FALL HAIKU

by Geoffrey A. Landis

Autumn wind;
Leaves gently fall.
Banks, not so gently

Geoffrey A. Landis is mostly known as a science-fiction writer, but as a hobby he also writes poetry. His first poetry collection, Iron Angels, comes out in late 2008. Far more than you need to know can be found on his website, http://www.sff.net/people/geoffrey.landis.
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THE GREAT AND POWERFUL SARAH PALIN

by Laura LeHew

an art installation in a desk lamp
swimming in endless circles amidst the artificial

     gravel—aquarium grass
a hardy red beta fish
able to tolerate poor water conditions
primarily a carnivorous surface feeder
she is typically fine in a small bowl

An award winning poet, Laura LeHew's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals and anthologies as Alehouse Press, Big Pulp, Her Mark Calendar, J Journal, Pank, PMS, and Untamed Ink. Her chapbook Beauty is forthcoming (05/09) from Altered Crow Press. Additionally, she interned for CALYX Journal, and won a writing residency from Soapstone. Her MFA is from the California College of Arts.
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AT THE CULT OF THE FREE MARKET

by Jon Wesick


Stained glass     Reagan, Goldwater, Bush
angels escorting Ken Lay to heaven

Today’s sermon – “Government is not the solution
to your problems.     Government is the problem.”

“What a friend we have in Wal-Mart
where good wages are quite rare.
Credit, debit, cash and carry.
Our fulfillment is found there.”

The congregation takes communion
Vioxx, Thalidomide, Chinese pet food.

Mortgage fraud, outsourced jobs,
corporate bailouts,
and unaffordable healthcare
fill the collection plate.

Pass the Kool-Aid.
Hallelujah!


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.
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TO THE GUY WHO PAINTED GRAFFITI ON THE FREEWAY OVERPASS

by Sherman Pearl


My car zooms under your words
(of whatever the hell you've scrawled up there)
and at this speed
I can't decipher your language or fathom
how you managed to balance above the traffic
while aiming your fearsome spray.
I drive past
this limb of the city's skeleton
but my mind screeches to a halt, imagining
that a caped super-hero
has swooped down, paint can in hand,
not to save us from evil
but to startle us out of complacency; or that
some dark angel had reclaimed
this road because we've failed to beautify it.

Most likely you're just a street kid
come to remind us you're here among us--
up in our rafters, down in our basements.
No space is safe; you've tagged
all the walls we've erected against you; now it's
the clouds you're coloring.
I think of you suspended above the danger,
the law, the humdrum. I picture myself
next to you risking all for art,
tied to the girder with strings of nerves--creating
something larger than art.

I've never been that high, kid,
but I think I'm beginning to see what you mean.


Sherman Pearl was a co-founder of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and co-editor of CQ Magazine. His work has appeared in more than 50 literary publications and has won several national and international awards. His fifth collection Profanities was published in July, 2008 (ConfluX Press). He lives with his wife, artist Meredith Gordon, in Santa Monica, CA.
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ELEGY FOR THE NEWBORN

by Howie Good


The librarian doesn’t care
as she once might have
that the books I’m returning
are missing some words.
Then I come to a forest,
dark, mossy clouds
like morbid thoughts
not even drugs can dispel.
A yellow cab, its engine running,
is always waiting at the curb
for a messiah to appear.
It’s the difference between
a democracy and a republic,
and though there’s no wind,
the puddles shiver.
My face reminds people
of someone they knew long ago,
before the assassinations
and the roadside bombings.
I stop to rest with the newborn
on the border of shrill gulls.


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). He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net anthology.
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WEEP, WRETCHED REGULATOR

by Bill Costley

Lightly adapted from HENRY VI, Part Three, Act II, Scene V, ll. 55ff

Alarum, Enter a REGULATOR that hath ruined a banker . . .
[dragging in the banker’s ruined body]

Regulator. Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.
The banker whom so handily, I ruined today
May be possessed with some store of crowns
& I that haply do take them from him now,
May yet ere night yield both my job & them
To some banker else, as this ruined banker doth me.
Who’s this? O God! It is my banker’s face,
Whom in this conflict I unawares have ruin’d.
O heavy times, begetting such events!
In the District by the President was I set;
My banker, being Bear Sterns’s man,
Came on the part of Bear, pressed by Stearns,
& I, who at his hands had receiv’d my funds,
Have by my hands of capital bereaved him.
Pardon me, God, I know not what I did!
& pardon, dear banker, for I knew not thee!
My tears shall wipe away thy financial wounds;
& no more words till they have flowed their fill.

President. O piteous spectacle! O bloody times!
Whiles bankers war & battle for their banks,
Poor harmless depositors abide their futility.
Weep wretched Regulator, I’ll match tear for tear;
& let our hearts & eyes, in intra-class war,
Be blind with tears, & break o’ercharg’d grief.


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers' Union.
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DEATH BY ELECTION

by Olga Wayne


To vote, or not to vote: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler to stress on undecided bleachers-
Submit to others' will and insane caprices,
Or to take arms against abyss of indecision,
And by choosing one of the evils – join it? To vote: to have a voice,
Responsibility; but vote – does it mean agreement?
The torture of a thousand objections and
Inquietudes – reflecting mind is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly abhorred by Independents. To vote, but
Republican or Democrat? Ay, there's the rub;
For in this world there's but a two-party system,
And lack of choices gives us Independents pause.
That makes calamity of road to each election;
For who could bear the whips and scorns of desperate decisions,
Between the oppressor's wrongs, and the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of empty rhetoric or total cluelessness,
The insolence of these choices and the spurns
Of disgusts and regrets over choosing the unworthy,
When I myself would better President make -
All I need is a good stylist and Wikipedia.
Alas, we grunt and sweat under the weary choice,
Fear and loathing after the election,
The undiscover'd country from whose trap
No traveller returns. This strangles all free will -
Traps thought, hope, will to live and spirit.
But vote for Nader? Lord O'Mighty, no!

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the total lack of choice or resolution -
Sickens. I dread the very thought of this election.
I resent the fervor and freight of the moment.
With this regard I fall into despair.
And I forget the rush usually felt with action.
Oh, the fair Hillary! You are a nymph in my orisons.

Be all my sins remember'd.


Olga Wayne is an attorney by day and a bard by night. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Temple Law School.
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NO! I'M NO PRESIDENT, NOR WAS MEANT TO BE!

by Aaron Gillego


O, that this too too "solid" economy would melt
Slow into recession because of the Dow!
Or that the Federal Reserve had not fix'd
Your rates 'gainst bad mortgages! O Bush! W!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the credit of this world!
Fix it! Ah fix! 'Tis an unregulated market
That's to blame for this: the rank and file in Wall Street
Possess bad debts. That it should come to this!
But two banks dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a bailout that was given
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; yet so unkind to Merrill Lynch
That it almost faced bankruptcy without Bank of America
buying its stocks too cheaply. Savings and Loan!
Must I remember? Why, that's what's happening,
Because inflationary spending has grown
By rates the Feds cut. And yet, within a month --
Let me not think on't -- McCain, thy name is woman! --
A little month, and the election will be held
And you want to postpone the debate with Obama?
Like Bush, all talk: -- Why even speak? --
O, Bush! A lame duck, that lacks discourse or reason,
You should have acted sooner—rescue by Uncle Sam
For Lehman Brothers, but no clue about
The cost to Taxpayers: Within the week:
Before any meaningful debate takes hold
And before anyone can eye and flesh out the bill
You want it passed. O, most wicked speed, to discuss
With both candidates the balance sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break my bank; for you must raise my taxes.


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 three poems previously to The New Verse News.
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LETTER TO SAMUEL JOHNSON

by David Chorlton


Dear Dr. Johnson, I own a copy of The Rambler, Volume III,
printed in 1798 on the kind of paper
that makes us value the print upon it. My grandfather
first told me about you; now amid slogans
I turn the pages to find your sentences
are often long enough to tie up with a knot
the superficial arguments of our age
masquerading as discourse.
Power and superiority are so flattering and delightful, that, fraught
with temptation, and exposed to danger, as they are, scarcely any
virtue is so cautious, or any prudence so timorous, as to decline them.
You couldn’t sell that on the street today, not on a Tuesday
and not on a Saturday the way you did. I’m not looking
to cloud the issues with language, but to find
some pleasure in the way ideas ripen
into words. Politicians like the ones whose meanings
have no binding power, like change or choice.
There’s no difference between their speeches
and the nightly ads between segments of the TV news
for allergy pills or stool softener. They just want
to sell us the idea of comfort. I doubt that you’d make it
as a commentator on the shows we have in which
it isn’t enough to serve sound bites, but we get the content
chewed up and ready to swallow. You’d take a question
and respond: There is nothing more common
among this torpid generation than murmurs and complaints;
murmurs at uneasiness, which only vacancy and suspicion
expose them to feel, and complaints of distresses, which it is
in their own power to remove. Some elegance might help us
disagree when we must. My grandfather appreciated
the way you wrote. He was just what we call working class,
which is to say he liked his beer and didn’t own
a lot. He didn’t learn about you in college
because he never went to one. It was simply the language
that proved that thinking isn’t a matter of class,
it is everyone’s right to conclude It is necessary
to distinguish our own interest from that of others;
          and that distinction will
perhaps assist us in fixing the just limits
of caution and adventurousness.


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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THE SKINNY

by Bill Costley


“A woman with a skinning-knife…”
slowly muses AK Gov. Sarah Palin,
“can cut the heart out of any man
in a pin-striped suit. I will again;
I'll truss up & skin that Sen."
Alaskans agree, half a million
hands on their skinning-knives.


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers' Union.
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RUNNING MATES

by Art Goodtimes


Something about
bitter & weary
that gravitates to honey.

Barracuda swims alone.
Strikes & smiles
‘neath stars of blood, eyes of blue.

Palin’s packing.
McCain’s double-dealing.
Obama’s biding his time.

As we slog on down
the October trail
bet the house on hope not hate.


Poetry editor for Earth First! Journal (1981-91), Art Goodtimes makes his living as a freelance writer and third term Green Party county commissioner in Telluride, Colorado, and runs Talking Gourds, an annual earth festival dedicated to the word in performance. He will soon appear in a new Ron Mann film about the Telluride Mushroom Festival (where's he's been poet-in-residence for 28 years) called "Know Your Mushrooms."
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GLOBAL LUNCHBREAK

by Scott Simpson


So the bell rang and we all punched out, but it’s hard being the American, so many third-world countries strategically located but ideologically problematic, and then there’s the lingering fast-food aftertaste and the smell of the Mall bathroom and the poly-textured rub of the voting-booth curtain sliding open to the sounds of the “historically oppressed” making marketable music for my children to buy but not get, and all of this factors in, but the worst part is when the market crashes and I have to remind myself that a 700 billion dollar bailout, after all, would be just a small drop in the world economy bucket I’ve been kicking…

Being the American means almost everyone wants me to fall hard—harder because I’m holding most of the goods and losing friends fast, making people want to tear down my back fence and scatter my toys… it all makes my stomach hurt--gives me a real global-tension headache…

So, I take a deep, cleansing breath, and stroll nostalgically out among the cold-war missile silos and dream of days when slapping leather solved everything until I’m stopped short in front of a polished casing panel, my reflection distorted and stretched, but still quite cinematic, “You lookin’ at me?... Are you lookin’ at me?” and damn if I’m not doing a great DeNiro, and I slap and slap… but when I turn around, the rest of the world is no longer looking, they all went for Chinese take-out.


Scott Simpson is a former high school teacher, college professor, camp director and lay-minister who attempts to live a contemplative lifestyle on a planet that views quietness and stillness as destructive ideas that could potentially undermine the fabric of society. He, indeed, hopes to undermine the fabric of that society with quietness and stillness. Scott lives on a planet called Earth.
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PATRIOTS

by Ayaz Daryl Nielsen


Nebraska panhandle roads
north of Billy Goat Hill
trucks move through fresh snow

thousands of cowbirds
unwilling to fly and lose
warmth buried together
under snowdrifts are

crushed by passing tires.


Ayaz Daryl Nielsen is editor/custodian of Bear Creek Haiku, also, poet/veteran/nurse/father, etc.
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SPARROW

by Merry Speece


bald sparrow
you could be the national bird

monotonous song!

& with that

one feather falls

& all the time Jesus listening


Merry Speece has published two chapbooks of poetry and been a recipient of a state arts commission fellowship in prose. Her Sisters Grimke Book of Days (Oasis Books, England) is a mixed-genre work of fragmented historical scholarship which one reviewer called a prose poem.
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