mine...

I don't need your need.


Stefanie Bennett has published eighteen books of poetry and 1 novel. Of mixed ancestry [Italian/Irish/Paugussett-Shawnee], she was born in Townsville, North Queensland, Australia, in 1945. Stefanie's latest poetry title 'The Vanishing' is due at year's end from Walleah Press.

POLLUTED LEGACY

by Charles Frederickson

Dysfunctional planet implosive uncivil warmongers

Warped minds bent on self-destruction

Obsessive-compulsive hateful fears carefully taught

Lessons learned today tomorrow’s legacies

Wild nature everything we’re struggling

To tame greedy excess abuses

Gaining reverence for natural world

Existence all forms of life

Eco-systems being destroyed used up

Lacerating soiled Earth begging mercy

Gouging riches stripping life-preserver dermis

Poisoning pure air water foodstuff

Outliving your life making difference

Create own legacy caring for

Others indelibly etched into brainwaves

Carved onto hearts not tombstones

Joyous cherished moments shared memories

Doing something positively original inspiring

Next generation’s unique extraordinary perspectives

Unimaginable next interconnected digital level

Cultivating tolerant multiversity conservation no

Longer luxury option survival imperative

Running out of natural resources

Now running out of time

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson  proudly presents YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

IMPRESSION

by W.F. Lantry

Our marbled cherry trees have lost their leaves.

It’s not yet solstice. Birds are gathering

in hidden trees along the riverside.

I listen to them from the forest’s edge

and mark the dew on willows, heavy pods

of wisteria, weighing down each separate vine,

disordered grass stems tangling Mary’s feet.

We’ve each spent lifetimes learning all these signs:

our Fall is coming, even though the days

seem long enough to finish everything.

I take on so little. I take on far too much:

the red clay pond, half dug and filled with rain

beckons. It’s pleasant work, but other tasks

with other frames conspire. Is there time?

And yesterday, at dusk, we crossed a field.

I offered her my shirt against the cold

and noticed how the hawks have disappeared

replaced by owls and foxes, how the deer

made bold by wind, invade, how sedum change

from white to rose. Some moving into red

presage feathered designs of ice-framed ponds.

W.F. Lantry’s poetry collections are The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award in Poetry, The Language of Birds(Finishing Line 2011), and a forthcoming collection The Book of Maps. Honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors' Poetry Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), and the Potomac Review and LaNelle Daniel Prizes. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Asian Cha and Aesthetica. He works in Washington, DC and is an associate fiction editor at JMWW.

RELEASING THE BURKA

by Catherine Cimillo Cavallone

. . . Nor is there any evidence in the Koran to support the wearing of the burka. Indeed, the Holy Book stipulates that men ‘should lower their gaze’ when meeting women to avoid lecherous staring (verse 24, chapter 30). So logically, if women were fully covered up there would be no need for such an instruction. Some Muslim clergy claim that the burka is religiously necessary. They assert this because the Prophet Muhammad’s wives allegedly hid their faces in public. These puritanical clerics do not base their theological misrepresentations on the Koran but on the subsidiary and suspect hadith (a collection of books containing the reputed sayings of Muhammad, written 250 years after his death).  In any case, this is a wilful misreading of scripture. In fact, verse 32 of chapter 33 in the Koran explicitly states that ‘the Prophet’s wives are not like other women’. So  there is no reason to emulate them. Just as revealingly, it is forbidden for Muslim women going on pilgrimages to Mecca to cover their faces. So if such a pre-Islamic practice is banned in Islam’s holiest site, why on earth would it be required on the streets of Britain? The truth is that there is no theological foundation for these separatist face masks, as most non-fundamentalists recognise. Only recently, Al-Azhar, the leading institution of Muslim theology in the Islamic world, declared that the burka has no spiritual authenticity. --Dr Taj Hargey, Imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation and the Director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford

First,
she will feel the caked earth

under
mud huts seeping through

her
blistered toes.

Then,
the winds will wrap about her ankles

and
coil up her splintered calves.

Next,
her knees, like desert rocks,

will
buckle and shake as she exposes

her
heaving midriff to the flagrant sunlight.

Then,
her breasts, like two ashen husks,

will
quiver in the stagnant air.

And
finally, her eyes,

like
landmines about to detonate onto the world,

will
gaze upon the adumbration of where

a
woman once stood.


Catherine Cimillo Cavallone is a teacher of middle school students. Her work has appeared in Four Walls, Sensations Magazine, The Rift Arts Forum Publication, Beyond the Rift-Poets of the Palisades, Red River Review, Phantom Kangaroo, Red Wheel Barrow, Turk’s Head Review and is forthcoming in Oddville Press and Nerve Lantern.  She lives in New Jersey with her husband George and son Michael.