BOKO HARAM APOLOGIZES

by Paula Schulz

We have taken your children.
We needed something humble to terrorize,
something weak to push around, break like toys.

We have taken your daughters from school.
They shouldn't have been there. We never
went. Yes, the world cannot understand

that we have taken your worthless daughters
from school. Western education is
sinful. And a smart ox does no more work

than a stupid one. We can sell them as whores,
feed them or not, trade them for men of value.
Any grief in us is cold: a chill blade

to stab the hateful. We are not men
who cry womanish tears. We will fire
the bullets of our anger into the future.

We are not peaceful men.


Paula Schulz has taught children for nearly twenty years and joins many others who are saddened and appalled by this kidnapping.

GREEN EGGS & MICHAEL SAM

by Chris O’Carroll

They do not like you on the right.
You get their panties bunched real tight.

They do not like you in the game,
But you got drafted all the same.

You’re gay, and hey, you’re now a Ram,
You’re NFL, you’re Sam I Am.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in Angle, Light, Lighten Up Online, Free Inquiry, and The Rotary Dial, among other print and online journals.

BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, GOOD FRIDAY 2014

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Image source: Occupy Beale Air Force Base*

                      for Roger Stoll and Kate Raphael


We stand outside the Air Force base
To grieve the deaths of innocents
Assassinated thousands of miles from here
By missiles fired from unmanned planes

We have come to deliver a letter
To the base commander
Insisting that the drone attacks be halted
In the name of our common humanity

In the broad field in front of the base
Redwing blackbirds are singing in the long grasses
And we wonder what songbirds there are
In the mountains of Pakistan, the deserts of Yemen

And we wonder what is the last sound
That the unsuspecting victims hear
Before they are obliterated from above
The twittering of a small bird? the roar of the approaching missile?

When jet fighters take off every few minutes
Their diabolical roar obliterates all other sounds here
We cannot hear if the blackbirds are stunned into silence
Or if they continue singing in defiance of the din

With our letter in hand we cross the line
Onto the Air Force base
And are immediately taken into custody
By polite young men and women dressed in camouflage

In the guard house the MPs are respectful and solicitous
As they ID and fingerprint and photograph us
Then hand us each a letter stating
That we are banned from the Air Force base forever

Children incinerated in drone attacks
Simply for being in the wrong places at the wrong times
Were not treated with such courtesy and consideration
Before they were banished forever from our shared life

One by one we are escorted back across the line
No war planes are taking off just now
And we allow ourselves to feel a flicker of hope
Hearing the redwing blackbirds singing in the long grasses


* Drones flown from Beale Air Force Base, near Marysville, California, do not fire missiles, but do reconnaissance and targeting for attacks by other drones.


Buff Whitman-Bradley is the author of four books of poetry, b. eagle, poet; The Honey Philosophies; Realpolitik; and When Compasses Grow Old; and the chapbook, Everything Wakes Up! His poetry has appeared in many print and online journals. He is also co-editor, with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley and Sarah Lazare, of the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War.  He has co-produced/directed two documentary films, the award-winning Outside In (with Cynthia Whitman-Bradley) and Por Que Venimos (with the MIRC Film Collective).  He lives in northern California.

FOR THE ESTRANGED ON MOTHER'S DAY

Imps of Insomnia
by Larry Litt

Image source: Becky Says Things

True Nature doesn’t give a damn.
Imps in darkest tossed nights
Sleepless chattering monkeys
Waken me analyzing
My life screaming
“Tragedy begets Empathy!”
As if I needed a
Hole in my heart repaired.
Monkeys feel estrangement
Shout “What’s it for?
What’s this silent pain all about?
Why can’t it be healed?”
I know now there’s no healing
Just accepting the boundaries
Of betrayal, anger
And eternal shame.
The mad poet took all offered
In his path of pleasure.
The payout is never
To hold a child with
Love again.
Biting lips with empathy
At families reconciled
In Hollywood movies
With a sadness too great
Even for the big fake screen.
True Nature is silent
Does not give a damn
Or consent to relief.
Were I more like True Nature
Could I still write this poem?


Larry Litt is a writer and performer who can't decide if he’s a 'dirty old man, 'smart olfart' or 'recently bathed geezer.’The NY Times has called his work "Wryly conceived, politically provocative." New Littany Editions coming soon.

VALUE ADDED TEACHERS

by Ann Bracken

Image source: Precarious Faculty Rising

She feels frustrated
as she rumbles around in cramped offices
with all the people shouting
Words don’t matter.
Especially when she hears graduates
of the university
referred to as output.

When people become output
there is no need for nurture.
Sewage pipes have output,
as do factories that churn out row after row
of standardized parts.

In cramped classrooms and windowless lecture halls
teachers are gauged by their productivity--
here every human complexity is reduced
to a series of data points, quantified and measured,
success or failure—positive or negative output.

These days she no longer relishes
seeing joy or surprise or the flash
of an ah-ha moment on her students’ faces.
Instead of planning for a field-trip to the meadow
for a sensory experience,
she spends time trying to quantify
commitment, measure amazement
and determine a cut score for
how much inspiration one needs
for a journey into the unknown.


Ann Bracken is an educator and writer whose poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in the Little Patuxent Review, Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century,  Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Life in Me Like Grass on Fire:Love Poems, Praxilla, New Verse News, Scribble, The Museletter, and The Gunpowder Review. Ann’s poem, “Mrs. S” was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. In addition to teaching professional writing at the University of Maryland College Park and working as a poet in the schools, Ann presents frequently at writing and creativity conferences including Mindcamp of Toronto, Florida Creativity, the Maryland Writers’ Association, the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, and The Creative Problem Solving Institute.

WHAT HE’S PAINTING

by Joan Colby

Painting by George W. Bush

He is painting dogs, we’re told.
So far, he’s done fifty. One shows
a fluffy terrier, another a Maltese,
both on backgrounds the color
of morning glories. His teacher says
he’s moving on to landscapes
like Winston Churchill. I’d like to see
studies of coffins offloaded from planes
in secrecy or one of a legless soldier
or an Iraqi child shot at a checkpoint.
This painting from the viewpoint
of one seated shows his feet
sticking up out of the bathwater.
Another depicts him in the shower.
I have to wonder why he favors
himself immersed like a baptism.
He has that cocky sense of humor
so you could almost like him.
I’d like a painting where he’s holding
a mandate to waterboard the constitution
or one clearing cedar brush, his previous hobby.
His teacher lauds his talent, says he
could be a master. He grins, brush in hand
to watercolor history.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Her latest book Properties of Matter is just out from Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014:  Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

THE ELEVENTH COMMANDMENT

by Kim Baker

“On the 18th of April 2014, when making his speech, Mr. Mugabe talked less harshly about corruption by his Zanu PF and government officials. Whilst he was talking about corruption in the country he looked sleepy and exhausted. Gosh the man woke up when he started talking about homosexuality. He knows how to fool Zimbabweans always and anytime. Homosexuality is his ace card. You can fool some people some time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time, though Zimbabwes’ president has fooled us for too long.”  -- Zanda Shumba, The Zimbabwe Mail, April 20, 2014

I am Mugabe.
A heart for sin.
A head for exploitation.
Every man must obey me.
Every woman must die for me.
Their screams feed my greed.
I sell Chrome to China.
My empire’s richest resource
laughs at your rusting girders.
Our steel is stainless.
Your soul is stained with apathy.
Our Chrome creates plastic
that you toss away by the mile
and makes the knives
that cut your gluttony.
Who can stop me?
Fear is a mighty assimilator.
And oceans are my moats.
I took back what was ours
from the colonial.
The Roman Catholic bastards
raised me to think right.
I am merely multiplying the fear
in the righteous order of Christ.
What do those childhood taunters
think of Mugabe now?
I can talk law.  I have no need for games.
Allow gays?  I will cut out your tongue.
They are the reason for all
our poverty hunger garbage.
Women-ministers in Zimbabwe?
Don’t make me laugh
at such an ill-fated oxymoron.
Democracy?
Peace?
I will build bunkers against them.
I fear no one!
I fear no one!
Hitler had his underground bunker.
I will build mine between the rivers.
What have I to fear?
I say, what have I to fear?!?


When she isn’t teaching the abundant virtues of the comma and writing poetry about big hair and Elvis, Kim Baker works to end violence against women and end hunger.  A poet, playwright, photographer, and NPR essayist, Kim publishes and edits Word Soup, an online poetry journal that donates 100% of submission fees to food banks.  Kim’s chapbook of poetry, Under the Influence:  Musings about Poems and Paintings, is now available from Finishing Line Press.  Kim can be reached at bighairedpoet(at)gmail.com .

ILLINOIS MAN PROTESTS REST STOP CLOSURE, CLAIMS HE WAS CONCEIVED IN BUILDING

by Elizabeth Johnston

DES PLAINES, Ill. (CBS) – A 21-year-old Crystal Lake man staged a one-man protest Friday morning over the permanent closing this weekend of the Des Plaines Oasis along the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway. The reason will do doubt come as a surprise. WBBM Newsradio’s Mike Krauser reports Kevin Walters chained himself to the door of the oasis, and said to understand why, you have to go back more than two decades.

A man in handcuffs imagines himself Adam
guarding the Tree.

Would not we all, if once we could,
chain ourselves to certainty:

Here life began,
against all odds
has purpose.


Elizabeth Johnston is a founding member of the award-winning writer's group, Straw Mat.  You can read her prose and poetry in various anthologies and literary journals, including Yellow Medicine Review, Mom Egg Review, Organs of Vision and Sense, and Trivia: Voices of Feminism, among others. She teaches writing and gender studies in Rochester, NY, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a menagerie of animals.

IT'S A RACE

by Tricia Knoll

Jockey Ron Turcotte poses aboard Secretariat in the winner's circle at Churchill Downs after winning the 1973 Kentucky Derby.

Secretariat's jockey complains of treatment by Churchill Downs 

--Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, April 30, 2014

Twenty years ago a Chicago Marathon race director
stood behind a chair, showing us how he steered his dog team
in the Iditarod. He swerved the chair, clucked his tongue, flexed
at the knees. His move to marathon racing? There’s joy
in the way creatures run. Life overflowing. Joy
in how good people tend to good creatures.

And Turcotte. That small jockey on the big red horse,
the impossibly big-hearted horse and the 1973 Triple Crown.
When I saw Haley’s comet in 1986, I knew
it was a once in a lifetime the way my years fall.
I feared so it might go with the Triple Crown.
Never another Turcotte on a Secretariat?

Bless Seattle Slew, Affirmed, the well-tendeds who ran
for their owners, ran for their trainers, ran to remind us
of that big red horse that swept the field.
Love in the way great creatures run.
Joy in the way good people tend good creatures.

And Turcotte. Rolling now on wheels in a chair.
Churchill Downs could not save an accessible place
for him to park. His chair, his heart. His legacy
with that big red horse.

Tend to good creatures.
Joy in the way they move.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet with a long family tradition of following the Kentucky Derby with a grandmother who once lived in Louisville. She knows there are many concerns related to horse racing -- but that never dulled her love for the best big red horse. Her chapbook Urban Wild is now available from Finishing Line Press.

ARIEL'S SONG 2014

by George Held

The intensive aerial search for surface wreckage from Flight MH370 officially ended today. --RTÉ News, April 30, 2014

“Full fathom five thy father lies” –
And thy mother and brother and sister too,
Thy aunt and uncle and grandma too –
But they lie far deeper than 30 feet,
Maybe as many as 6,000 leagues
Beneath the sea – if that is where
MH 370 actually landed.

Six weeks and no evidence can drive people
Mad. But the public loves an unsolved case,
Wastes hours watching the same old
Denials on TV as well trained technicians
Conduct the search with the best of sensors.
But the known unknown still can’t turn the missing
Into “something rich and strange.”

Even as we write about this mystery
We hope our words will soon be irrelevant,
We hope the plane and the people on board
Will be found, dead or alive, and if alive,
We hope their disappearance will show
That even in a world of NSA detection,
There remains the luxury of evasion.


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

ST. JOHN THE WATERBOARDER

by David Feela




No scripture foretold
the coming of Sarah Palin,
not Matthew, Mark, Luke,

or even John McCain.
If the prophet is inclined to baptize
every suspected terrorist,

may their mouths be opened
by the bombastic political psalms
the NRA continues to pray,

and may Sarah’s crusade
to interpret the Constitution lead her
to the Bering Sea where

an opportunity to walk on
spring ice becomes her christening,
this wrath of water.

David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

KERRY ON, JOHN

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Prince Valiant epic comic adventure
Positive mindset wading into troubled
Waters flotsam debris garbage patch
Pelagic plastics chemical sludge pollution

Pitch Black Sea bullyrag revenge
Hearts of Darkness octopodal depths
Derelict abandoned shipwreck cast overboard
No hope of being reclaimed

Slivered driftwood floating turd extremists
Inbred superiority complex insular chutzpah 
Thug mentality spreading putrid humanure
Compromise declared a dirty word
                                                                       
History isn’t made by cynics
But by brave-hearted visionary dreamers
Unafraid to end Zionist occupation
Wheeler-dealers spinning Vegas odds roulette

Peaceful coexistence only viable alternative
Stubbornly ignoring Uncle Sam cries
For help illegal settlements universally
Condemned drowning in leaky pool

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

A MASH NOTE TO HILLARY

by David Spicer

You’re an American pioneer.
A world warrior.
You scare the hell out of everybody.
Except your believers.

Why do you want this job?
Don’t give me patriotic bunk
You recite on Hardball.
You want what you want.

Is your ego the size of Texas and Ohio?
Are you Machiavelli’s spiritual great granddaughter?

Your lemon meringue pantsuit fails the fashion test.
That laugh could chop wood.
If I hear On Day One again,
I’ll yank out my bazooka and shoot the Milky Way.

You thought the job a divine right.
You owned the nomination.

Then along came Barack Obama,
Grinning like a llama.
A meteor that seduced a nation:
The Blessed Orator.
The Golden-Tongued Angel.
Smooth as peanut butter on fresh bread.
You'd  met your match.
You hated it.
Live with it.
               
You fight in the era of the last bastion
Of white males.
They resist, a phalanx poised
To confront and destroy you.
Don’t concede.

You’ve been reviled.
Caricatured. Pilloried.
You don’t care. You persevere.

You’re not our mother, our sister, our daughter,
Our girlfriend, our waitress, our opera escort,
But our leader.

And a cat with twenty lives.
Not in double digits yet.

Hillary, you’re my hero.
Tougher than the meanest missile in the world.

Answer this note.
Please.

What about Bill? you might ask.
Forget him, though you love the guy.
Divorce him on Day One.
(Remember, hell hath no fury . . .
He doesn’t want you President anyway.)
Throw him out on the steps with his humidor.

We’ll elope to the Ukraine.
The world our oyster.


David Spicer is  seeking a publisher crazy enough to print his manuscript American Maniac. He has had poems in The New Verse News, The Naugatuck River Review, Spudgun, Yellow Mama, and elsewhere.

ON MAY DAY THE POETS WILL GATHER FOR PEACE

by Patricia Smith Ranzoni

Image source: Storybook Woods

               
                                            on having to decline the honor


I will make them all the Maybaskets I know how.
Small tissue-and-crepe-paper-covered grocery boxes saved all winter.
Folded and cut lantern and umbrella ones. Frilly cones with
accordion handles and kite-like tails. Pastel petaled and grass fringed ones.
I will fill them with maple bits, chocolate and divinity fudge, nuts, and molasses corn.
I will tuck pussywillows into their hearts, our rite.
I will tiptoe up behind each in turn, nestle a sweet cup into his hands or lap or at her feet,
    tap them like the doors they are and run, my skirt ruffling in old country mischief.
They will laugh, seeing, and chase me.
They will catch me one by one and give me a kiss.
I will say I remember you, thank them, and say so long again
    and not be lonely another year.

And when they remember, may this comfort them when they read out and cry.


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.