TAUTOLOGY

by Judith Terzi

Mike de Adder

--with a nod to Bob Dylan

Ecstasy of the shot
Barbie doll for some  
Interchangeable parts
Three hundred million guns
Butter pecan      on your mark
Buy a shoe      a fishing hook  
A cap      a book of puns
How many deaths will it take?  
Will the wind be fresh?  
Buy a bike      Take a hike
Watch a lightning bug
Until the white dove
Has a good night's sleep
Most wanted arm
Stick of Juicy Fruit      sweet
Explosion on the tongue  
Remember when Trigger
Was a horse?      Gravedigger
Occupied     Lethal recourse
Not denied     Air-cooled fire  
Lock-bolt desire      Most wanted
Colt      Tautology assault

Judith Terzi is a Southern California poet and educator whose recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Off the Coast, Raintown Review, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque). If You Spot Your Brother Floating By is her latest chapbook from Kattywompus Press.

THE SNAKES

by Carolyn Gregory

The Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a day after Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine congregants following a Bible study. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE RAEDLE/GETTY via The New Yorker.

The snakes are slithering
from under the rocks
where worms and old bodies
lie buried.

The bones are not stopping them
from venomous thoughts
of squeezing innocents to death
or sinking their fangs in.

For they have been hungry
in their hiding holes,
thinking of the red meat
of their prey running quickly
across the prairie

to their own small caves
between mountains and cactus,
fearful for their families
and children.

Nothing will paralyze the snakes
save the hatchets good men wield
in the dead of night
to save our people's freedom.


Carolyn Gregory has published poems and music reviews in American Poetry Review, Seattle Review, Cutthroat, Borderlands: Texas, Main Street Rag and Wilderness House Literary Review. She previously won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has published two full length volumes of poetry through Windmill Editions in Florida: Open Letters (2009) and Facing the Music (2015).

ICE AND FIRE

by James Penha

after Frost . . . after Francis . . . after Charleston

Some see America destroyed by hate;
others forecast a torrid flood as its fate.

I feel its glacial faults cracking 'long lines
      blue and red and black and white,
thence to implode and dissolve, O Columbia!
      into the ocean, a gem out of sight.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

THE THIRTEENTH STATION — CHARLESTON 2015

by Janice Lynch Schuster

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America

If only the women had carried
Guns in their Bibles and prayed
With rage, not love

If only the children had carried
Guns in their backpacks
Their teachers might
Have been spared

If only the boy playing
In the yard had something
Real to fire

If only the suffocating
Man had had gunpowder,,
Not tobacco

If only we armed us all
Who worship at the glamorous
Fortresses of our fears

Brought to us
By the NRA and Congress afraid
Itself to say no

If only we let the bloodbath
Baptize us daily in horror
While our blue hearts
Beat on and we tweet

Hashtags of despair
As if to absolve ourselves
Of the killings we did not stop
And the ballots  we failed
To cast


Janice Lynch Schuster is the author of a collection, Saturday at the Gym, and has been published in various print and online venues, including Poet Lore, Your Daily Poem, and The Broadkill Review. She writes about health care and public policy, lives in Annapolis, MD, and works in Washington, DC.

JUNE 18TH, 2015

by David Chorlton

Lisa Doctor joins a prayer circle down the street from the Emanuel AME Church early Thursday, June 18, 2015 following a shooting Wednesday night in Charleston, S.C. | David Goldman / AP via Chicago Sun-Times

Being offensive
wasn’t the intention
in mentioning how simple
it was to visit
the USSR, compared
to entering the USA
today. So, where else
would you rather live?
to which the response
begins with Anywhere
elections aren’t for sale
or the campaigns
a drawn-out circus
because this isn’t
the first time someone
has suggested this
is the greatest of all
nations, defined
now by a wall
and the constant claim
of freedom, which
extends today
to the young man’s
right to go out with
his birthday gun
because nobody
could assume
he’d take it to church
and actually use it there.


David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in Manchester, England, and lived for several years in Vienna before moving to Phoenix in 1978. In September, 2015, he will participate as a poet in the Fires of Change exhibition at the Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff (Sponsored by the Southwest Fire Science Consortium, the Landscape Conservation Initiative, and the National Endowment for the Arts.)

CURRY SEASONING

by Earl J Wilcox






A flick of the wrist,
Add a glance at the scoreboard:
Savory three points.


Earl J Wilcox lives in South Carolina, cooks, writes, watches baseball, contributes regularly to The New Verse News.

NO BOOTS

by Marilyn Peretti

Source: Danziger Cartoons

No boots on the ground—
peacetime nomenclature.
Now 450 more troops
will take their vacation
in Iraq—
just training the natives.

You Sunnis and Shias,
hundreds of years
is a long time to hate,
to hide behind your battling
perceptions of the Caliphate.

Now the ISIS crisis
threatens you all!
Well armed and clever
this monster will decide
if you let it, the reigning
Cyber Caliphate to beat
all Caliphates.

But who needs
more friendly fire,
collateral damage, drones
playing in the sky,
spying to target the enemy,
the single leader of a group
in the headquarters,
the family home, where
children dreamily count
their fingers and toes,
and sing.


Marilyn Peretti lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She has been published on The New Verse News, Christian Science Monitor, Journal of Modern Poetry, Talking River, and others. She has published several books on blurb.com . She takes interest in international politics, the conflict, the violence, losses and sadness.

LILY PAD LOVER

by C.L. Quigley

Image source: Pauses&Clicks

I fall in love with photographs,
mustachioed Union soldiers,
baby faced and hopeful hippies,
or late-Romantic composers.
I wake to find my lovers dead,
better off dead or immortalized.
Everywhere I look — graves,
if I see a mound, a ditch
or a pile of dirt, a cairn.
I breathe radiation,
my cilia singed, the sun
a merciless master.
All I see are graves,
another casualty, a number,
an obituary (or not)
blowing in the wind
or waiting for a Google search.
I’m advised to wait —
for my Marine with one leg,
control issues, or
a weekly therapy appointment.
He’ll be fighting evil
from a Lily Pad.
Who would disagree with that?


An artist and naturalist, C.L. Quigley grew up in the capital of Nevada, where she began writing in the sagebrush from a young age. She now rides her bicycle through tiny Northern California towns, abides near Lassen Volcanic National Park, and she's working towards her educational goals.

MANHUNT

by George Held

A note with a caption "Have a nice day" left on an opening in a pipe by two inmates who escaped Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. (Source: New York Governor's Office)

Why do you always secretly root for the hunted?
Is it American love for the underdog,
your persecution complex, paranoia?

You feel sorry for the hunters, embedded
in uniforms and armed to the teeth
but terrified of ambush or sniper.

Why do you hope that the canniness
of the fox will outwit the nose of bloodhounds
and elude the mechanics and strategy          

of the men encased in uniforms
as they march strung out across a cornfield
in PA or file along a dry creek bed in CA?

You hear the experts on TV call the hunted
“psychopaths” and smugly speculate on whether
they’ll be brought to earth by the hunters

or by their twisted selves. It’s best if they
die in a televised shootout, to save the state
money for a trial and stem viewer sympathy.

And as the camera pans in on the front yard
you feel the sense of doom when the hunted
strolls through the gate in that picket fence

and lives are about to change forever …


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

BATTERS UP

by Laura Rodley

Even the translucent luna’s clock is
off, her June flight transcribed to May, the fizz
of Summer already cloning the air;
she came early to our door, here to share
the beckoning porch light with other moths
who wear green, beige and gold as altar cloths
laying their linen on wooden doorways
blessing our entrance, the very short phase
of their life a prayer for afterlife
how their subtle greens, their thin wings’ hard strife
will live on in our warm adoration
wanting to touch them at this way station,
but you can’t touch a luna’s light green wings
the dust of their being rubs off, clings.


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.

DARK SECRET

by Paul Smith

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was arraigned in Chicago, Illinois on Tuesday afternoon, June 9, 2015. Hastert pleaded not guilty to all charges related to lying to the FBI about $3.5 million he agreed to pay to an undisclosed subject to "cover up past misconduct." —WQAD, June 9, 2015

There is a poker game called
Dark Secret
Played Down South
They tell you it is played
Nowhere else
You don’t get to see your
Hole card
Till the end
So you’re guessing all the time
Staring at the faces
Staring back at you
Dark faces
Secret faces
Faces smeared with shame
With deed
With dread
Other players know their
Dark Secret
And your face is worse
It is scarlet with fever
Unlike your hole card
Your face is up
So the others can read it
Bluffing your way
Through another game
That is played everywhere

Paul Smith lives near Chicago.  He writes fiction & poetry.  He likes Hemingway, really likes Bukowski, the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks and Slim Harpo.  He can play James Jamerson's bass solo for 'Home Cookin' by Junior Walker & the Allstars.

A QUESTION FOR THE NEW VERSE COMMUNITY

by George Salamon

Image source: DonkeyHotey

"'Tis the season once again. You should know it well by now: a 'progressive' Democrat running in the primaries for president of the United States. We've seen it all before, from Jessie Jackson to Dennis Kucinich, left-leaning voters have time-and-again been asked to support candidates that are working to transform the corrupt and war-happy Democratic Party from within. And each and every time the strategy has failed..."  Joshua Frank," Why Bernie Sanders is a Dead End," Counterpunch, June 3, 2015

Our poems burst with love for humanity,
We care for all its members, only not their oppressors.
We sign petitions, shout for peace and march for justice.
It's all so good, but we risk little and gain even less.

Is it time to put our bodies
Where our pens played and our words sprouted?
We shall confront once more what Tadeusz Borowski
Discovered after his liberation from Auschwitz:
 "The world is ruled neither by justice nor by morality,
The world is ruled by power and power is obtained by money."

Been there, done that you say, but what did we do?
We blinked and vowed to go on writing and volunteering and organizing.
We played by the rules in the land of the lemming
And the home of the harmless.

"We tried," we'd say as the words curdle
Into cold comfort on our tongues while
Power grins and grants us our gestures.

Our words struggle to trade as conscience's currency.

What is to be done?


George Salamon taught German at several East Coast colleges, served as staff reporter on the St. Louis Business Journal and Sr. Editor for Defense Systems Review. He contributes to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.

WALKER MANIA

by David Southward

Image source: DonkeyHotey

Amazing, what a guy like me
can do for voters who can’t see
what’s good for them. I’ve hatched a plan
to make their state a wonderland!

I broke the unions, stripped their rights—
and though it sparked some ugly fights,      
the squawking’s dwindled to a peep
and labor now comes oh-so-cheap.

I turned the federal money down
that would’ve linked up town to town
with light rail. Jobs were lost, but hey,
it kept the socialists away.

Natural gas? Now that I’d tap.
It’s ours if we just frack the crap
out of Wisconsin’s woods (though first
her residents must be coerced).

The jobs report still sucks, the budget
can’t be balanced. Hell, let’s fudge it:
keep the taxes low by raping
schools, the poor, and park landscaping.

I passed a law that welfare queens
must view their fetuses on screens
before aborting. God will care
for those unwanted babes, I swear.

With cuts in funding, it’s a breeze
to gut state universities.
They nurture liberals, stir up minds
and threaten us with picket lines.

I’m loved by all the billionaires,
which may explain why no one dares
to question me.  If someone tries,
I’ll stare him down with my dead eyes.

If I could gain complete control,
I’d sell the public sector whole
to the highest-bidding financier—
and run it like an overseer.

It seems to me we’ve turned a page:
I’ve ushered in a bold new age
in which a scoundrel goes scot free.
An age of proud cupidity.


David Southward teaches literature in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poems have appeared in The New Verse News, The Lyric, and Voices on the Wind.

BEING AM-ISH IN AN OLYMPIAD WORLD

by Krista Genevieve Farris

Image source: LGBTAmish.com

I got a call sometime last summer. He was shunned.
I wasn't allowed to cry, the conversation was never about me
but of his death and her muncha muncha on his segmented life,
the unfurling of her wings and a fighting not to be cliché butterfly fragile flight.

I consumed our youth, chewed on Polaroid bits,
tried to digest as I kicked the covers. Didn't say-
it hurt to swallow jigsawed shots  
it slashed each time I couldn't utter his name.

I gurgled I love you with a bloody throat
bi-sected, di-ssected- am-ish- the shunning- her-of-him
the sister who wears make-up, whose hair curls just so,
the one who tells me what it is to be a woman.

She is not Caitlyn Jenner. I am not a cool Kardashian.
We don't have implants, an airbrush, good lighting or awards.
I didn't hear her called beautiful 10 times today
or a hero when she kept her factory job.

He was. They were. She is.
We are.
I am.


Krista Genevieve Farris lives in Winchester, Virginia with her husband and three sons. Her recent poems, essays and stories can be found in The Literary Bohemian, Right Hand Pointing, Cactus Heart, Shot Glass Journal, The Screech Owl, Brain, Child Magazine, Mamalode, Literary Mama, The Rain, Party and Disaster Society, Indiana Voice, Tribeca Poetry Review and elsewhere.