THE READING

by Lynnie Gobeille

after reading Charles Bukowski's "poetry readings"

She arrives in patterned flower pants
floppy sea green sweater, clogs,
her hair loose and matted
beaded woven bracelets dancing on her arm.
Introduces her first poem with the rambling saga
of her divorce, the recent death of her cat, how just
today she discovered a mouse had chewed through
small wires in the ice maker of her mother’s old refrigerator…
Her mother’s death resurfacing in all that water.
All of us are flattered when she remembers our names.
Talks to us as if she knows us. Or we know her.
I have been to enough of these to know
we are merely shells in the game.
People whose identity gets moved from here to here…
chair to chair ..reading to reading. We all sit in silence.
Witness her weave her star- like magic
Are her poems fabulous?
Or are they fabulous because we hear her read them?
My friend falls in love and buys two books. Hopes to have
them autographed and waits in line. Watches closely as the poet
signs each one with regal grace…
  I am asked to fetch more books
and dash off eagerly, honored by the task. Opening the car door,
overwhelmed by the sweet scent of spice and onions….I wade
through bags of garbage. An empty wine bottle rolls around at my feet
wrappers from a half eaten grinder slip through my fingers,
her children’s clothes and toys covering the back seat…
I kneel there breathing in all that is the magic of her life.
I recall the last poem she read.
  The one about the birds.
How they fly up and move from spot to spot,
three feet up to down.
She read it with such energy and amazement.

Breathing in one last blast of lunch
  and sweat and disaster,
I gather up her treasures.
Head back into the library…
Praying someday to be of equal measure


Lynnie Gobeille has been published in the Sow's Ear Review, Crone's Nest, Clear Creek Courant, The Avatar, The Prairie Home Companion, This I Believe (NPR) and New Verse News. She is the editor for The Poetry Corner in the Providence Journal South County section. Currently part of the Origami Poems Project, a state wide "free poetry event" based in Rhode Island.
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JUDGING THE JUDGE

by Anne G. Davies


The GOP had well laid plans
For interrogating Judge Sonia;
From the outset they’ve treated her
Like an acute case of pneumonia.

She shouldn’t take it personally,
Or overdo placating;
No matter who Obama chose,
The long knives would be waiting.

Her opinions have been subject to
Minute examination;
Any hint of minority bias
Is grounds for condemnation.

Can a Latina with life experience
Know as much as a law-trained male?
We know many an ethnic mama
Wise as jurists from Harvard and Yale.

Many Republicans will continue
To nitpick, carp, and upbraid;
We trust that others will rise above
This unbecoming charade.


Anne G. Davies is a fund-raising writer by profession and a writer and versifier by avocation. Her work has been published in local and regional papers. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
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LINT HEADS' LAMENT

by Earl J. Wilcox


Today, the last big mill in our town
burned down, almost to the ground.
It was a vast factory once, employed
thousands---textile heaven during its day.
Vandals probably started the fire,
as they usually do, though who can
know why they want to destroy this
last big building where their whole family
worked over the years. Dozens pour out
to watch the dark, coiling smoke climb
so high in the sky a city twenty-five
miles away sees one of our landmarks
go up, make a menacing cloud.
Friends who’ve not seen each other
since the mill closed decades ago
watch firemen douse the blaze.
Some recall teen years spent in spinning
rooms, some sweeping up cloth fragments,
others shed tears, glad they’re no longer
called lint heads.


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.
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THE INTERROGATORS

by Christopher Woods


Christopher Woods has published a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. He lives in Houston and in Chappell Hill, Texas. He shares an online gallery with his wife Linda at The Texana Review.
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SARAHTUDE!

by Bill Costley


She's so got it! Look @
any colorfoto of her:

teeth & skin & hair
2 absolutely die 4!

All she has 2 do is say:
"I'm just so...available!"

Like, I'm not kidding!
It's so...totally obvious!

Go, Sarah; Go-Go. Go.


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers Union.
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CURIOUS AT THE SMITHSONIAN

by J. D. Mackenzie


As the litany of useless details
began to reach Olympian proportions
what was to be a service became a circus

The grieving father moved
to ensure complete financial control
of more numbers than he could count

Two remaining Beatles
seeing an opening for justice
pondered buying their songs back

Three confused children
became even more so after
another strange day in their strange lives

The remaining four brothers
wondered through tears what they’d fetch
for a nights’ gig at the Aladdin

While millions tuned in to glimpse
how commoners send royalty
into the great beyond

But the Curator, paid to think of these things
could only watch and wonder
what ever happened to that damned white glove?


J. D. Mackenzie is a poet, college administrator, and improving organic gardener. His work has been widely published, generally when he remembers to submit it to online and print publications.
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BURIED WITHOUT HIS BRAIN

by Janice Keough


Sorry, Michael,
but the brain stays
outside the remains.

They need time
to see the chem trail
written by you

To maybe explain
what you took
but never why

That would take
an interview
you’ll never give.

Your life was always
outside your control
then and now.


Janice Keough has published in the RI Writer’s Circle 2008 Anthology. Last January, the Bay Area Poets Coalition awarded her 1st Honorable Mention for the 64-count poem, "Lemon Life". Her "Billing Queen" appeared in New Verse News in April. Her poem ‘A little encouragement’ is being published in the Providence Journal.
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OFF THE WALL

by Andrew Hilbert

today Michael Jackson will be buried

but not

Joe Jackson or Al Sharpton

they're sure to be

                                        there

advertising whatever it is

they're selling

today on facebook

a friend (but i don't really know him)

compared getting tickets to see

the King's memorial to getting

the golden ticket to see Willy Wonka

some comparison.

Willy Wonka was alive.

in his death,

Moonwalker is still treated as an

item

a commodity

Andrew Hilbert has a degree in History at Cal State Long Beach and lives in Orange County, California.
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I LOVE MY FEET, OR OVERLOAD OR SOMETHING ELSE

by Kim Doyle


Uyghur American Association is news to me;
never heard of them before the troubles
came to Xianjing. They (Uyghurs) are the n-word
to the Han Chinese majority it seems.

Muslims in a “buffer state” in central Asia
buffering, I guess, the world of Han
from the burgeoning world of Islam.
This is sometimes called “East Turkestan.”

It’s hard to keep up with everything reported
24/7. I used to know what to worry about
but now am confused. So I sample all the channels;
clicking, flipping, wanting to know and knowing
that what I get will just cause me to fret some more.

News is a whore feeding at the tit of the dead
Michael Jackson. I forget, wasn’t he a pedophile
or something like that; you’d never guess it’s a fact.

And who elected him ‘King of Pop’?
And was the election held in Iran?


Kim Doyle reports: "I try to know everything, but only Jorge Luis Borges did that; and he's long dead. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown."
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SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

by Buff Whitman-Bradley


Every morning
For more than six decades
I have gotten out of bed
Put on my clothes
Eaten breakfast
Brushed my teeth
Opened my front door
And stepped out of my house
Into a world that men driven mad
By money and power
Threaten to blow to smithereens
Or otherwise render unlivable

Who can say I am not
A man of faith


Buff Whitman-Bradley is a peace and social justice activist in Northern California. In addition to writing, he produces documentary videos and audios. With his wife Cynthia, he is co-producer/director of the award winning video Outside In, about people who visit prisoners on San Quentin's death row.
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PIT STOP

by Catherine McGuire


This is no tourist trailer parked beside us:
a cold dawn fingers
rusted ladder rungs curving
up to the dented roof, open-air “attic”
piled with summer clothes in garbage bags,
a coil of hose, buckets that might hold oats
or old shoes. Their featureless aluminum box
wheeled onto blacktop off the main road,
to the fringe of this roadside park,
among the Bounders' and Outlanders'
expandable rooms and sleekly furled awnings
hasn’t moved since Wall Street hit a pothole
got a flat and swerved
sending their lives off the edge
they‘d spent years clinging to.

The bike tied to the back
is unhooked for the graveyard shift
at the Highway Gas ’N Grill.
She cooks silently at a charcoal grill
the hot plate burnt out, she told me last week.
The white poly deck chairs and tv trays
create the dining room
that doesn’t fit inside. They eat
with their backs to the rest of us - she's slim,
he's hefty, with long gray-streaked hair.
They don’t socialize; don’t use the concrete clubhouse
or showers, or play bingo or cards.
Brown and green empties roll loose
tinkle like windchimes under the wheels
as cedars waggle admonitory fingers
over the rust-speckled, once mobile
home.

I hear them inside, though.
Morning is just another excuse to drink;
noon a rendevous with Oprah;
evening a cold bike ride to the edge
of the interstate which is endlessly
leaving them behind.


Catherine McGuire now peeks at the news through sheltering fingers. A third of her poetry is political; the rest is about Nature - before it's too late.
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NO TRESPASSING

by Janice D. Soderling


A carefully trimmed hedge
behind a fence.
Two ornamental stones
like runway markers.
A tailwind.

Dandelion seeds flying in low.


Janice D. Soderling is a previous contributor to New Verse News. Her work appears in many online and offline publications including nth position, Boston Literary Magazine, Alba, Right Hand Pointing, Shakespeare's Monkey Revue, JMWW, Literary Bohemian and Anon. She lives in a small village in Sweden.
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EQUAL RIGHTS

by Barbara A. Taylor


gaydar demands
under the rainbow
hand–in–hand
remembering stonewall
forty years on


Barbara A. Taylor's poems appear in literary journals and anthologies, including The Salt River Review, Tattoo Highway, qaartisiluni, Lynx, Modern English Tanka, Kaleidowhirl, Umbrella, Magnapoets, Triplopia, Poemeleon, Loch Raven Review, The Blue Fifth Review, Contemporary Haibun On Line, and elsewhere. Her diverse poems with audio are available online.
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CONFIDENCE IS A DUTY

by Kim Doyle


I am confused, I don’t know whether
it is better to spend or save. I am
naïve about this, as I am about many
other routinely political things.

As a generation we have been castigated
for not putting enough away for a retirement
that might entail eating cat food, or spending
time in a nursing home where we will be abused.

Now we are told to spend, this swirling tail
eating circle never ends, and I am not amused.
Spend or save; each conflicting wave assaults
me, sapping the strength remaining.

There are fearful lessons in this Great Recession;
if I could only cipher out their true meaning.
I’m leaning towards spending; never ending questions.

Life’s a beauty; confidence is a duty.


Even now Kim Doyle is not confident he’s got it right. However, he does have a new bath room, his contribution to the coming economic boom.
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