The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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I do declare this Prism Day,
for, finally, Americans as one
look up and round together,
seeing through a single prism
equally, resulting rainbows
viewed with reverence unified
by simple love, needing
nothing other than a national
acknowledgement to set the
global table, turning tides to
placid calm where all can
swim in matrimonial sanctity.
David James Olsen is a 32-year-old published poet/actor/singer/researcher living and thriving in New York City. Recently, he has volunteered with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and PFLAG NYC, as well as filling the role of House Manager for The York Theatre Company. He aims to start his own specialized NY theatre company soon, wanting to learn from the best while laying the groundwork. Previously, his poetry has been published in The South Townsville micro poetry journal, Instigatorzine, and here in The New Verse News. Continuing to compose daily, he hopes to have much more of his work out there very soon.
I’m not posting photos on social media
of my father with his arm around me,
both of us grinning, oozing affection.
No photos like that exist, not even
from my childhood.
On Father’s Day, I’m perusing again
of my boozy father’s last act, self-
inflicted gun shot that whisked him out
of this world and our lives. How did he
excuse it?
I’m remembering how my short-fused
husband insisted my father have a gun,
took him to buy that Walther PPK
and showed him how to use it.
Self-defense,
he said. That was the gun he used when
he could not defend himself against misery
and hopeless blues, my mother’s cancer.
I’m thinking how glad I am that my Ex
never was a father.
In an old photo, my not-yet-Ex husband stands
unsmiling, pistol on hip, rifle and Confederate flag
crossed across his chest, wearing a string tie
and cowboy hat. I took that photo, and only
was bemused.
Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Whitefish Review, Off the Coast, Kestrel, Slipstream, American Journal of Nursing, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Buddhist Poetry Review, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.
“Nearly 60 million people have been driven from their homes by war and persecution, an unprecedented global exodus that has burdened fragile countries with waves of newcomers and littered deserts and seas with the bodies of those who died trying to reach safety.” —New York Times, June 18, 2015
Their fleeing
is from these times
mired in apocalyptic struggle
spread through and by power
coated with ancient enmities and beliefs
brought up to slaughter and stagnation.
Safely sequestered, we trace the ways to today,
tracking back through old empires
and all manner of community
to rest in those imaginary ages
ruled by honored sages who left us
with stories of Tang poet-governors gathered
round wine and evening composition,
calm in the certainty of their world
and accepted sureness
of suffering and death.
Yet even they flaunted rants
on injustice of their times,
satire buried in language
which led them to exile
in far provinces.
Robert Farmer is a retired forester who lives in Cleveland and occasionally publishes poems in small journals.
Swept-up
on a blast of heated air – one flash & another
& nowhere to run,
to hide, to breathe free . . . & he keeps coming on
this pilfered heart, this shameless ragging, like a lion on fire,
provoked, pissed-off, punishing, a collapsed invention where fear marries power,
with guns blazing the angel of death smacks his lips slurping up a treacheries soup . . .
Speak not of justice, sanity & bigotry in one breath. Speak not of mercy without
passion. Do unto others as you do unto me. The words ring wrong.
If harmony reigns what will come to fill the vacuum? Guilt-of-the-fathers
passed to the sons. Inbred fear of retribution. The Other, no longer dark but from the light
comes to resurrect that supreme fabric. Owner. Master. Overseer. That sublime indifference
born of guilt – suspicion – nurturing – fomenting. Is there no one to speak
against the blind warrior? We forgive you.
It’s said with conviction – tearful & full of grace. Who’s earned such a holy gift?
Tattooed across his brow a crown of thorns, swastika etched between his shoulder blades.
This is the time of mutilation, of dementia, of disgrace. Where are the voices of revolution?
Those willing to stand & be counted, unafraid of hard choices? The one who bears malice bears
a cataclysm too long dismissed as fated, too long tolerated, too long unchallenged.
“Born in blood, so blood must be spilled.” It’s the way of the smuggler,
the rapist, the strangler of kids, the demon lover of hatred & dread. To this we say, with all our strength – No more!
Roger Aplon has had eleven books published: Ten of poetry (most recently It’s Only TV) & one of prose: Intimacies. He’s been awarded prizes & honors including an arts fellowship from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. After eight years in Barcelona, Spain, he now lives in Beacon, New York where he publishes the poetry magazine Waymark & is working on a new collection: Poetic Improvisations after musical ‘experiments’ by composers such as John Adams, Elliot Carter, Miles Davis & John Zorn.
“For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon. Enter the modern National Rifle Association. . . . ” —Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker, December 17, 2012 (i.e. after Newtown)
“The most recent national poll of NRA members that we could find, done in January 2013 by Johns Hopkins University, found that 73.7 percent of the members supported requiring background checks for all gun sales.” —PolitiFact Wisconsin, March 18, 2015
An accidental death here and there,
an impulsive murder-suicide,
a massacre of moviegoers,
a gunning-down of worshippers,
a slaughter of children in classrooms,
a lucrative trade in weapons
all being in keeping with the preservation
of our crazed State,
the need of our People
to shoot each other
shall not be infringed.
William Aarnes lives in South Carolina. His work has appeared recently in Field, Heron Tree, and South 85.
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 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).
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.
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.
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 Chorltonwas 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.)
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.
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.
