OPEN YOUR MOUTH, JUSTINE!

by Mary Sexson

She had eviscerated herself
before the plane landed, bled
a job and reputation out through
her social links.  The birds sang
and sang, and word went round
the world, like giant drums, beaten
to a pulp, the skins bloodied
with the tainted viscous fluids
of her birth country.  And she,
silenced for an eleven hour flight
as the plane cut its arc across
the blankness of space, where
not even a tweet can be heard.
By the time she landed
her demoralization was set,
her name sung into infamy,
this white girl without a country, lost
in her own version of what went down.


Mary Sexson is the author of the book 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996-2000 (Restoration Press, 2004), which was nominated for a Best Books of Indiana award in 2005.  She is the co-author of the recently released Company of Women, New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013).  Her work has been included in projects such as Arts Kaleidoscope, Shared Spaces/Shared Voices, and Poetry in Paint.  Her poems have appeared in various literary publications, including Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, Grasslands Review, and a special Kurt Vonnegut edition, One City, One Prompt.  Her newer work has been included in several anthologies, including The Globetrotter’s Companion (Lion Lounge Press, London 2011), Trip of a Lifetime (Sleeping Cat Books 2012), and A Few Good Words (Cincinnati Writer’s Project 2013), and the online site, The New Verse News (2013).  She has forthcoming work in the Reckless Writing Anthology (Chatter House Press).  She was recently nominated for two Pushcart Prizes for work published in 2013.

ODE TO THE AK-47

by Judith Terzi

                    after the obituary for Mikhail Kalashnikov, Los Angeles Times, 12-24-13


He was born hearty without
a heart in 1947, weighed eight
pounds but had few moving parts.
He screamed six hundred bursts
of fire blood that ricocheted
from his banana-shaped clip-crib
through jungles and steppes and
tunnels and flesh and now. He is
the Lego for child soldiers who
crave him, caress him with agile,
wide-eyed fingers. He is their
playmate; they deconstruct him,
then rebuild him for pleasure.
They drag him into sandboxes,
into the silt of rivers and creeks,
through grasses of marshes,
the grime of exile, crime of
hunger. Drug lords fondle him
during drive-bys and executions.
The chouchou of the Hutu,
Saddam, Bin Laden, the Afghan
mujahideen, he became a Russian
icon for creative genius. He is
the most lethal firearm in human
combat. Yet, with so few moving
parts, without a heart, he can be
bought for the cost of a live chicken.


Judith Terzi holds an M.A. in French Literature. Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies including Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer's (Barefoot Muse Press), Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo Press), The Raintown Review, and Times They Were A-Changing: Women Remember the 60s & 70s (She Writes Press). Her fourth chapbook, Ghazal for a Chambermaid, was just published by Finishing Line.

GIVE US OUR DAILY KALASH

by Martha Landman 

 
                  ". . . the world has moved a little." --Phil Kafcaloudes

Peace-time peasants are born ignorant of
the Pill, the Apple Mac and breast implants

Looking like ordinary men they coin money
from vodka, umbrellas and pocket knives. In

honesty, they work for the good of the people.
Iconic, as Gatling and Colt, their Siberian son

receives the Order of Saint Andrew, wrapped in
a Mozambique flag, a hero of socialist labour.

There are no regrets in his photograph or
in poetic dreams buried in shallow graves

where the counterfeit child soldiers of Africa
pray that their crayon boxes be filled with

enough bullets and Big Macs to crack all the
cocaine plants of the world during short break.

If Russia had a Bill Gates they would patent
him Kalashnikov and be proud as a mother

They would let him battle Bryansk and Brody
and decorate him with more than a lawnmower.


Martha Landman lives and writes in tropical North Queensland, Australia. Her most recent work appeared in Poetry 24, Every Day Poets.

HAPPY HOLIDAZE

Poem by Charles Frederickson

Graphic by Saknarin Chinayote 

Yo-ho-ho-hoping Yule N-joy
Sheepish Fleece Navidad ho-ho-hokum humbug
Hot & Spicy zesty seasoned 1% greedings
Volunteering help to (s)ain’t nickeless needy

Human jelly beings suffering tinsilitis
Jingle bellyache noggin migraine bon-bon
Noel nutty crunchy cheery cherry fruitcakes
Nutcracker God Jul sweet Swede crumbs

I scream for eyes crème-dela-crème
Popsicles fudgesicles creamsicles dreamsicles multiversity
Unisex frosted ginger-bred tinkering boy-toys
Sno-man is a dessert island

Web-addicted Generation-Xmas XS Yes Icon
Computer wonderland wreck the malls
Oh .com all ye faithful
Freeze a jolly good Facebook fella

Santamental Journey X-rated Xmas fave pet
Santa-paws point-setter yellow snow frost bite
Dependent clauses vertically challenged low elf-esteem
Gnome sweet gnome workshop

Sleigh traded for Holly Davidson
Modem icicle built for 8
Comet Cupid Donner Blitzen Vixen
Dasher Dancer Prancer naughty Rudeolph

Gluelicke Wienachen Germs speaking North Polish
Ooh-la-la-de-dah dandruff flakes o-o-o tan N-bomb
Uncaged turtle doves eco-friendly green peace
Happy ever laughter miles of smiles

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 .

PROGRESSION

by Kristina England

Yesterday I woke to people talking about ducks,
a dynasty, some man that believes in the bible,
says homosexuality is not what God proclaimed.
I don’t have Cable, stumble through the news,
piecing it together like a young child
does with puberty, hormones, identity.
Today I woke to Uganda passing a law:
life in jail for those who partake in same sex love.
How does the dynasty man feel about this news?
He says he’s a love thy neighbor kind of guy,
does not promote hate or discrimination.
He just sticks to interpretation of the written page.
But what does he think of Uganda?
How does it make him feel inside?
I’ve been around long enough to know
that the human word means little
compared to the judgements of the mind.
Perhaps the duck man will squirm,
hold himself back from quacking
at how hard it is to love yourself,
to realize we are all fallible men.
Or he’ll skim over the headline,
say Uganda is not his problem.
He has nothing to do with Uganda.
He’s just an average, God-fearing man.
Then, he’ll grab his gun, hunt duck for dinner,
So what if he’d rather hunt a moose today.
Ducks are what he knows and understands.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her writing is published or forthcoming at Extract(s), The New Verse News, The Story Shack, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other magazines.

LISTENING TO THE NEWS AT MY FARM TABLE IN MAINE, OR SOWETO SAYING SO

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

This morning’s bread is a recipe and a half to make full use
of yesterday’s ricotta whey. I mix and think, the drop leaf
of my old oak work table crying in rhythm with my kneading,
Mandela’s death on the radio turning into a living ingredient.

It comes to me, making this week’s oatmeal-molasses
this enriched way, that I need to look up Soweto Bread
and invent an outback Maine version, in honor, the way
our Obama Bread rose from the joy we elders earned.

Wondering at my work, I knead. And drizzle Nebali tree olive oil 
all the way from the Canaan Fair Trade route from Palestinian
farmers to brother Schaibles’ caravan downeast, its bittersweet
anointing a clear film consecrating the overcoming of apartheid
in South Africa and how, once we knew, we wrote, petitioned,
and marched, the way, after television made it this far north,
showing us, we did over our own country’s shame.

Wondering at my work, I gaze into this dough lifting
by this fire here in this north, for hope, asking, if, as we
keep hearing, people who plant trees in whose shade they know 
they will not live to sit have begun to know the meaning of life,
what can be said of those who uproot, ax, chainsaw, burn,
rip out by thousands ancient trees of others, the ancestral
food and means trees of others? The very identifying
and sacramental trees of others? The olive trees of neighbors?

Do separation barriers make them not neighbors anymore
or neighbors held apart in a less than human way? Wondering
at my work.
              
     Do not the Mandelas of the world foretell
     that the writing on the walls of the oppressed
     proves other Freedom Days are rising?
     That making bread with Palestinian oil in Maine,
     we must make up our own minds and, like Soweto,
                                        say so?


Health troubles keep Patricia Smith Ranzoni from public participation so she relies on joining her voice this way. Her unschooled work documenting the Canadian-American, mixed-blood Yankee cultures of her people has been published across the country and abroad, including past issues of The New Verse News and most recently in Parallel Uni-Verse, Tuesday Anthology of the Oregon Coast, and Bedding Vows, Love Poems from Outback Maine (North Country Press), her 9th collection. She participates electronically with the Blue Hill Peninsula Peace & Justice group.

KIM JUNG-UN CONSIDERS BUCK ROGERS

by Jim Bartruff

My grandfather's panel, from his decadence,
signed by the ghost who dreamed the three,
Buck Rogers, Wilma, Ming the Merciless,
the terrorist, the victim and the steel,
eternal metaphors of Snow and Spring
and her fertility between the two,
he kept for the imaginary stress
depicted on the three-dot color pane
of Sunday luxury, his time abroad
recanted with the War, because the line
was like the line cartographers had drawn
with politicians sleeker than my uncle,
another yellowed relic we displayed
in stills from slightly overhead to show
his hair in disarray, already dead
the man beneath the bare place on his head,
walked down the aisle with white gloves on each arm
like ice on maples, and the tree a bride
defiled and veiled in black instead of white,
and so disposed of as her village would,
dissected from the revolution's arms,
assassination as the mark of Cain
on every generation of his line.

With famine as the rigor of our faith,
and falling in the withered field as belief
no longer potent proofs or martyrdom,
and truth a cartoon inked, re-inked, erased,
we see the ray-gun at Buck's side,
and see it through a holocaust of snow,
as solid you see me while the old
impediments and those they raised go down,
so we in freedom may proceed in strength
developing a ray-gun that will work,
and hold Buck bayed, while Ming moves toward the girl.


Jim Bartruff's work has appeared in Canto, Westwind, Barney, Marilyn, Drastic Measures.  He is a past winner of the William Carlos Williams and Academy of American Poets prizes.  A third-generation native of Los Angeles, he was previously a print journalist and screenwriter, now living in Portland, Oregon.

A GRAFT IN CHANGSHA

by Daniel Bosch

Chinese doctors have saved a man's severed hand by grafting it to his ankle, it is reported. --BBC News, December 16, 2013

Among the amazing inventions
Of the Chinese: pulp paper,
A musical four-line stanza,
A tiny hand carved at the end

Of a bamboo shaft—each
In its way an acknowledgement
Of how often and how painfully
One’s reach exceeds one’s grasp.

Who has not scratched furiously
At a blank sheet, leaving faint scars
When one desired only words
Through which lifeblood flows?

Who has not punched and kicked
At the bounds of thought, only
To find oneself beyond them,
Seeking not a way out, but a way in?

Who has not felt some small thing
Make its glorious revolution
At the top of one’s sock or
Under the cuff of one’s pants?

No hand without extremity.
No mind that will not fold
Like paper. No stanza that will not cut
The breath to shape what one sees.

Every measure taken is temporary.
At the end of any given line
One believes each mute twist of the stick:
This tourniquet’s tight enough.   


Daniel Bosch is Senior Editor @ www.berfrois.com .

THE HUGE HOUSE HALFWAY UP MY NEIGHBORHOOD'S STEEPEST HILL

by Tricia Knoll

 

Image source: HDRcreme

You have to pass it to get out of the bowl we live in,
to get to the abandoned school yard we’ve claimed as a dog park.
The hill is steep. Most walkers slow down by the showy red brick mailbox,
except for that woman who pushes a three-wheeled baby carriage.

The house is empty. First the fan in the third floor window disappeared.
Two bright yellow rent-a-trucks parked outside for three hot days.
The dainty Japanese maple in the cedar planter withered.
Leaves clog the front gutter. No one has raked the backyard.
They left a garden hose coiled like a brown snake
in a ceramic pot. The pump is turned off so the waterfall
water in the pond is green frozen slime. (I hope the cattails survive.)
Someone mowed the lawn in late November and pulled up wilted hostas.
I picked up a sodden newspaper months ago. Unlit Christmas lights
drape from the deck supports. The lady with the golden retriever
said it’s a foreclosure.

Nothing posted from the bank or a realtor. It’s the largest house
around. Not easy to sell, I guess. I thought someone ran a mail order business
on the first floor.  They put out flags for every holiday,
even St. Patrick’s Day. The house reminds me of an old green truck
that died on a back road so the disgusted farmer walked away wondering
how long it would take it to become a rusted-out derelict.
The man with the rescue boxer named Bridget says it’s a bankruptcy.
Vacant window-eyes stare down on us, not in judgment,
more like disbelief. The silence disturbs me.
Three teenage boys in hoodies used to shoot hoops out back.

What does a house that big sound like without people?
Does the furnace ever rumble to keep pipes from freezing?
Does wind tom-tom the picture windows? Pierce of tinnitus, a low whistle
in forlorn solitude? The next-door-neighbor heard one coyote howl
beyond the slatted fence, three answered back. Maybe mice moved in.
It would take a big family to fill that house.

I wish someone would put up a sign.

 
Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet -- who passes by this house several times a  day. She runs up the hill but slows down at the mailbox. Her chapbook Urban Wild will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2014.

ADVENT

by Penelope Scambly Schott

Syrian children take shelter against the cold in Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan. © UNHCR/B. Sokol

Our town has lit the star on Dufur hill,
its heavy orange extension cord draping
across snow crust.  Below, in lit houses,
we cook supper.  Even the poor will eat.
I’m glad they won’t turn on their radios
to hear about one family in Syria
beyond the reach of refugee agencies
who cluster by a stove kluged together
from galvanized scrap. There is no wood.
This family is burning their leather shoes.
The shoes of children offer little heat.


Penelope Scambly Schott lives in Portland and Dufur, Oregon, and donates to the food bank.  Her most recent books are Lovesong for Dufur and Lillie Was a Goddess, Lillie Was a Whore.  She is a regular reader of The New Verse News (and a fan of Tricia Knoll’s frequent contributions).

CHRISTMAS DOLLS

by Earl J. Wilcox

 Cartoon by Jeff Stahler.

For Christmas, I want my own Ted Cruz
bobble-head, stolid from the neck down,

feet planted firmly toward the right ventricle
of our hemisphere---slicked down, cropped

hair flat atop a head jerking up and down—
erratic rhythm, so wobbly my Cruz doll

makes me dizzy watching it teeter and totter
smirking its fake, fixed smile, the way all

bobble-head dolls carry on. Aloof, my doll
hunkers on a top shelf in a store with metal bats,

acrid-smelling leather gloves, bobble-heads
Rush and Rand and Sarah and Michele. Bob on.


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 TheNew Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

WORLD APART

by Kit Zak






Here in this world apart
from Syria’s shoeless kids freezing in Lebanon’s snow
we recheck our Santa’s list
detailed requests from our children
who track every advance in I-phones.

Here in this world apart
from tent cities not just in Bekaa Valley
but in our own hometowns
we push the thermostat up two degrees
then rush to our waiting car.

Here is this world apart
from the country and cities of Syria
where the slaughter does not cease
one hundred and ten thousand and counting
we plan our holiday entertainment.

Here in this world apart
eyes shut to our hungry and sick
and the sixty thousand vets searching shelter
we close our minds to thoughts of oligarchy
believing still in a country with justice for all.


Kit Zak lives with her husband in Lewes,  DE. She has most recently had poems published in an anthology about motherhood as well as in the following journals: Avocet: A Nature Journal, The Blue Collar  Review,  and A Time of Singing.

SELF PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENT

by Kristina England

Artists have been painting themselves for ages,
a narcissistic undertone in their strokes.
We are all painters,
prone to staring in the mirror,
tweezers, razors, makeup
tasked with refining our complexions.
We are beasts of beauty,
so why not capture ourselves
in the best and worst of lights?
A face will only last a lifetime (or less).
We should each grab a camera,
smile into the lens,
introduce self-love into our daily routine,
a much needed moment of clarity
that's been absent for too long.


Kristina England resides in Worcester, Massachusetts.  Her writing is published or forthcoming at Extract(s), Gargoyle, New Verse News, The Story Shack, and other magazines.

11,460

by George Held

Children killed by gun violence since the Newtown shooting.
From top: Alton and Ashton Perry, Leonard J. Smith Jr., Aaron Vu; Middle: Trashawn Jaylen Macklin, Tiana Ricks, Mia Lopez; Bottom: Antonio Santiago, Jaiden Dixon, Madison Dolford.
Image source: NBC News

That’s the number of once-living
Innocent persons killed by gunshots
In the year since Adam Lanza

Slaughtered 20 lambs and 6 shepherds
At Sandy Hook School one year ago.
Hard, and maybe futile, to make that

Number poetic. Say it: “11,460”
And by the time anyone might read
This piece, the number will be bigger.

That’s over 31 gun deaths per day,
114,600 per decade, or 10,000
More than the population of Green Bay, WI.

Adam Lanza’s name is immortal,
His victims will soon be anonymous.


An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com