SING A SONG O' MIKE PENCE, A CHILDISH SONG AND DANCE

by D. Brian Craig

Song:

Sing a song of Mike Pence

he claims it's our mistake

to read into this Hoosier law

more than wedding cake.

Dance:

But Governor, yes or no,

will the law allow discrimination?

Could you make this about something else?

May I ask you seven more times?

Origins, Meaning, and Interpretation:

Some infer in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

a prognostication wherein Belch (no accident that) 

tells a clown (nor in that):

"Come on; there is Mike Pence for you: let's have a song."

Some, however, find the name a corruption, or at the very least

too great a price to pay. On this not all folios agree.

Other scholars find parallels in the 21st-century social amusement 

of placing live politicians on a hot plate, 

as a form of entremet (something to be enjoyed between 

servings of cute animal videos).

The recipe most often called for birds

of a uniform feather to be locked in an oven,

or statehouse, from which they would, after a time,

poke their heads out half-baked;

an uproar would ensue, after which they would be returned,

only to emerge finally

singing a different tune

to the great amusement and delight of the electorate.

No corroborative evidence supports either of the above,

though the earliest tradition, in one stanza,

clearly mentions Naughty Boys

from whom little is heard of afterward.

D. Brian Craig is a scientist, engineer, and writer, though not always in that order, nor separately. His writing has appeared most recently in The Pitkin Review and FEBS Letters.

THE GREEN CITY

by m.nicole.r.wildhood

Shell Arctic Drilling Fleet OK'd To Use 'Green' West Seattle Port. —KUOW.org, January 14, 2015

Boxes clickclack like LEGOS
escorted by confident cranes over
fragile veins to keep the whole world
up and racing.

The city, from their point of view
a sidebar, has enough year-round jade
for mercantile satiation
if only it were capital

and not growing things.
Traditionally, the city has guarded
all its life – it would rather
articulated bus jackknife all over the highway

than salt the roads during a snow
because of the tainted runoff
into the salmons’ stream.
This city that cares so much for its fish

is the same city that is making room
for an armada of royal oil drillers
to station among the blocks and birds.

Every green movement
can be whitewashed;
every commitment to fish
can be watered down.


m.nicole.r.wildhood is a Colorado native who has been living in Seattle – and missing the sun – since 2006.  She has been a saxophone player and registered scuba diver for over half her life.  In addition to blogging at http://megan.thewildhoods.com, she writes poetry, fiction and short nonfiction, which have appeared in The Sun, Lodestone and Ballard: A Journal of Street Poetry, ditchpoetry.com and Café Aphra.  She and her husband, who is gifted both as a structural engineer and as an artist, often collaborate on poetry/painting pieces.  She seeks to be an advocate for those experiencing mental and emotional suffering and celebrates the misfits, the non-conventional and the bold.

STRANGE CHORDS

by Rick Mullin



Mar 31, 2015: UPDATE 9:57pm PDT
Joni was found unconscious in her home this afternoon. She regained consciousness on the ambulance ride to an L.A. area hospital. She is currently in intensive care undergoing tests and is awake and in good spirits. More updates to come as we hear them. Light a candle and sing a song, let's all send good wishes her way. --jonimitchell.com


I love the way she winged it on Hejira.
Crow, not seagulls, sounded right to me.
She got away with Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter,
Don Alias on the date, and spoke
of Mingus where she used to sing. And Jaco.
It was kinda Blue-to-Kind of Blue.

A kind of transformation of the blue
horizon on a field of that high era
shot in black and white, a season chock-a-
block with ice on lipstick black. To me
she seemed the more divine. She spoke
to me from someplace new, the daughter

of a snowbound country, not the daughter
Woodstock might have wished for. But what blew
me out was anecdotal, the bespoke
position of her fingers, the Hejira
of the coffee house and Do Re Me
tautology. The maundering with Jaco

on the frozen tide, a sliding ride with Jaco
holding down the line. Abandoned daughter
of the Blues, insurgent, blond and white like me,
she bartered for the flatted fifth, a blue
note on the top. Eponymous “Hejira”
spread harmonics, spinning hub and spoke

along the endless highway Dylan spoke
of on the stage at Newport. Him, the jack of
anything he got his hands on. Oh, Hejira
to the new Medina. But Mohammad’s daughter
left behind the radio of blue
oblivion and came across to me

on carbon leather skates. She came to me
exhaling lacy signals where she spoke
into the weather and the grayscale blue.
I caught a glimpse of something like a Jack-o-
Lantern smiling in the clouds, a daughter
lost and laughing on the moon’s Hejira,

longing for Hejira, calling me,
a daughter dancing on the ice. She spoke
of Miles and swung for Jaco in the blue.


Rick Mullin's poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies. His most recent book, Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle, was published in December by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio.

AFTER SANDY HOOK, NEWTOWN

by Joan Colby

Crews have torn down the home of the man who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Mass. The school was demolished in November, 2013. AP photo via Time, March 25, 2015.

Nothing will bring them back.
The shooter killed himself as well
So the marble hand of justice
Cannot signal. There’s no one left to punish
Except the building where it took place.
Halls of learning. Books and desks
Stained with the memory of what happened.
Then the house where he planned the monstrous
Acts of unreason. Nothing left but to
Tear it all down. To burn the ground where they stood
And then maybe in time to plant
Something green and tend it.
It seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

I can’t help but be reminded
Of my friend accidentally kicked
By her horse and then lay comatose
For weeks on the narrow ledge of dying.
Her husband in his grief
Had the horse killed. What else could he do?
What could relieve this? Nothing. Nothing.
She woke to the empty stall of loss.


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. 

THE TIN SOLDIERS MARCH

by Howard Winn

Reading John Bolton's dangerously casual argument for yet another war in the Middle East . . . you’d never know that war with Iran poses any risks at all. Given Bolton’s record on Iraq, this recklessness is not surprising. More surprising is that the Times let him get away with it. I understand that the Times, as a left-leaning op-ed page, needs ideological diversity. But when it comes to war and peace, diversity isn’t the highest value. Honesty is. —Peter Beinert, The Atlantic, March 27, 2015

Go to war,
they cry,
even the old
discredited ones
who screwed up
originally,
drop the bombs,
send the drones,
kill, kill. kill.
No one notices,
I am afraid,
that most such
hawks have never
served nor heard
the crack of those
guns they love
like adolescent
suitors in middle
school who yearn
for glory and girls
whose love affair
is with the self,
for whom the thought
of war is a kind
of masturbation.
They do not actually
follow their own
war cries, but hide
in speeches and lead
from behind in what
is only a war dance
to the death of others.
How brave and martial
is the tin soldier.

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.

SHOWING A DVD ON THE GALAPAGOS TO A NINTH GRADE CLASS

by Don Kingfisher Campbell

Some watch the projected video

of blue footed boobies

diving down like bombers

to feast on an unsuspecting school of fish

Others would rather stare

into their small lighted rectangles

to play a game, send messages

or simply check out their faces

The British narratress

twistedly intones the wonder

of sea lions snatching by the tail

swimming rock-colored iguanas

And what will become

of the fourteen-year-olds

who don’t care to take notes

on this predatory world

The gliding hawk seizes

the frantically running lizard

The bug-eyed orange crabs

pinch off pieces of wounded seagull

Are these students doomed

to be pushing paper, repairing roads

selling cars, hammering homes

stocking stores, serving plates

The volcanic islands themselves

are born in the ocean

live a few million years

sink slowly to die

Don Kingfisher Campbell’s poetry has recently been published in the anthologies Altadena Poetry Review, Like A Girl, Poems To F*ck To, San Pedro River Review, Attack of the Poems, Gutters & Alleyways, and Lummox #3; and in cyberspace on Toe Good Poetry, In-Flight Literary Magazine, Poetic Diversity, Where I Live-Silver Birch Press, One Sentence Poems, Cadence Collective, and Camel Saloon.

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.