DESCANT ON OUR DEFORMITY

by Rachel Voss

Richard III's skeleton as found in the grave beneath a parking lot. The remains of the King who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485 were reburied in a tomb in Leicester's Anglican cathedral on March 26, 2015.

What’s more naked
than bones?  The whitewashing
of history, a ghostly rose

to honor the dead.  Which
dead?  “It doesn’t look like
the face of a tyrant,” a woman

said.  Hasn’t she heard
of Shakespeare (who couldn’t
have written a better ending),

or known any real sons of bitches?
It costs a lot of money
to look this immortal.

The onlookers point their thousand several phones,
and every phone takes several similar pictures,
and every picture condemns us all for vanity.

Now is the spring of our
reinterment.  Despite
the line of worshippers

and the royal craze, I, for one,
am determined to hate
the idle pleasures of these days.


Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher and lives in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, Borderline, WORK, Blast Furnace, and The Prompt Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Newtown Literary and the Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology.

STRANGER

by George Held

1.

Warum? Por qué? Pourquoi?

Why-o-why-o-why-o?

The people want to know: Why

Did Andreas fly into the alp?

It would be OK if he’d killed

Only himself – suicide, while

Regrettable, is acceptable,

But murdering 149 innocents …

That’s beyond the pale,

The boundaries of civilized

Behavior.

O the pounding on the door

And the screams of terror …

2.

Warum? Por qué? Pourquoi?

Why-o-why-o-why-o?

But what if the answer

Is “just because …”

Because Andreas could

And so he did,

Adding his name to those

Of Stavrogin, who killed

A child to prove his freedom

To do so, and Gide’s Lafcadio,

And Camus’ … is Lubitz

The new Meursault,

Author of an “acte gratuit”?

O the pounding on the door

And the screams of terror …

3.

Warum? Por qué? Pourquoi?

Why-o-why-o-why-o?

But those men and their victims

Are literature, figments

Of great writers’ dreams,

While Lubitz’ victims

Left living survivors,

feeling loss, grief, despair.

Germanwings suffered

A cockpit intrusion

By the co-pilot, who locked

the door, dialed the numbers

in and then hit

“Execute.”

O the pounding on the door
And the screams of terror …

George Held, a regular contributor to The New Verse News, has a new book out from Poets Wear Prada, Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems.

KNOWING THE GREAT UNKNOWN

by Laura Rodley

Can I keep an Aborigine
alive in the desert
where he can draw up water
from under the sand
if I recycle my cans
can I keep the leaves green
there in the desert
where even the lizards are parched
if I use less gas, change my oil
can I hold out my hand
across this great distance
if I only use the dryer at night
when electricity use is less
easier to trundle along the wires?
And can I carry you in my arms
through the desert when you have given up
past the kangaroos, errant camels,
if I plant more trees, their leaves
giving oxygen to you, to seep
into the desert air, invisible
but still there for you to breathe?
And if I keep my heat down,
will it bring you more water
underneath the sand where you
dip your straw to sip
while I carry you to my house
so I can lay you down;
I’m carrying you to my house
so I can lay you down.      

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

SPRING PEEPERS

by Martin Elster

Spring Peeper. Image source: Virginia Herpetological Society

Spring peepers trill and whistle in between
the avenue (where drivers rush toward shops),
construction site, the woods, the putting green.
No one stops to listen to these drops

of sentience small as buttercups and shrill
as piccolos. They hide amid the stalks
that rise up from a liquid eye as still
as a spyglass pointed at the equinox,

Unblinking for eternity. The first
of April. The environs dance and ring
with notes from frogs who, though they’re unrehearsed,
belt out a song precisely tuned to spring.

These lusty soon-to-be inamoratos,
iconic crooning harbingers, will soon
be silent. You who ride inside your autos,
roll down the windows! Do not wait till June!

Martin Elster, author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in such journals as Astropoetica, The Flea, The Martian Wave, The Rotary Dial, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan. Martin’s poem, “Walking With the Birds and the Bones Through Fairview Cemetery” received first prize in the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014.

THAT WAS THE WINTER

by Peter Krass

The New York City blizzard of 1947 dropped 26.4 inches of snow in Central Park over two days (December 26-27). As moisture in the Gulf Stream fed the storm's energy, the City was paralyzed when the blizzard barreled its way through, stranding cars and buses in the streets, halting subway service, and claiming 77 lives. —Image Source: New York Public Library via New York City OEM.

That was the winter when snow fell three times
in one week, twelve times in one month,
fell even on the first day of spring
and no one mentioned it
or else looked surprised when it was mentioned,
as if eccentric blizzards, deep endless freezes
were perfectly normal
and no cause for worry.

That was the winter when a bicycle was buried
in a snowbank, only its handlebars
visible, poking out from the top
of a frozen mound
like a pair of chromed periscopes
hunting for clues.

That was the winter said to be the coldest
in years, in decades,
the snow freezing on sidewalks and streets,
then melting in rare rays of sunlight,
then freezing again,
then melting again and freezing yet again,
changing color, too, from pristine white
to urban grey, and then
to a disgusting speckled black
until the snow became something else, something
not-quite-snow, not-quite-ice,
but what, no one had a word for yet.

That was the winter lonely-hearted men
relied on porn and their exhausted imaginations,
for all outdoor female forms were bound and concealed
in boots, hats, scarves, shapeless coats, fleece vests, bulky
sweaters, lined gloves, even childish mittens,
and beneath it all, long underwear, turtleneck collars
and sad, thick grey wool socks.

That was the winter when walking to the store
was like walking on the moon,
the ground grey, frozen and crunching,
the air muffled, disconcertingly still,
when even a Friday night was strangely deserted,
neither a car nor a pedestrian on the move,
as if an entire city had been immobilized,
which in a way it had.

That was the winter so cold, no one dared speak
of global warming,
though some saw the weather
as a kind of warning
and they worried, worried
a great deal.
And now, decades later,
we who have known so much more,
so much worse, think back on that winter,
those long-ago worries,
and we smile.
Sadly, to be sure.
But still, we smile.


Peter Krass is a freelance writer and editor, and a creative-writing teacher at The Writers Studio, both in New York and online. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Commonline Journal, The New Verse News, and elsewhere, and his poem "All Dressed in Green" recently received a Pushcart Prize special mention.

THE PUPS

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Wildlife services in California are being pushed to their limits this year. Since January 2015, every month has set a record in sea lion "strandings," mostly sea lion pups, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There has been an unusually high number of sea lions stranded since January," said Justin Greenman, assistant stranding coordinator for NOAA on the West Coast. "Stranding does happen, but just to give you perspective, 1,800 [sea lion] pups have been responded to this year alone. We responded to 1,600 strandings total during the entire year in 2013," he said. Stranding is the official term to describe marine life that "swim or float into shore and become beached or stuck," according to NOAA. Greenman said California has had warmer weather than usual this year, and, while NOAA is still conducting studies on the Channel Islands to get a more proven explanation, warmer water drives the food source farther out or deeper into the ocean, where the colder water is. When food is farther away, the mothers are away from the pup too long in search of food, and return with little food or too few nutrients for a growing sea lion. —CNN, March 18, 2015

The pups
rise like shaking hands
out of the surf,

with their skin
held like bunched blankets
round their shoulders. They aren’t
yours.

Who should claim them?

From the road, they are the color of the sand –
easy to miss. Think

of them:
their wide steep eyes,
and their bones like broken sticks.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California. Her poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, Word Riot, The Kentucky Review, Paper Nautilus, The Lake, and The Tule Review, among others.

ALLAHU AKBAR, GOD IS GREAT

by Zeina Azzam

A group that said it was affiliated with Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attacks on the two mosques in San’a, where suicide bombers detonated explosives just after noon as people gathered for midday prayers, local security officials said. When survivors fled, a second pair of bombs exploded outside the mosques, killing more people. By evening, the official death toll had risen to 135. —WSJ, March 20, 2015



They've made it so there is no room for me,

she said defeatedly, like an old building
about to be torn down.



The spectrum of Greatness is now a narrow alleyway
in ancient San'a or Kabul. Few may pass.

Guns the price.



They've elbowed out the ones
whose crescent shines on the courts and libraries,

schools and shelters.



How do we make room in this crazy world.
How do we make the world believe that this is not

what we believe.


Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian-American educator and writer. She works as executive director of The Jerusalem Fund in Washington, DC.

MENTAL SLAVERY

by Abraham Adonduwa

Nigerians displaced by Boko Haram wait to get their villages back as new military alliance begins to make progress. Image source: The Independent, March 23, 2015

Politics is a dirty game
It involves grown up men abandoning decorum
For personal aggrandisement
Men in suits, Agbada, Babanriga
Taking off the inhibitors
To make it easier for them to roll in the dirt
It involves the death of conscience and the birth of pragmatism
So that when 219 girls are abducted you stay above the fray
score cheap political points against the opposition
Who are only breathing life to a figment of their imagination
go on a dance jamboree
When a bus park is blown to bits because
They are only trying to undermine your leadership
Indeed politics is meant for pigs
And rabid dogs that bark more than they bite
Covered in teak and filth
Because how can you claim to be a farmer
And have no grime under your fingernails
A surgeon and have no blood on your hands?
Politics is for men and women
ready to jettison their faith in God
For the only true religion: money, power and respect
Ready to increase their wealth by collecting bribes
And inflating contracts
And looking the other way when confronted with the harsh realities
Of the ever hungry streets
Grateful to finally belong to the cabal

Sometimes I detach myself from the daily Boko Haram attacks
Because after all, they are happening in the far North East
Where I have never visited
I clip my tongue from running loose
Grit my teeth and thank God
they aren’t extending to these parts of the country
but it is this sort of silence in the face of tyranny
this sort of lackadaisical aloofness
that is the onset of mental slavery.


Abraham Adonduwa is a Nigerian writer and poet who has been published in Origami, Ontherusk, Indiana Voice, Sentinel Quarterly amongst others. He is an emerging voice burning with passion for the written and spoken word and is currently hard at work on a collection of short stories.

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