TO THE NEW REBELS

by Margery Parsons

Inspired by the young demonstrators in Madison, protesting the police killing of Tony Robinson.

Spartacus on a hill
dreaming up at a tapestry of stars
as slaves from a far flung empire
prepared to fight Rome.
What made the ragged minions
with nothing to call their own
except misery
dare to challenge Caesar's throne,
its fearsome weaponry,
legendary battles won,
and all the philosophical sophistry
used to justify its reign?
What gave them the temerity
to defy gods, to tear down
idols, to question
the exalted certainty of the known?
Look into the eyes
of a mother who has lost her son
to a centurion,
a father carrying the remains
of a child slain by drones.
Listen to the cries
of a generation doomed to oblivion
and you will know why you must rise
as they have done.


Margery Parsons is an activist and poet; she lives in Chicago, works for an arts organization, loves movies and music.

THE STUBBORN OLD NOTION

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Image source: United Posters

for Tony Robinson, Anthony Hill, and !Presente!

For a few months now
Six of us have stood on a busy corner
Once a week
Holding signs that read Black Lives Matter
In solidarity with the movement of that name
Protesting police murders
Of unarmed African Americans
And endemic racism in our country
We are in our ‘60s, 70s, 80s
And doing what we can
As our time grows short
To stand for the possible world
And not surrender to the despair
We increasingly feel
Not only about the tenacious cancer of racism
But also about the savaging of the poor and disempowered
And the plunder of Earth’s bounty
By the felonious elite

When we were young we thought
That revolutions were about to occur that
The tumult and turmoil we were part of
Would lead to a new more peaceful
And more just world
Any minute now
But over the decades we have watched our dreams
For that the new world
Go tumbling backwards down the stairs
And we find it increasingly difficult
To remain positive

Today as we stood with our signs
A man walked up to us and said
Fuck niggers fuck Jews
And the driver of a passing truck shouted
That we were nothing but a bunch of aging hippies
With meaningless lives
If he’d stuck around for a chat
We would have explained that
Standing on a street corner
Witnessing for justice and human decency
While enduring the blast and blare of traffic
The stinking miasma of exhaust fumes
And the scorn of foolish folks like him
Was meaning enough for us thank you
Whether on any particular day
We can muster up hope for the future
Or not

Just a few days ago
A nineteen-year-old unarmed black teenager
In Madison, Wisconsin
Was shot and killed in his own home by a white police officer
And yesterday
A twenty-seven-year-old black man in Georgia
Behaving erratically
Parading naked in public
Was also gunned down by a white cop
Maybe the long moral arc of the universe
Bends toward justice
And maybe it doesn’t
Maybe it isn’t optimism we need in order to persist
Maybe just the stubborn old notion
That to do nothing and remain silent
Is to give our consent
Which we cannot do

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.

IN EACH OF US

by J. D. Mackenzie

Moscow ralliers protesting the murder of Boris Nemtsov carry a banner reading "Heroes never die — these bullets are in each of us" | SERGEI GAPON/AFP/Getty March 1, 2015

The sting of each new murder
and the recoil of every new clue
points us back to the same source

We carry the burden of knowing how
these gruesome deaths inter-connect

We suffer the agony of wondering
when it all must end

Ballistic tests mean as much
as dust in ancient churches

We’ll march because we can
burn candles when the wind permits
and hope, because we can’t give in

The bullets are in each of us
sunk into those who remember better times
who cherish the power of free voices
and wistfully recall our rightful place
in the world


J. D. Mackenzie tried careers as a steelworker, sommelier and psychiatric aide before his current role as a college administrator.  A 2011 Pushcart nominee, his work has appeared in The New Verse News, The Ekphrasis Project, Four and Twenty, and Poets for Living Waters. He lives with his family in the foothills of Oregon’s Coast Range.

END OF THE LINE

by Howard Winn

Chinese Communist Party leaders are afraid that the Dalai Lama will not have an afterlife. Worried enough that this week, officials repeatedly warned that he must reincarnate, and on their terms. Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing. . . . Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet. --New York Times, March 11, 2015

The train has reached the
station and will be taken
out of further service.
All passengers please
proceed to the platform.
It is reported as possible
that the Dalia Lama may not
choose reincarnation bringing
to a close the ageless reign
of his timeless essence in order
to thwart the Red Capitalists
now milking crony connections
to make the nouveau riche of
the modern China connected
to the high end real estate
of London, Paris, and New York
and who desperately still need
their own dogma for the Tibetan
region the Chinese covet as
also prime real estate where
they can park the excess
Chinese now filling their
historical land and deposit their
young like money laundering
shady deals in the best Ivies
and yet they desire Shangri La
as their very own and this
is what the 14th Dalai Lama
will short circuit if his spirit
says no more and no return
in the new body of some
favored infant for number 15
no matter what the descendants
of Mao wish they can only pretend.

Howard Winn's poetry and fiction has been published recently in Dalhousie Review, Galway Review, Taj Mahal Review, Descant (Canada), Antigonish Review, Southern Humanities Review, Chaffin Review, Evansville Review, and Blueline. He has a B. A. from Vassar College and an M. A. from the Stanford University Writing Program.

COMPANY

by David Feela

Terry Pratchett, the immensely popular British fantasy novelist whose more than 70 books include the series known as Discworld, died on Thursday at his home near Salisbury, England. He was 66. --New York Times, March 12, 2015

As you can see
I am occupied with Death,
so there’s no time left
to answer you with a novel.

When I first arrived
in the world
I thought there would be
more time;

I was mistaken;
so are we all.


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.

APPLESAUCE

by Gil Hoy

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court . . . blocked the next three executions scheduled in Oklahoma pending its review of the state's controversial three-drug cocktail for lethal injections. The ruling was expected, since both lawyers for the convicted murderers and the state itself had urged the justices to intervene. But Oklahoma also wanted the court to allow executions to resume if it could find a replacement drug, and the court left open that possibility. --USA Today, January 28, 2015; Cartoon source: Penn Live

If the supreme court

Says 43 minutes
Writhing squirming
On death cot

Is cruel and unusual,
We have tried true

tested alternatives.

Shave head, part of leg
   To welcome flow of electrons,

Strap chest, legs to chair
Metal skullcap

electrodes on head
Moisten sponge---
   j-u-s-t   right

Hood over head
Flip switch---

Asphyxiation
   Cardiac arrest
nervous system Paralyzed

Defecation,  urination
Smoke steam Escape
  from body
Boiling Blood

“The body’s temperature
becomes so hot, the flesh
falls off
if touched”

Third fourth
degree burns
Body may catch
   Fire

The Sound of
Sizzling Bacon tickles
your ears

Eyeballs pop out,
  but rest comfortably
     on cheeks

Body bleeding
body Cooking, The

sweet smell
of broiled vulgar Flesh

permeates the chamber
into your nostrils.


Gil Hoy is a regular contributor to The New Verse News.  He is a Boston trial lawyer and studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in philosophy. Gil started writing his own poetry and fiction in February of last year.  Since then, his poems and fiction have been published in multiple journals, most recently in The Potomac, The Zodiac Review, Harbinger Asylum and Earl of Plaid Literary Journal.

OKKKLAHOMA

by Chris O’Carroll

The Daily Cartoon by Emily Flake, The New Yorker

Okkklahoma, where the white frat boys think hate is great,
And black guys swing in the songs they sing
’Cause their campus is a lynchpin of the state.
Okkklahoma, where the Klan was strong in ’21
When Tulsa burned, and no one learned,
So “hang ’em from a tree” still sounds like fun.

We know we’re the heirs of Jim Crow.
If it weren’t for that damn video
EN EYE GEE GEE
EE AR is something we’d feel free
To go on sayin’,
And we’d feel fine.  Okklahoma!
But just one K, OK?


Chris O’Carroll used to live in Kansas, and has performed at comedy clubs in Oklahoma.  He doesn’t expect to be invited back any time soon.

TRISKAIDEKAPHOBIA

by David James Olsen

Image source: Share

dedicated to Alan Turing

numbers hold more fear than words for some people haunted by sad notions,
especially that dreaded thirteen, surely evil by nature and dark to the core:
it has led men to doom due to gloomy superstition quoting Capitol maidens,
crumbled psyches with barren rage hinting at a horrific end to their pulse,
and crept into many tales of terror read by children with chattering teeth-
though braver brains have dared indulge the qualm of it and other integers,
oh so big: Euclid, Euler, Gauss, Newton, Leibniz, Abel, Weyl, Turing, and Fib-
all tangled with enigmatic math in ways we now must admire and learn,
so maybe we fools need to follow their lead, leaving baktun foreboding behind;
yet if you review closely, calculating the lines and words of each line
within this odd clumping of lexemes lurking in lyric patterns on a page,
you will find that often fears are founded in precessional and seemingly puerile
print which hides eery numeric code- and perhaps it never happens by chance.


Author's note: There are exactly 13 words in each of the 13 lines of the poem. The word "enigmatic" is used to reference the Nazi code "Enigma" cracked by Alan Turing; the phrase "barren rage" is from Shakespeare's Sonnet 13; the shortened surname "Fib" is for Fibonacci, who introduced to Western Europe in 1202 A.D. the brilliant sequence of numbers including 13, though it had been described earlier in Indian mathematics; in the Mayan calendar, each cycle of 13 baktuns encompassed an Age, making many people believe the final baktun was bound to be apocalyptic; each full "precessional" cycle on Earth takes 26,000 years, perfectly divisible by 13, and amazingly, as if our most ancient predecessors knew this, it is slyly interlaced into almost every culture's oldest architecture and creation story/legend such as the number of maidens painted around George Washington on the ceiling of the Capitol dome in D.C.


David James Olsen has been published by Instigatorzine, The South Townsville micro poetry journal, and here in The New Verse News. He is currently submitting much of his recent poetry and writing fresh verse every day. Also rehearsing a uniquely conceptualized production of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, he looks forward to its New York run and subsequent tour to Milan, Italy. Though he enjoys the juggling involved in being an actor-singer-poet-researcher, he finds the most peace while gently gripping a pen.

RIGHT TO WORK FOR LESS

by Paula Schulz

Gov. Scott Walker Monday signed so-called right-to-work legislation banning requirements that private-sector workers pay union fees, prompting one business to say it will add workers in Milwaukee and another to say it will expand in Minnesota instead. --Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel, March 9, 2015

Earliest morning, the moon a mirror,
the sky that deep, hopeful blue.  And for those
few moments all plans are possible.

You feel it--to walk into the world is
to walk into a fairy tale where the king
is a good man who loves the beautiful.

All the old witches grow backward into joy,
straighten up, fly right, drop glittering
educators in Wisconsin schools.

Every child is beautiful, strong, well-nourished:
factory and government jobs pay
a living wage.  Police and protesters

carry potato guns.   After they face
off, all gather ammo, take it to their
local soup kitchen, cook up a rich

chowder, pass warm bread, talk of family.
Governor Walker goes to Washington,
takes his dislike of the arts with him where,

despite his best efforts, a new WPA
is formed and funded and we learn again
each others stories, paint new portraits

of dignity, sculpt a strong citizenry,
paint with bright colors, polka to a new
American song.


Paula Schulz is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, a recent Pushcart nominee and an educator.  She is hopeful, blue.

NO SINGULAR COUNTRY

by Alejandro Escudé

Harrison Ford was injured last Thursday afternoon when his vintage single-engine airplane crashed on a golf course shortly after taking off from Santa Monica Airport. Photo of the plane by Alejandro Escudé.

Oh furious desire for the present! That nose!
Like the botched schnoz of a prizefighter,
the splayed yellow wings, aluminum body,
the star, a model-slick Army Corps roundel.
Ford’s plane, whole, stark,  not the protracted
present, but the breakneck speed existence,
unafraid, the kind that wolfs one across time
despite failure. Have you risked it? The plane
asks, Or are you pulling back? Other cars
maneuver around me, stopped to cellphone
snap the pic. Say what you want, but the man
that took down that plane, that wasp-like,
double A battery-shaped plane, that metallic
cereal box, met the abounding void and tore
through it, no perturbation over loose ends
nor much hindsight, no babble or echoing
self-talk, just the return home with no home.
No singular country but the loosened sky and

there it sits, intact, on that cool green grass.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. 

MEASLES

by Joan Colby

Anti-Vaxxer Kristin Cavallari

A darkened room. Venetian blinds
Slatted like a stern mouth.
No reading. No coloring books
Or paper dolls. I shut my eyes
Reddened like the polka dots
Of my fevered body.
The doctor with his satchel
Of uselessness. Two weeks
Or longer. It’s the hard
Measles.

Two infant boys born before my father
Died of it. They were both named
For their own father, an unlucky
Name as it turned out—he too would die
Young in a gunfight. They called my father
A different name. So names must
Matter. My own means Gift of God
According to my mother who never wanted
Such a daughter, one spotted
With original sin, who must be
Worried over, hot and sulky in the dark
Demanding one more chapter.
My father’s weary voice as Jim
Hides in the apple barrel
Listening for the thump of a peg leg.

Once a third of the tribes crawled
To the cooling waters where they expired.
I get better. A neighbor child
Loses smartness, burnt away in a conflagration
The way conifers on the mountain
Turned into ashy witches.

There’s such a thing as herd
Immunity. The few protected
By the many. How penguins huddle
Against weather, changing places constantly
For the good of all.

Age of enlightenment.
Lords of miracle: Lister, Pasteur,
Jenner, Finlay, Reed, Salk.

Yet in the forest where the children stray
The house of the witch still beckons,
People believe in angels, in green men from mars,
That evolution is a lie, that the moon is a hologram,
That science is a devil’s plot
Against the faith of conjecture.


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.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by 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. 

ALABAMA ATTEMPTS TO STAND STILL

by Jay Sizemore

Alabama is also on the front lines of what some see as the modern-day successor to the civil rights movement. Although a federal court threw out the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, Alabama’s Supreme Court has tried to block the issuance of marriage certificates. Mr. Obama made several references to gay rights but did not directly address the fight over marriage in Alabama. --Peter Baker and Richard Fausset, The New York Times, March 7, 2015; photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times

in a hurricane of rose petals,
in a landslide, where every granule of dirt
is a body clamoring for air:
roll tide, roll.

There’s something holy about crimson,
the color of blood,
the color of a wound left open
like a gash between the ribs
where wind can be heard
whistling
through a punctured lung,
gasps of breath lost
out the knothole of a hollowed oak,
felled when the roots began to die.

Remember the F-5 that tore through Birmingham,
digging a trench a mile wide,
scrubbing houses clean of their foundations.
Remember the hopelessness of the sundogs,
shimmering in the wake
of Death’s coattails
like pearl buttons on a burial suit.
Remember the sounds of rubble
lifted from the cellar door,
the way the world smelled
like a dirty palm pressed over a mouth.

Whose hand reached down
through that rectangle of light,
that swirl of dust and dripping rain,
to pull you free of the cobwebs,
into cacophony and conflicted weather vanes?
If that hand had held
the penis of his lover
just hours before the storm,
would you have refused to be saved?
If Jesus Christ put on fishnet stockings
after the sermon on the mount,
and let Peter call him bitch,
would his words cease to inspire you?

Alabama attempts to stand still
with both feet on a fault line,
shaking its fists like gavels
to pound illumination
out of the stars,
insisting that every kiss
be given with the eyes closed,
no tongue. Leave the lamp on,
so you can see yourself
drowning in the gulf. .

Roll tide, roll.


Jay Sizemore brought the high-five out of retirement. He still sings Ryan Adams songs in the shower. Sometimes, he massages his wife's feet. His work has appeared online and in print with magazines such as Rattle, Prick of the Spindle, Revolution John, Menacing Hedge, and Still: The Journal. He's never won an award. Currently, he lives in Nashville, TN, home of the death of modern music. His chapbook Father Figures is available on Amazon.

RADICALIZED

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: RCOG Globeal Network International Women’s Day Page

The main thing was, she
listened. A
cliché.

So we told her
everything: how we cared

how we couldn’t
stand

watching all the news, how sad we felt.

She said we’re right. We told her
more: little

slips like pretty dolls
with long loose hair

laid on their backs –

here: the teacher
who won’t look
at us

my mother’s glass of brandy
every night,
her soft red cheeks.

She said the answer and it was
the one we wanted.

On the big plane
looking down
at the dark world we held

our coats wrapped tight
as love

around our ribs. The future waited like a bear,
still asleep.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Hobart, decomP, The Tule Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others.

TERRORISM AND ITS MODES

by Austin Alexis

I compare it to a wintry night:
kale and other crops won't grow:
its land sits barren, dry.
It is defined by lies.
The bodies and shards it scatters
disintegrate in The New York Times.
Its causes it fails to justify
so its effects lack resonance.
By definition it is a cry
whose message, unheard, belies
what it wants to say.
Unpersuasive, it never asks why
its arguments don't make loud sounds
like shopping malls crashing to the ground.


Austin Alexis has published in or has work forthcoming in The Long Islander, Home Planet News, Paterson Literary Review, The New Verse News, The Ledge and other journals. His full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press). His chapbook is For Lincoln & Other Poems (Poets Wear Prada Press). He teaches composition and literature at a CUNY college in Brooklyn and lives in Manhattan, New York City.