FINDING BEAUTY IN SEWERS

by Catherine Wald

A new photography exhibition featuring images taken by Paris’ homeless and most vulnerable citizens was inaugurated by Deputy Mayors Bruno Julliard and Dominique Versini this week. The photos are on display on the railings surrounding Paris City Hall. This new initiative is the outcome of a partnership developed between 'Deuxième Marche', a nonprofit association offering assistance and educational opportunities to vulnerable individuals in France, and the start-up Wipplay, which organizes amateur photography competitions online. After a short training period, the twelve homeless individuals selected spent 4 weeks capturing Parisian life from their perspectives. Accompanied if they wished by students from Paris’ art schools, the photographers set out to depict their daily lives and to provide an insight into a side of Paris that most people never experience. The exhibition aims to raise public awareness of homelessness, and to demonstrate photography's potential as a means of reinsertion and rehabilitation. A selection of the photos taken are on display outside the City Hall until March 19th, and will also be available for purchase online on Deuxième Marche’s website. The profits from these sales will be shared equally between the association and the photographer concerned. The hundreds of photographs submitted depict scenes of solitude, insecurity, exclusion, and public indifference, as well as moments of beauty. —Mairie de Paris, February 20, 2015

In the tradition of our patron saint, Baudelaire, we are exhorted
to find harmony in mud, trash and indifference; given cameras
and point-and-click lessons; sent in search of photo ops.

We have no hesitation in rising to the challenge – we, the
flowers of poverty and displacement, society’s poisonous vapors,
perambulating poets that trail nasty refrains after us wherever we go.

Our longing for beauty, actually, is more poignant than yours.
We have learned to conjure it from sewers, air vents, public
toilets and fountains, billboards, and tunnels that only
sometimes have light at the end of them.

We are the visionaries -- not you soft, you sheltered ones.  It’s easy
to embrace loveliness when it wraps a silken shawl about your
shoulders, when it looks like your kin and feels like your birthright.

It’s supremely possible to celebrate ugliness when it’s a choice, not
an obligation, not a brooding and inescapable horizon.

Do you doubt us?

How do you think we’ve survived thus far on nothing
but fumes and cold pavement?  We are not metaphors,
we are the living dead, and we have learned over and
over again how to inject beauty into our thinning veins,
decomposing clothing, the cracked and bleeding
soles of our feet.

We have been artists all our lives.

Catherine Wald's books include poetry (Distant, burned-out stars, Finishing Line Press, 2011), nonfiction (The Resilient Writer: Stories of Rejection and Triumph From 23 Top Authors, Persea Books, 2005) and a translation from French of Valery Larbaud’s Childish Things (Sun & Moon Press). Her poems have been published in American Journal of Nursing, Buddhist Poetry Review, Chronogram, Exit 13, Friends Journal, Jewish Literary Journal, The New Poet, Society of Classical Poets, The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly and Westchester Review.

INNER-CITY SLUM

by ayaz daryl nielsen 

Image source: Mairie de Paris

inner-city slum, the relaxed dive
consciences hibernate there
the fumes of cigarettes, booze and meth,
dried sweat-stink, grease-stained blankets
homeless misfits with measured oblivions
their hunger abiding in all dimensions
punctuated only by upheaval and
sometimes, you know, I miss it


ayaz daryl nielsen, x-roughneck (as on oil rigs)/hospice nurse, editor of bear creek haiku (25+ years/125+ issues), homes for poems include Lilliput Review, SCIFAIKUEST, The New Verse News, Shamrock, Kind of a Hurricane, and online at bear creek haiku.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLITICAL POET

by Israel Wasserstein

“...artists who use their media of choice to advocate specific political agendas should always warrant our suspicion...” --Sam Lasman

I will confess I have little patience

for pastorals, for experiments, for post-

modern explorations, for poetry written

in circles to subvert patriarchy,

for lyrics that earnestly explore

how communication is impossible.

I confess such things seem a luxury,

and so I embrace unpoeticism,

and admit that I sometimes think

about those bankers who destroyed

millions’ pensions, profiting

on the misery of the soon-to-be

homeless, fantasize about lining up those bastards

and putting two bullets in their heads. I am not

a violent man, and I would rather write

about occult patterns the rain

creates, mixing with oil and garbage

on city streets. How can I write

of the squirrels in my backyard

who antagonize my dog

while Colorado burns, crops wither,

ice caps melt? These are ugly sentiments

for a poet. I can’t write small poems

about autumn with Trayvon Martin dead,

about subverting the paradigm of I

while the people of Syria are murdered,

while politicians label anyone killed by drones

enemy combatants, while polio and T.B.

return, while women die in back-alley

abortions and churches preach stay

with your abuser. While football coaches,

Archbishops, politicians cover for rapists,

while the children of the powerful

become the powerful, while wealth

piles in the hands of the rich

and the poor go without jobs, without

healthcare, without hope. I confess

if I knew how, I would rather be a poet

of revolution, to bend my words

against injustice. I confess

I am not that poet--too middle-

class, too white, too straight,

too soft-spoken. In my defense,

I can say only this: I

reject the sin of silence.

Israel Wasserstein, a Lecturer in English at Washburn University, was born and raised on the Great Plains. His first poetry collection, This Ecstasy They Call Damnation, is a 2013 Kansas Notable Book. His poetry and prose have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blue Mesa Review, Flint Hills Review, and elsewhere.

COURTING JUSTICE

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

Middle school hasn't always been the kindest of places, and when a cheerleader with Down syndrome was bullied from the stands during a boys' basketball game, it seemed to be just another example of kids being cruel — until a few players stepped up to make it stop. It turns out that Desiree Andrews, an eighth grader from Kenosha, Wis., had some friends in her corner. "The kids in the audience were picking on D, so we all stepped forward," said Lincoln Middle School basketball player Chase Vasquez, who told TMJ4 in Milwaukee about the moment a teammate finally left the court to ask for the harassment to stop. NY Daily News, March 12, 2015

the cheering crowds provided anonymity
or so they thought . . .
for who would call them on their words
like a foul or an out of bounds
then came time out
for this time
in a world of monstrous bullies
grown from small ones like these . . .
three boys to men also grown
simply said

                stop

                                the

                                          game

losers, your game is over

                                now


Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S. has been a teacher and a librarian.  Her poems have appeared in America, Commonweal, Sojourners, and First Things among others.  Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless will be released in the fall of 2015 by Press 53.  She is presently a poet, freelance writer, and a spiritual director.

DUNKING

by Richard Spilman

Back when you were fourteen, small
and new to that school, three toughs
cornered you in the boys’ john, shoved
your head into a bowl of yellow water,
and when they let you up you screamed
bloody murder, hit anything your arms
could reach. To shut you up, the big one
put his foot on your neck and told you
what they’d do. You believed and cried.
Hands in pockets they left one by one
Silently, as if they’d watched a man
betray his friends for a moment of breath.
You dried off, picked up your books,
and went to class. You didn’t tell, and
the teachers didn’t ask about you wet shirt,
and the kids already knew your disgrace.

That was the last time you ever cried.
Not when you were wounded in war,
not when your wife left telling you
she couldn’t love a man so closed off.
You make money trading commodities.
You don’t buy and sell goods, you buy
and sell futures—someone always wins,
someone loses, roulette with wheat and gold.
You trade in illusions, in rises and falls
on a screen created by phantom sales.
Investors like fish rise to your bait.
At the reunions you bring your latest,
her blonde youth a testament to your
prowess, but they laugh behind your back.
For them, your collar is forever yellowed
with piss, your eyes rimmed with tears.


Richard Spilman is the author of In the Night Speaking and Suspension. He lives in Hurricane WV where he is discovering that a bathroom above a garage makes for a frigid winter.

POWWOW

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

My tribe is my life
Personal identity comfortable cozy belonging
Recognition feeling desired wanted needed
Praying respect to magical totems

Born into clan without reservation
Uncivilized savage beast trapped within
Daily battle fighting nasty demons
Peacepipe powwow serene quiet calm

Primitive tribalism addictive conformist cult
Clan network security blanket family
Whatever you call it everybody
Needs one quest for belonging

Medieval Dark Ages unholy crusades
Inquisition wars of conquest extermination
Violent wild passionate rage misplaced
Unencumbered by compassion empathy pity

Clockwork universe surviving by ticks
Secondhand surpassing minute bonfire countdown
Timelessness experienced in counterclockwise regression
Digital era speeding fast-forward pulse

Second nature spirituality beyond cowardly
Massacres raping murders looting barbarism
Slaughter justified in name of
One hypocritical faith or another

Tribal mission recruiting chosen chief
Mesmerixed followers manipulated by cooperation
Not competition rusty sketleton key
Unlocking identity battle owning yourself


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

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.