JOHNIETTE'S SOLILOQUY

by Aaron Gillego


Obameo, Obameo, wherefore art though Obameo,
Deny thy Muslimhood and refute those charges,
Or, if thou wilt not, I will be sworn in as president,
And I'll no longer be a Senator.
'Tis but thy party affiliation that you're my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Maverick.
What's Maverick? It is nor Post, nor Fox,
Nor Wall Street Journal, nor any other paper
Belonging to Rupert Murdoch. O, be some other network.
What's in the news? That which we call a pig
Is still a pig even with some lipstick on,
So Obameo was quoted, though that's not what he meant,
Referring to that dear Palin, who talks of oil,
Without any real experience. Obameo, doff thy party,
And for that Hillary, who wants no part of thee,
Her votes I'll take all myself.


Aaron Gillego resides in Miami, FL, where he teaches high school English. He pursued his MFA in Poetry at the University of Miami. He has been published by The Advocate and has contributed two poems previously to The New Verse News.
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YOGI. POET LAUREATE OF BASEBALL

by Earl J. Wilcox


At 83, icon of icons,
there you stand, Yogi,
your shadow smaller
and smaller
each time we see you.

Your clear-eyed twinkle
fills old Yankee Stadium
your presence,
your smile,
your catcher’s squat stance.

O, Yogi, essence of our poets,
your word horde---
tho not deep,
is distinct, your voice unique,
rhythms just right.

We want one more line, Yogi.
We promise not to mangle
this one,
as we have done
over the years.

Your coy smile beguiles,
holds us fast. Laureate
to the end, speaking
on the occasion, echoing
yourself, I’m Sorry to See it Over.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he has contributed 40 poems to the New Verse News.
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THEY WERE CARELESS PEOPLE

from The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald


“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
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ANATOMY OF A TERRORIST

by Suzanne Richardson Harvey


Our preliminary diagnosis revealed no apparent abnormalities
No early symptoms of the disease were visible
True he spent hours at the zoo
Observing the cheetah measure her territory
With tethered but predictable speed
Watching the polar bear
Pace from one smoothly hewn stone to the next
With deceptive affability

His favorite pet was his Doberman whom he found user friendly
He remembered to file the incisors
Till they were indistinguishable from the ivory tips
Of the poniard set in the parlor
He neglected to clip the nails
That had carved a hole the size
Of several finely crafted grenades
In the surface of the bedroom floor

At day care he demonstrated an unfaltering sense
Of expertise in the area of property rights
On the beach he staked out the lot for his sandcastle
With a steel tape and a marble eye
He achieved coitus with a treatise
Experienced orgasm with a slogan
Human secretions of any sort disturbed him
Sweat, semen, a tear.


Suzanne Richardson Harvey is a member of the Academy of American Poets. For almost two decades she lectured in the English Department at Stanford University. She is now retired. Her poetry has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Concho River Review, Mannequin Envy, Convergence Journal, Poetalk, Poetry Salzburg Review (Austria), SpeedPoets (Australia), Ascent Aspirations Magazine (Canada), nthposition (UK), Current Accounts (UK), Poetic Hours (UK), and Splizz (Wales), among other venues.
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MCCAINOMICS

by Bill Costley


“I don’t know economics? Like hell!
Holy hell!” explodes John McCain,
“I read Samuelson’s ECONOMICS;
played pinochle & canasta & beat
Alan Greenspan & Andrea Mitchell,
tho why the hell they wouldn't play
poker, I’ll never know! Alan’s face
is just about as stony a poker-face
as I saw anywhere in the Navy.
Why hell, Lt. Dick Nixon made
a bundle running a poker-game
in the Pacific during WW2, or so
my 4-star admiral dad told me . . ."



Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers Union.
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DIGGING LORCA

by James Penha


"One of Spain's most enduring literary mysteries could soon be solved after the descendants of Federico García Lorca dropped their longstanding objections to unearthing the mass grave where the poet's remains are believed to lie. 'We will not oppose it,' said Laura García Lorca, the poet's niece. 'Although we would prefer it weren't done, we respect the wishes of the other parties involved.'”

--Thomas Catán, Times Online, September 19, 2008

Do these soggy bones matter
more than Bernarda’s broken
cane or New York
tenements or a perfect pair of olives
in hand? For if we hold, Federico,
your delicate fingers, trace the lines
of your lips with our fingers,
and hear your inspiration
even now, we have no need
for the palpable
to imagine you.

Exhumation reminds me more
of the next innocent
to die wordlessly
in a ditch.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.
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BODY AMMO

by Scott Keeney


1

Over the synagogue
at the end of the road
crows shatter the sky
like small arms fire—
safety is not enough.

2

The generosities of film—
capturing it all in
theory—against
the savagery of actual
footage. Dire, cinematic age.

3

brief endurance
of what
makes
flags whip
ripple or tear

4

The dead arrive on flatbeds
or else disappear around corners—
dust clouds in the streets—
would it be better if
we could eat them?

5

To arrive meaning to leave,
meaning continue, not end,
not unlike what happens
when you fall on your ass
at the Miss Universe pageant.

6

I don't know which to prefer:
the black bird that is oil
at $100 per barrel
or the simple, muscle
mathematics of the surge.

7

The tabernacle at the end of the road
used to be a synagogue,
and before that a pre-school,
and before that a church,
and before that some woods.

8

The moon rises predictably
suddenly—like the stock market—
same as it goes down.
The crows land on treetops
like proud little flags.


Scott Keeney writes from Connecticut. His poems have appeared most recently in Court Green and The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Volume II (Meritage Press).
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AFTER BEER

by Stan Pisle


After beer,
I’m up late
in my Berkeley kitchen.

Hungry, I can’t decide what’s the itch.
I scratch the fridge,
find old democratic green veggies,
and decide, “No.”
Then I vote at the cupboard and notice a candidate: corn oil.
--And I know what I need,
deep fat fried republicans.
Lightly salted, so as not raise my blood pressure.


Berkeley resident Stan Pisle's poems have appeared in Our Magazine of Cleveland, Ohio. He's a supporter of California State University East Bay's writing program, and an advisory board member of CSUEB's literary magazine Arroyo.
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LATE INNINGS

by Howie Good


The man at the ticket window asks
for some identification.
My dark laughter?
The socket of my missing tooth?

I pass through the ancient turnstile.
The war is here and it’s not,
like a book on the nightstand
that you’ll never open.

I’m inconspicuous at the ballpark
in my threadbare mourning clothes.
The crowd is huge but sullen,
as if they know something

the players down on the field don’t –
that the starting pitcher will be betrayed
in the late innings by the bullpen,
that grass crumbles, that everything

that isn’t dying is already dead.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of six poetry chapbooks, including the free e-book, Police and Questions (Right Hand Pointing, 2008).
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FOOTNOTE FOR A HEADLINE

by Darlene Pagán


I worry less about the grown man
who stumbled into the emergency room
complaining of chest and abdominal pain
after consuming an aphrodisiac made
from toad venom, than I do
about the woman pacing
her apartment floors waiting for him:

stopping to gaze at her reflection
in the mirror then the window then
the mirror then back again, tilting
her head here, parting her lips there,
smiling, nodding, her occasional laughter
sputtering like flame on a wet wick.

With dusk’s fire light gone, the silk teddy
looks too tight under her arms,
where the flesh makes two folds,
one for each child,
first a boy then a girl,
away for the weekend.

She takes a breath, unzips the side,
shuts the curtains, smears the mirror
with No. 217 Lips by Lippy tangerine lipstick,
peels the silk away from her body like
gauze from a binding or a burn
that only the risk of exposure
could possibly cure.


Darlene Pagán’s poetry is forthcoming in Willow Springs and her poems and nonfiction have most recently appeared in Literal Latte, The Nebraska Review, and The MacGuffin. She teaches writing and literature at Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR.
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MODERN-DAY SLAVE: TESTIMONY

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper


Samirah widens the holes in her rags.
These shirt . . . these pants? I never wear them again.

Yes, my name is Samirah; I wander
into doughnut shop
so hungry, I taste the smells.
They force me eat my own vomit

when I can’t keep chili peppers down
where they force in mouth. Yes, I steal
food from garbage. Yes, I do
not want say their name;

please let me point them . . . they cut my ears
and do you have tissue I can wipe
this stuff that comes from them like
bad water? Yes, what you touch hurts,

you call them scars?
Yes, I come from Indonesia
to be maid, to live in
picture of house they send

and for money I send Bunda my mother . . . she . . .
yes, I go home, no holes in food, holes in me.


A workshop Leader for The Florida Center for the Book, the first affiliate of the Library of Congress, Lucille Gang Shulklapper writes fiction and poetry. Her work has been anthologized and appears in many publications, as well as in four poetry chapbooks, What You Cannot Have; The Substance of Sunlight; Godd, It’s Not Hollywood; and In The Tunnel. Living up to traditional expectations led to work as a salesperson, model, realtor, teacher, and curriculum coordinator throughout schooling, marriage, children, and grandchildren.
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ONE PLUS ONE

by Darla Himeles


And how many single-parent children
are lied to, told to call Mommy and Daddy
those who are secretly not

or told dramas of Daddy's death
at war or by other sacrifice
to hide imprisonment, abandonment?

When McCain sideways smiles
as an adoptive parent does
when he is proud of himself,

and says two men could never
adopt a child together, clearly
children need both parents

(by which he must mean both
genders), I wonder about orphans
and the many children lied to

and whether two fathers
or two mothers or even three
would be worse than a man

like Mr. McCain who cannot
understand any one plus one
is always more love than none.


Darla Himeles currently lives in Bryn Mawr, PA, and works as the Coordinator of Staff Education at nearby Bryn Mawr College. This winter she will begin pursuing her MFA in poetry at Drew University's low-residency program. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Mad Poets Review, Getting Read, and Poetica Magazine.
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FIRST LIGHT

by Joy Gaines-Friedler


This is the hour before the wind,
before watering, winning, oil
cans, gas cans, core issues, clanking
cacophony. Before the word
country. This is the hour when
the mallards stir, clear throats, cluck, shake,
eye thistle and corn at the feeders,
eye tadpoles, float, feed, paddle, pluck.
This is the hour before the sun
has risen over the edge of
arborvitae and spruce, before
daylilies open in its heat,
before another desperate blast
from the hill, noise drummed out
because we can’t stand to hear
the hum of vehemence, another
frame, a roving band of framers,
forging, marching, for the sake
of what? for what? for what? This is
the hour before foreign and freedom,
before dressing, pressing cults and sects,
before suicide, walls, mortar, motors,
employ, deploy. This is the hour before
thirst, before belts and vests, before prayer
and martyrdom. Before breakfast, buses,
bones, backpacks, brigadiers, before nails
and bits of metal, before redeploying
cell phones, web sites, framers. This
is the hour before refilling the feeders.


Joy Gaines-Friedler's poems have been featured in many literary magazines including, The Litchfield Review, RATTLE, Margie and The Pebble Lake Review. Her first book of poems - Like Vapor - was published by Mayapple Press in 2008. Joy lives in Farmington Hills, Michigan, with her husband, three cats, and lots of wild life she tries to protect, including a neighborhood coyote. She teaches creative writing workshops to young adults considered "at risk" through Common Ground, a mental health core provider. She also tutors Political Science and English courses at Oakland Community College.
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TAXES

by David Chorlton


What don’t you like about low taxes?
Our neighbour isn’t watching
the Republican convention. Says
he doesn’t need to. Always votes
straight ticket, checking off the boxes
arranged on his ballot as neatly
as the discount coupons stacked on his porch
where he invites us to share a glass of the wine
he can’t tell from the expensive brands.
Why pay more? Never misses a deal.
Gets his shoes from a company that sends them
to him in return for a report
on how they fit. He likes to sit and talk.
Another glass? He likes to tell us
what’s free and where to get it.
Then turns the conversation to the way
taxes only benefit those
who want something for nothing.
Like the socialists in Europe. He never had children
to send to college. He’s affable. Just enjoys
an argument. Teases us about our views.
Disparity between rich and poor
doesn’t bother him. They must have worked for it.
And he doesn’t care that the Republicans he votes for
are always talking about a god
he doesn’t believe in. Shrugs his shoulders.
And he doesn’t agree with the war anymore.
Shrugs his shoulders. He’s got a firewall
around him that keeps information away.
He’s not comparing candidates. Blames
the Democrats for every cent he pays
even when they’re not in the majority.
Tell him the state’s run by Republicans
and he shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t want
to ban abortion, occupy Iraq, or promote
family values; he wants a discount on democracy.
Wants it simple.
Wants to drink it from a box.
Can’t tell snake oil from a good Chardonnay.


David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix for 30 years and come to love the desert around it. He recently won the Ronald Wardall Award from Rain Mountain Press for The Lost River, a chapbook whose contents reflect his unease with what is happening to our planet. More of his work, including paintings, is at his Web site.
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