FIRST 100 DAYS TRIOLET

by Marjorie Maddox

Cartoon by STEPeHEN

Ridiculous standards to hold me
to standards. Huuuge mistake
to mistake me for me.
Ridiculous. Standards can’t hold me;
I’ll flip-flop alternate news. Bigly
mistake by media to mistake
standards for ridiculous me. Hold me
to standards? Huuuge mistake!

Marjorie Maddox has published eleven collections of poetry—including True, False, None of the Above (Poiema Poetry Series and Illumination Book Award medalist), Local News from Someplace Else, and Wives' Tales as well as the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite Press) and over 500 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies.

CARBON THOUGHTS

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Above the broad green expanse of the marsh
Dozens of swifts
Dart and veer and cavort with anarchic abandon
Like a corps de ballet gone slightly unhinged.
Red-shouldered piccolo birds
Ornament the air
With the bright clear notes of their piping
And a lone egret lopes past a pond
Just above the water.
Here on land
Countless pill bugs
Full of purpose and gravitas
Hump back and forth across the trail
Like law clerks bearing weighty briefs to court
While box elder bugs keep backing into each other
For anonymous sex.
The rumor making its way
Among the long bright green grasses
The clovers and the tiny pimpernels
Is that the massive winter storms
Inundating us this year
With triple the normal precipitation
Likely a result of human-caused climate change
Are at last headed out of town
And the spring weather that's on its way
Is certain to stick around for a while.
So we join with the birds and the bugs
In welcoming the new season
And calling for the carbon grubbing
Glassy-eyed lucre-addicted climate manglers
To rejoin life's great extended family
And keep the oil in the ground.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesdayand others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

THE GREAT DENIERS

by Richard Meyer

Thirty prominent climate scientists sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday, refuting his recent false statement that carbon dioxide is not a primary driver of climate change. —Inside Climate News, March 13, 2017. Image source: DonkeyHotey.

Their mental houses have a leaky roof
and cracked foundations built on shaky ground.
They squat inside, benighted and aloof,
imagining the Earth is safe and sound.                                

For them a fact is nothing but a spoof
devised by eggheads in a lab somewhere.
They blindly scoff at scientific proof
that points to threatened water, land, and air.

They sit in darkness, make-believe what’s true,
and bar the door so reason can’t get through.

Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the home his father built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Able Muse, The Raintown Review, Think, Measure, Alabama Literary Review, Light, and The Evansville Review. He was awarded the 2012 Robert Frost Farm Prize for his poem “Fieldstone” and was the recipient of the 2014 String Poet Prize for his poem “The Autumn Way.” A book of his collected poems Orbital Paths was a silver medalist winner in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.

BERG

by Devon Balwit

An iceberg ran aground over Easter weekend just off the small Newfoundland town of Ferryland, population 465, drawing knots of tourists eager to catch a glimpse. Photo credit: Jody Martin/Reuters via The New York Times, April 20, 2017.

No more clinging. I calve from the motherland,
current captured, channeled to beach and the relentless

gaze of the curious, their selfies blind to my fissures.
Invisible salt fingers widen hidden cracks. Inertia

weighs heavily, bodes further fracture. When I go,
it will seem a bomb blast. As in life, I will fire my own

salute. You will flinch, and I will be glad of it, the
sound of me opening spillways in your secret places.

Devon Balwit is a teacher/poet from Portland, OR. Her work can be found in many places, most recently: Alyss, All the Sins, Poets Reading the News, Jenny, Dis-Articulations, and Lemon Quarterly.

COALS

by Elizabeth Johnston

Image source: DonkeyHotey

“[He] is being raked over the coals in the press right now. People are trying to destroy him”

—Glen Beck in “Witch Hunt: Bill O’Reilly Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt” 

“We will not be staked this time.” 

–Cari-Lee Miller, “Granddaughters”

Myth smokes with the corpses we’ve inherited,
simpering seventy-times-seven girls:
Gretel, escaping the oven to wrap arms around her dead-beat Dad.
Persephone in a singed bikini boarding the bus for Spring Break.
Corn-woman begging for the stake so bellies might be fed.

We are the granddaughters of the witches you burned
and our tongues won’t, anymore,
wrap around the lie:
            Once, Long Ago, Far Away

Like fugitives of Pompeii
we’ve borne the blistering surge,
been arrested mid-joy, fixed
to the earth for centuries, lain airless,
buried under soot, cocooned
our voices like fingers
cast in their clawing.

But go ahead, storytellers.  Rewrite.

Return to the scene shouldering your excuses like shovels,
dismissive as a pickaxe.
Fill the void with your plaster white,
your sight-seer-safe.
Stake your claim. Charge your fees.

There’s profit in bigotry, big money in violence.

Stand over the volcano’s mouth piece,
sermonize, ejaculate,
make your pithy sacrifice.

Never mind the ghosts
who sneak up from behind,
palms facing forward.


Elizabeth Johnston teaches writing, literature, and gender studies in Rochester, NY. A past contributor at TheNewVerse.News, her most recent work appears in The Atlantic, Feminist Formations, and The Boiler.

JASON AND THE ARC OF KNOTS

by Richard Hacken

Image source: DonkeyHotey via Daily Kos

I, the Grand Chair of the House Committee on Oversight,
Enduring my own governmental and dental overbite,
I, Representative Jason Chaffetz,
Never go into raving fits
About being partisan.
No, I am just the leading artisan
Of ignoring with quiet ease
All conflicts of interest and improprieties
That might impinge on any fringe of my own party.
Using gymnastics of justification, quite smartly
I look the other way.

But ask about Hillary’s Benghazi: I’ve got plenty to say.

Still, I’ve decided not to take it anymore.
“Soon" I’m going to pack my beret,
My toothbrush, my blinders and cot,
And make good my getaway.
Why? Well, with T***p and his lot—
All of whom I secretly deplore,
But whose follies I feel I must simply ignore
(As a blandly mocked, land-locked ichthyosaur)—
This task of looking the other way
(Oh-Massive-Distressing-Flames-of-Heck)
Causes a passive-aggressive pain in my neck.


Richard Hacken regrets to inform you that Brazen Jason is technically “his” representative while somehow not representing him.

LEDELL LEE, R.I.P.

by George Held

Image source: The Innocence Project

The state machinery for murder
executed its steps coolly and efficiently
in the killing of Ledell Lee.

So what if the blood on his shoes
and the hairs found at the scene
received no test for DNA?

So what if the Innocence Project
and Sister Helen Prejean protest
Ledell Lee might be not guilty?

So what if Camus warned against
executions as mere state-approved
murder? How many have heard

of Camus, Prejean, even DNA? How
many have thought hard about
the idea of state-approved murder

or resisted the confection that
medazolam’s nearing expiration date
justified eight executions in eleven days?

So the executioners poured three drugs
Into Lee: medazolam, a sedative, then
a paralyzer called vecuronium bromide—

hear the falling meter?—and a heart-
stopper, potassium chloride.
Each flawlessly performed its part.

Thus did the wheels of Arkansas justice
turn exceedingly well on 4/20/17
in the killing of Ledell Lee.

George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, has received ten Pushcart nominations, including ones for both poetry and fiction in 2016. His new poetry chapbook is Phased II (Poets Wear Prada, 2016).

EARTH MOTHER

by Cynthia Neely

The New York Times, July 22, 1962

To Rachel Carson, mother of the environmental movement, who died April 14, 1964

Was it a good day to die
when we were young,
when the earth was younger
than it is now?

Silent Spring had sprung
and we were bell-bottomed and braless,
flowers in our hair.

Today would have killed you
now that we’re old
and the world is older

but no wiser.
Our kids are tweeting,
the birds too for now.

Yes, I’d say it was good to die
before you could witness
the work you’d done undone,
Mother Earth again made “useful”
to us in useless ways.

And you aren't able to see
the undoing continue
as sea stars lose their limbs,
polar ice cools the sea,
oceans rise, our winters shorten
and our springs become silent.

Poet and painter, Cynthia Neely is the 2016 winner of the Bright Hill Press chapbook contest for Passing Through Blue Earth and the 2011 winner of the “Hazel Lipa Prize for Poetry” chapbook contest for Broken Water published by Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Her essay work has appeared in The Writers’ Chronicle, and her poems have been included in numerous print and online journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge’s Pontoon, and Terrain.org. She has been nominated for “Best of the Net” as well as had work included in several anthologies. Her full-length volume of poetry Flight Path was published in 2014 as a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest.

DEAR LEADER I WORRIED HIM

by S.O.Fasrus

Image source: zazzle.com

There was Kim Jong-il
Kim Jong-un
turn up the telly
not much fun

Car on the road
masses of space
art on the wall
Kim Jong's face

Go to the shop
can't find one
There was Kim Jong-il
There was Kim Jong-un

Dear Leader Un
taking in the view
firing off a missile
fuse just blew

There was Kim Jong-il
Kim Jong-un
turn up the telly
but you can't turn it off


S.O.Fasrus has verses at LUPO and is currently writing a YA novel.

GOD WINS

by Frank De Canio

with the Godwin family whose father was murdered

God wins, indeed, with devotees like these
who show the hard way to a nobler realm
of love. No bending, supplicating knees
petitioning the world to overwhelm
the murderer of their beloved Dad.
Benevolence reigns godlike in their hearts
to help them walk beneath the cross they’ve had
to bear. No smug indulgence that imparts
a measured justice for their neighbor’s loss,
while their own griefs are fueled with kindling rage.
Instead, they selflessly pursue a course
that imitates the God-anointed sage
who, forced to drink death’s vinegary gall,
could still afford forgiveness for us all.


Born & bred in New Jersey, Frank De Canio works in New York. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby. He likes Dylan Thomas, Keats, Wallace Stevens, Frost, Ginsburg, and Sylvia Plath as poets.

THE WALL AT 90 DAYS

by James Penha

live from the border at JFK

No photographs allowed
to see the visitors’ queue
at passport control full
of tumbleweed, tear
stains, dust, and bloody staples
picked from ready papers
and wrinked travel brochures.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News.

ON THE RECENT DEATH OF CHUCK BERRY

by Gil Fagiani 

To Chuck Berry, 1926-2017

I was a chronic bed wetter. My teachers mangled
my name, called me Fag-ee-annie, no matter how
many times I corrected them. I wore orthopedic
shoes and had stomach cramps in class. I couldn’t
sit still and Miss Harrison tied me to my seat with
jump rope. When I couldn’t recite my homework,
Miss Wilson shook me, leaving nail prints in my arms.

Then I learned how to turn on Chuck Berry
in my head. His voice jolted me out of my stupor,
his guitar chords, like a tommy gun, riddled
the blackboard, the bookshelves, the display
cases with prize-winning science projects,
the Stars and Stripes, the Pledge of Allegiance,
the portrait of the President of the United States.


Gil Fagiani is a translator, essayist, short story writer, and poet. His latest book is Logos (Guernica Editions, 2015). Gil co-hosts the Italian American Writers’ Association’s monthly readings in Manhattan. In 2014, he was the subject of a New York Times article by David Gonzalez, “A Poet Mines Memories of Drug Addiction.”

UNREALITY TV

by Melissa Balmain

TV Guide: July 8, 1967 - Efrem Zimbalist Jr. of "The FBI" and J. Edgar Hoover of The FBI

"Comey green lights TV series to boost FBI's image"

—The Hill, April 13, 2017

James crowed, "The way to raise our cred's
to show us working smart—
an altruistic team of Feds
with public needs at heart!
They'll see I'm not some fickle nut
Or floundering buffoon!"
"Okay," said the producers, "but
why jump the shark so soon?"

Melissa Balmain is Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Arts Quarterly, American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, and Poetry Daily; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award) is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.

MOTHER OF ALL

by Mimi German

Marker Painting "PIETA-2" Black Pieta Ethnic Folk Art Black religious art African

The Mother

of all

Bombs



the

(space)

mother

(space)

of

(space)

ALL

(space)

bombs

The
Mother
of all
bombs

repeated chanted repeated chanted
sung liturgized canonized infantilized eroticized epitomized

into being

a mantra of man

the Mother
of All

Bombs

the mother of ALL bombs

chants the news so many times
that it becomes a thing

this

Mother

of all
Bombs



My
nipples
lactate
blood




tonight
cloaked inside
my Grandmother’s blanket
my mother’s mother,
i write
with mourning sickness
under my fingernails

the taste of burnt skin
inhabits my tongue

my grandmother
had a scar
on her abdomen
a c-section.

my mother
wanted
to enter life
feet first

the Mother
of ALL
Bombs

an
empty
womb
is
bleeding



mother
mother
mother
mother

mother of all
mother of ALL
Mother of ALL

bombs

goes the chant


mother
of dead child
on exploded soil
on Mother Earth
in the Mother Land
in Afghanistan


314,000,000 dollars worth
of
mothers
of
dead children
and
children
with
dead mothers

wrote a poem this morning
about shadows

while

the Mother
of All
Bombs

was chanting itself
into being

there are

no Mothers

of

Bombs


only
men
who
make
bombs
to
drop
them
on
Mothers.


Mimi German is a Queer Poet, Free Radical and an Activist for human rights in Portland, OR.