W LANDS KURDISH MAYOR IN JAIL

by Rochelle Ratner


Mr. Bush doesn't find out about this until he reads it in the
paper. Damn aides must be holding out on him again. They
always do this as elections near. But it says right here in
the Washington Post that the mayor sent out New Year
cards with the letter W in them, and now he faces six
months in jail. Mr. Bush decides he ought to call him.
Maybe invite him to dinner at the White House. Is he in
Kurdia? Kurda? He really ought to be better informed
on foreign affairs. But who ever heard of a language with
no W? When he first took office a man in New York had a
vanity license plate that was just W and they said he
couldn't renew it. Been driving with it for years, and boy,
was he upset. He doodles a W on the pad before him, then
turns it over to form an M. There's no god damned way to
please everyone.


Rochelle Ratner's latest poetry books include 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.

MULE MANEUVERS

by Chad Faries


--February 6, 2005: Mules laden with sacks of ballots were led into Haiti's countryside Monday to reach remote villages on the eve of elections aimed at putting Haiti's experiment with democracy back on track.


My hoof prints are cracked hearts in the pebbles and sun baked soil
that blow away in puffs of dust. I may bray. At the summit I pause
and lift one hoof in a heroic pose, seared to the sky and great distance.

Pray that I might drink of water on the other side.
I carry the messages in fat leather packs.
Freedom pokes at my guts, heavy, with every step.

I’d trot if I could. I’d love fine conditioners for my mane; my locks
flaming in the moonlight. A farrier takes my step
in his calloused hands and gives me the attention I deserve.

Instead I sleep tied to a tree with mangled rope. In my dream
it is an earthly umbilical cord of threads of gold hand picked from rays
of the sun and streaking stars pulled brilliantly through atmosphere.

But what I have done is sacrificed all that for utilitarianism.
I have a message and it is a dream that only I can channel.
I could stop and stand stubborn and bow to stereotypes but I refuse.

This is the birth of freedom, in the stride of a neglected beast
whose wildness has been bred out. It is still in me, that adolescent
precariousness and I rub it all over these pieces of paper.

I allow myself to be a pawn, dispensable, when in my soul I am brook,
I am knight and castle, and men in parks take me in their fingers and plan great
moves all in their hopes of finding a new promise and a better game.

A plane flies overhead. A truck mumbles in the distance, a mule brays;
and below, along the briny shores, emerald leaves flutter not from wind,
but from the movement of beasts with heart and machines with naught.


Chad Faries has published poems, essays, photographs, interviews, and creative non-fiction in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, New American Writing, Barrow Street , The Cream City Review, Afterimage, Post Road , and others. His book, The Border Will Be Soon: Meditations from the Other Side was a winner of Emergency Press’s open genre book competition. It chronicles his visits to Yugoslavia between 1995-2000 and will be published in May 2006. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest . His memoir, Some Houses, is seeking a publisher. When not traveling he is a carpenter and professor. He recently purchased an old Victorian home and now is planning his next Triumph motorcycle in order to solidify his artificial existence as a renaissance man.

THE MOTHERS OF THE DISAPPEARED BOOKSTORE, BUENOS AIRES

by Jon Wesick


The snapshots are unremarkable
save for clothing thirty years out of date.
Some black and white, others color.
These are the victims of the dirty war. The generals,
now ghostly TV images, their faces gray as intestines,
ordered deaths by the thousands. Ordinary people
hustled into Ford Falcons, tortured. Their bodies
tossed from DC-3s into the Atlantic.

But it’s not that simple. Photos of Lenin, Castro,
and Che Guevara hang on the bookstore’s walls.
I buy a Mothers-of-the-Disappeared T-shirt for my mom
and pray it doesn’t’ become a prophecy in Bush’s America.
Outside pounding drums. Marchers with red flags.
Do ghosts of Ford Falcons still cruise these streets?

We wait on the sidewalk, while tens of thousands pass.
“Muchos gentes,” a shop owner says. I nod.
The drums – boom, ba boom, ba boom. Girls
selling socialist newspapers. Marchers
with banners wide as the Avenida de Mayo.
Lauren takes out her camera. The flash!
Rows of men with clubs bring up the rear,
their faces disguised with bandanas or keffiyehs.

We cross to Café Tortoni. Fine china. Cloth napkins.
Waiters in tuxedos. Photos of celebrities on mahogany walls.
I drop a submarine-shaped chocolate in my cup of hot milk.
Lauren sips coffee and says, “This is the best night of my life.”


Jon Wesick has a Ph.D. in physics, has practiced Buddhism for over twenty years, and has published over a hundred poems in small press journals such as American Tanka, Anthology Magazine, The Blind Man’s Rainbow, Edgz, The Kaleidoscope Review, Limestone Circle, The Magee Park Anthology, The Publication, Pudding, Sacred Journey, San Diego Writer’s Monthly, Slipstream, Tidepools, Vortex of the Macabre, Zillah, and others. His chapbooks have won honorable mentions twice in the San Diego Book Awards. Recently in Argentina, Jon and his girlfriend went to the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo Bookstore. The Madres are the mothers who protested Argentina's dirty war by holding their disappeared childrens' pictures in the Plaza de Mayo.

THANKSGIVING: FOUR TO SIX A.M.

by Verandah Porche


Double-take in the dark.
Sleet needles me
un-knits my sleep: it’s that tick
below think itch within speech
the tsk of task.

Ice seeps back to rain—
Won’t coat a stick
slur a wheel.
Two fluorescent hunters
cruise toward dawn
in a bronze Dart.
A hip flask loosens their intent.

The cats yowl for tinned meat
while rodents drunk on compost
snicker by the chimney.
In this sumac-red farmhouse
my young sack out
and I’m easy: la-de-dah
no axe to grind.

Day takes shape:
boughs bear globes
of pop-it beads
pretty and cheap.

Swank heat blows up
the grates: propane
Yahweh made
invisible and full of himself
comes clear from elsewhere
pricey as love or war.


Based in rural Vermont since 1968, Verandah Porche has published The Body’s Symmetry (Harper and Row) and Glancing Off (See Through Books) and has pursued an alternative literary career. She has written poems and songs to accompany her community through a generation of moments and milestones. As a teacher and facilitator, she has created collaborative writing projects in schools and nontraditional settings: literacy and crisis centers, hospitals, factories, nursing homes, senior centers, a 200 year-old Vermont tavern and an urban working class neighborhood. Her work has been featured on NPR’s “Artbeat,” on public radio stations around New England and in the Vermont State House. The Vermont Arts Council awarded her a Citation of Merit, honoring her contribution to the state’s cultural life in 1998, and a recent grant to support the preparation of poetry for publication and performance.

THANKSGIVING

by Esther Greenleaf Murer


My browser is taking a poll:
What are you most thankful for?
        a) turkey
        b) football
        c) shopping

For the turkey
whose mana we ingest
so that we too
can be stuffed
to immobility
and impotence
let us be virtually thankful.

For images of stylized mayhem
with arbitrary rules
which we can safely
watch from our roost
and pretend that
the outcome matters
let us be virtually thankful.

for the constant stream
of clutter which gives
our lives meaning
and helps us
outgrow our coops
let us be virtually thankful.

For protection from a world
with real anguish
and real mourning
and maybe even repentance
not to mention
blessings worth counting
let us be virtually thankful.


Esther Greenleaf Murer lives in Philadelphia. She has published poetry in Friends Journal, Guinea Pig Zero, Folly,and the New Verse News.

INCOGNITO: FRONT LINES

by Kevin Hodgson

They published front line letters this week in the New Yorker and they arrived like missives in the night, exploding my own sense of calm from a world away with an increasing powerful detonation of fear and bravado.
As I sank down between the words, I could almost taste the fine grit of sand on my tongue and the layers of dust on my teeth. I could almost feel the dry scorch of the air of the desert days and the bone-chilling cold of the nights beneath the shooting stars. I could almost sense the tight clench of the M16 gun barrel between my fingers and the rattle of the Humvee over potholed roads in my bones.
Almost.
(But I’d be lying – I was just another passive reader in a safe house on the other side of the universe, drinking coffee and folding laundry and not even thinking about IEDs or mortars or spies along the roadside or midnight raids or body parts)
I spied in from afar on these young men writing to mothers -- young women reaching out to fathers --
friends explaining to friends --
inching towards a way of trying to understand themselves what was happening,
what had happened,
why they had done what they had done or feared what they were going to do,
even as the military censors were watching (and I was watching the censors watching the soldiers watching the roads and imagined another strange set of frightened eyes, trailing our soldiers from the darkened corners of bombed out buildings)
and I realized that these script characters on the page ultimately failed them,
powerful though they were,
the words were not nearly enough ammunition to overcome this internal enemy of theirs and might never be.
There was blood on my back and hands, and pain, too, but it wasn’t real, just images from someone else’s thoughts and I felt like the intruder into the minds of these writers emerging from reality seared with strangeness and violence.
Yet, here they were, moving across the page like armies in the dunes
– the words, I mean –
and so I gently reached out and grabbed a handful of those letters,
placing them in my pocket for safe keeping – doing my best to protect them and vowing to never forget they were there (but I do, from time to time, until my fingers accidentally wrap around the crinkled papers at the bottom of my memory and I suddenly realize that they are there in harm’s way, and I am caught again in the wave of forgetting) –
contemplating that imaginary border crossing between Iran and Iraq
where the man I knew from long ago remains steadfast at his security post,
incognito.

Kevin Hodgson is a sixth grade teacher in Southampton, Massachusett, and a technology liaison with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. He has his own Weblog (http://dogtrax.edublogs.org/) in which he explores the intersections of writing, technology, education and other issues.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. ON THE CON-MOVE

by Bill Costley


"The con-movement is, in a sense, inanimate,
compared to 20-30 years ago, with a kind of
ideological slovenliness affecting its morale."

Given the current combination of low taxes,
high government-spending & moderate-inflation
sustaining our current illusion of short-term
e-con-prosperity, what would it take to revive it?

"Something electric, like dollar-depreciation!
Other countries no longer subsidizing our debt
would shock lots of people! Then reservoirs of
con-thought would once again be con-sulted."


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union. His epic-in-progress The Cheni@d appears here on The New Verse News.

DARFURY

by Charles Frederickson


Dark Continent lost cause rebels
Desolation and despair ember ashes
Slow burning wars singeing consciousness
Smoldering conflict mired in neglect

Where government dams bloody rivers
Blue headstream conjoining White Nile
Political frustrations percolating for decades
Oily motives shamelessly disclaiming rights

Brutal faithless ethnic cleansing campaign
Black voices silenced throats slit
Marooned in fruitless arid wasteland
Traditional means of livelihood destroyed

Cross-border refugees fleeing for survival
Attempting to escape marauding Janjaweed
Makeshift camps overcrowded tent cities
Innocents held hostage to deadlock

Meager access to potable water
Bare necessities in limited supply
Hand-to-mouth existence reliant on strangers
Incommunicado muffled cries forcibly raped

Furrowed brows creased with dust
Tribal scars dimpling ruddy cheeks
Wounds that never heal cover-ups
Festering open sores crusty scabs

Dirt poor mud hut cracks
Soiled future fertile as sandbox
Desert battered by windswept grit
Sunstroke nomads begging for mercy


Dr. Charles Frederickson is a Swedish/American/Thai impassioned observer, daring experimentalist and progressive visionary who has wandered intrepidly through 206 countries, an original sketch and poem for each presented on http://www.imagesof.8k.com. A member of World Poets Society, based in Greece, his unique poetic style has been featured in: Ascent Aspirations, Auckland Poetry, Blind Man’s Rainbow, Both Sides Now, Caveat Lector, Cordite Poetry Review, Dance to Death, Flutter Magazine, Greatworks, Green Dove, Indite Circle, International Poet, Listen & Be Heard, Living Poets, Madpoetry, Melange, Newtopia, Peace Not War Japan, Planet Authority, Poetry Canada, Poetry of Scotland, Poets for Peace, Poetry Superhighway, Pyramid, Sz, T-Zero, Ygdrasil, Ya’Sou! and Zafusy.

BUSH TO VISIT INDONESIA TOMORROW

by James Penha


Shaman slits
the throat of a goat,
collects its blood in earthenware
holding already the flesh of a red snapper
for this nation is sea and soil
and must be saved
all of it
from pollution.

Shaman wears a Muslim peci on his head
but these are dangerous times,
he says, and the sooth of our ancient archipelago
from many mouths must be heard
against black magic.
He listens to the bowl,
quaffs its eerie contents

and chants spells
so to bewilder the terrible Wizard in our midst:
that his alien abracadabra will fail
ever again
to bemuse the water and land.


James Penha edits The New Verse News from Indonesia.

DISCOVERY

by Mel Waldman


We stopped searching years ago after dreams were obliterated
during our metamorphosis, when darkness came to us and
swallowed our light, and we gazed into the broken mirrors of
our shattered souls and saw only shadows-nothing human.

We lost much, especially our innocence, and after the devastating
emptiness, we were filled with something familiar but alien-
emerging from our darkest dreamscape.

We stopped searching years ago and some no longer asked: “Where
are the other human remains?”

The recovery effort ceased. And reconstruction began above sacred
ground, where ghostly secrets were buried in the catacombs of ground
zero.

Yet now, when hundreds of human remains have been discovered, we
must question why we stopped.

What is more horrific: that we now know terror or that in this intimate
knowledge of evil, we stopped searching for our own?

What discovery shall we make, when looking back, we see the Void of
human omission?

And if we are offered redemption again, in a second metamorphosis,
somewhere in tomorrow’s treacherous landscape, shall we search the
catacombs of our souls and never stop, or shall we fail again, when
facing evil, giving up before the final discovery?


Dr. Mel Waldman is a poet, writer, artist, and singer/songwriter. His stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews and commercial magazines including Happy, Sweet Annie Press, Children, Churches and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, New Thought Journal, The Brooklyn Literary Review, Hardboiled Detective, Detective Story Magazine, Espionage, and The Saint. He is a past winner of the literary Gradiva Award in Psychoanalysis and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, American Mensa, Ltd., and the American Psychological Association. Who Killed the Heartbreak Kid?, a mystery novel, was published by iUniverse in February 2006. It can be purchased at www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/, www.bn.com, at www.amazon.com, and other online bookstores or through local bookstores. Recently, some of his poems have appeared online in The Jerusalem Post.

BOMB

by Doris Henderson


We are sitting in a darkened room,
inert, like a drawing in charcoal.
A thief waits outside the window.
He swallows dreams, memories.

There is a bomb under the couch.
No one is trying to remove it.
We sip red wine, comment on
the inevitability of the explosion.

Then we stop talking about it altogether;
it becomes an impolite subject.
We play music, tell stories
to soothe our jangled nerves.

Today is the Official Celebration of Hope.
We wear bright colors,
pretend to love each other and the fate we share,
pretend safety, solidarity, high purpose

pretend we have time.


Doris Henderson's work has appeared in Sagewoman, Black River Review, Calliope, Comstock Review, Window on the World, prior issues of New Verse News, and other journals and anthologies. "Bomb" is about those things --- too numerous to mention --- currently "under the radar."

WOMAN ARRESTED IN THEFT OF MULE HARNESS

by Rochelle Ratner


When the XXX videos no longer excite her, when the
whips and handcuffs in the window of the sex shop
no longer seem like enough, she goes for a drive,
alone, along dirt roads, past farms and houses
patched with tar paper. She turns country music
stations on, then off, then on again. She spots two
mules in a field and pulls over to watch them,
plodding along side by side, tails brushing against
each other. She watches so long that the sunset
turns rows of corn a sort of scarecrow-black. She
watches the farmer drive the mules into the barn,
sees him leave a half hour later. She parks on a
nearby hill, waits till the lights go out in the
farmhouse, then drags that double-harness over to
her car, already halfway to orgasm.


Rochelle Ratner's latest poetry books include 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.

THERMAL SIGHT

by Luke Welch


Late at night is the best time,
after the baked streets cool.
Then people appear
as bright constellations
moving about in the dim world.
Even their footprints
are incandescent trails
in the dust.
It is hard, in this light,
to discern enemy
from noncombatant,
a basket of bread
from a bomb.
Women and kids as radiant
as men of fighting age.
A pregnant woman
shimmers like a nebula
in my scope.
Far too easy
a target.


Luke Welch has published recently in Pemmican and Centrifugal Eye. He works as a sign language interpreter in northern Illinois.

A SHORT CONVERSATION

by Robin E. Sampson


Did you see the news today?

Which news?

There are so many
and so few
versions now

and all the news is old,
older than time.


Robin E. Sampson, born on the east coast, raised on the west coast, now back on the east coast, is a writer of poetry, fiction, and even some non-fiction, at least when she’s not avoiding the pen. She’s a member of the CT-based six-woman poetry performance troupe Shijin. Her publishing credits include their chapbook We Shijin, Book 1, Wicked Alice, The Bitter Oleander, and several anthologies.