EMANUEL

by Ed Gold

We asked the red bottle-brushes blooming off the back porch,
we asked the woman who was singing and writing parking tickets,
we asked the colossal white blossoms of the magnolia tree,
we asked the cashier named Wilnetta at the Harris Teeter,
we asked the cedar waxwings swarming the holly berries,
we asked the new baby, Helena Wren Silverman,
we asked the hailstones striking west of the Ashley,
we asked the oil truck that overturned and blocked I-26,
we asked the helicopter circling the neighborhood,

we asked the couple holding hands under a maroon umbrella,
we asked the two mourning doves sitting close on the wire,
we asked the cardinal who placed a millet seed in his mate’s mouth,
we asked the aviator sunglasses forgotten on the porch table,
we asked the smudgy smoke of the citronella candle,
we asked the blue flowers on the Kleenex box,
we asked the juice glass with a decal from a moose hall,
we asked the first brown clutch of leaves in the green of the pin oak,
we asked the empty hammock on the porch next door,

we asked the crow we thought was an eagle until he cawed,
we asked the green anole who hopped on a branch and turned brown,
we asked the hawks whose chick refused to leave the nest,
we asked the loquat tree that didn’t blossom and fruit this year,
we asked the mutant sunflowers sprouting under the bird feeders,
we asked our neighbor whose throat is healing from radiation,
we asked the house finch on the sconce with his eye crusted over,
we asked the little boy who played dead under the pew,
we asked the mockingbird who sang for five minutes before starting over.


Author’s note: This is a poem I wrote after the massacre at the Emanuel AME church. We live three blocks away.

Ed Gold has a chapbook Owl and poems in the New York Quarterly, Kakalak, Cyclamens and Swords, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, and many others. He is a grateful member of the Long Table Poets in Charleston, South Carolina. Ed Gold lives in Charleston with his wife Amy Robinson.

THE UNIFORMED FIGURE

by Alejandro Escudé






On a YouTube video a cop
gets out of his vehicle, unholsters
his gun, just to ask the man recording him
a question. The man filming the cop
says, “Put your gun down, really?”
as the cop continues to walk toward him
and through him and through me,
as the policeman, gun in hand,
traverses the Milky Way,
the void a uniformed figure
consuming the stars.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

WHY I AM NOT A POET

by Gil Hoy

Poem-Painting by Frank O'Hara & Norman Bluhm. Image source: Lingo 7

I am not a poet; I am a lawyer. Why?
Sometimes, I think I would rather be a poet,
but I am not. Well, for instance

Frank O'Hara is starting to write a poem.
I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink,"
he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have the words
‘Black Lives Matter’ in your poem." "Yes," he says.
I go, and the days go by, and I drop in again. The writing of the poem
is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in.
The poem is finished. "Where are the words
‘Black Lives Matter’ in your poem?" All that's left is a painting
of dead black boys and dead black men to illustrate the poem.
"It was too much," Mr. O'Hara says. "And I've decided
I'm both a poet and a painter."

But me?  One day, I am thinking about racism, justice
and the law, about praying for God to bring Michael Brown Jr.
back from the dead. I rehearse my argument, all about
why Mr. Brown should be saved.  Pretty soon, it’s a whole litany
of arguments.  And there should be so much more. Not only about
Michael Brown’s life, but also the lives of Trayvon Martin, Christian Taylor,
Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Jordan Davis, Africa, Dontre Hamilton, Ezell Ford,
John Crawford III, Dante Parker, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray,
all the black boys and all the black men whose lives have been needlessly taken.
Days go by. I am prepared for God’s court. My legal argument is finished,
but I haven't mentioned racism yet. It's twelve arguments and the court reporter
faithfully transcribes  what I say to the judge.

When I see the transcription, it's titled "Racism."  And one day, I see Mr. O'Hara's
poem and painting, collectively titled: “Black Lives Matter.”

Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer and writer. He studied poetry at Boston University, while receiving a BA in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. His writing has appeared most recently in The Montucky Review, The Potomac, The New Verse News, The Boston Globe and The Dallas Morning News.

HUNTING SEASON

by Jay Sizemore

Pearly whites. Teeth. Not teeth.
Privilege.
$50,000 to kill a black man.
In the safari grassland of Zimbabwe,
a man with white skin, white teeth, white erectile dysfunction,
draws back his bow. He knows the dark has no soul.
It’s only an animal.
The grass ripples in waves, flashing between shades
of brown and yellow and green.
His arrow strikes true, bowstring vibrato hum,
the familiar inhuman cry.
The rifle to finish the job. A bullet through the heart,
the animal heart.
Careful to get no blood on his khakis.
Poses for photographs with his trophy,
his prized fetish, fresh frothy crimson, foaming
from its mouth. He’ll cut off its head, mount it on his wall,
maybe make its black skin into a rug.
Just another dead thing to stand on.

Blue lights. Blue shirts. Blue eyes.
Privilege.
The lion doesn’t have a license plate.
The lion doesn’t have a license.
Lions shouldn’t be driving, their primal instinct
is to kill, to gnaw marrow from healthy bones.
Question the lion. These things don’t speak English.
The lion will grunt and growl, avoid eye contact,
that dead yellow stare,
that scent of bloody breath.
This is why he carries a handgun.
This is why he’s trained his trigger hand.
The lion has no pride, it’s been drinking gin,
dribbled it down its beautiful black mane.
Old car animal sweat, fight or flight.
It’ll reach for its keys.
Tell the lion to stop.
It’ll reach under the seat.
Don’t think twice.
Shoot the lion in the head.
No one will riot.


Jay Sizemore doesn’t win awards. Founder of Crow Hollow Books, he writes poems and stories and scribbles his name a lot onto electronic pads for material possessions. He listens to Ryan Adams and drinks Four Roses. You can find his work online in places if you go looking, including his chapbook Confessions of a Porn Addict, available on Amazon. His wife puts up with his shit in Nashville, TN.

THE SECOND BOMB

by Frederick Shiels 

Source: Yamahata photographs © Shogo Yamahata, The Day After the Nagasaki Bombing. The Japan Peace Museum via Morningside Center

Honorable Americans:
​there are not many of us left who were there,​
​to remind you that seventy August 9ths ago
you finished your war job
and 75,000 of our lives on green Kyushu island
three days and three mourning hours after killing even more--
Who knows how many?--
on big Honshu to the north, you ​well ​know ​the name,
Hiroshima, you teach it in your schools.
To be sure, we are linked with ​her​
​our  second, final​, high
superheated mushroom of death
​​Y​our Mr. Truman
didn’t give a speech about Us, we guess he just left
our boiling harbor, our children’s ashes
floating down
like leaves
for days,
to work things out
for themselves.​



Frederick Shiels teaches American foreign policy and history at Mercy College in New York. He has published in Sixfold, The New Verse News, The Hudson River Anthology, and elsewhere. He lived with his family on Kyushu Island, Japan, as a Fulbright Scholar, in 1985, the fortieth anniversary year of the bombing of Nagasaki, not far south. He is the author of a book of foreign policy case studies Preventable Disasters (Rowman & Littlefield) among others. 

CORRECTION

by Don Hogle

Excerpted and re-formatted from “NYT Now: Your Thursday Briefing,”

an email, August 6, 2015 at 3:15AM.

In Wednesday’s Morning Briefing,
we misstated the number of children

among the 150 people
killed in December

by militants at a school
in Pakistan.

There were
134 children,

not 13.

                   
Don Hogle is a poet, blogger and brand and communications strategist living in Manhattan. Mud Season Review, Minetta Review, Blast Furnace, Shooter, DoveTales, Outrider Review, Clapboard House and Dirty Chai are among the journals that have recently published his poetry.

HAND PICKED

by Bill Petz

The freshly harvested bountiful crop of fruits and vegetables
take the farmers' market tailgate stage
crying out to mingling uncertain gawkers:
I'll keep illness at bay
I'll save money
I'll make you feel good
I'll restore strength
I'm locally grown.

Jalapenos, on display by themselves, strut hot flashes of flavor
Still dirty carrots suggest birth place fertilizer
Peaches picked too late fear flavor will be missed
Misshaped heritage tomatoes downplay ancestry
Sturdy, ruddy potatoes claim center place to mask blandness
Seedless watermelons deny impotency
Red Delicious apples tout their hearty core.

None name the brown hands that plowed, planted and picked.


Bill Petz lives and writes in the mountains of western North Carolina. His work has been published in Status Hat, The Ashevillle Citizen-Times, The Chronicles of Higher Education and Artists & Writers Quarterly. 

RUSTING TOYS

by Gil Hoy

Shin’s Tricycle. Exposed at: Higashi-hakushima-cho, 1,500 meters from the hypocenter. Donated to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum by Nobuo Tetsutani. Shinichi Tetsutani (then 3 years and 11 months) loved to ride this tricycle. . . . This tricycle was donated to the Peace Memorial Museum. Image source: Hiroshima Peace Site. See also "A tricycle, a toddler and an atomic bomb" —CNN, August 6, 2015

Shinichi was buried
with his favorite Red Tricycle
and best friend, Kimi

Who lived down the street.
Their trusting toddler fingers

Intertwined in a back yard
Grave, after

Brilliant flash, Waves of
Whipping oven fire, Mothers
Screaming at rivers of
dead children.

Oh, to see Shin
Riding his tricycle again.


Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer, who first studied poetry at Boston University while receiving a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science. Gil started writing his own poetry last year. Since then, his poems have been published most recently in The Potomac, The New Verse News, The Antarctica Journal, Third Wednesday, and To Hold A Moment Still, Harbinger Asylum’s 2014 Holidays Anthology.

AFTER HIROSHIMA

by Howie Good

Listen to the snow falling.
Some might hear distinct words;
others, only a high squeal.
Still others will experience difficulty
in finding their way around.
In which case, stay away from the windows.
Mothers and children, men and beasts,
hang from the branches of trees
where a roaring wind has blown them.


Howie Good is the recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.

POLITICIANS DISCUSSING GLOBAL WARMING

by Donelle Dreese

                        after Isaac Cordal, Cement Eclipses

The billions beneath have drowned
leaving tiny pink congressional skulls
to emerge as pimples in a water-fat city.

They will not survive. They are swamped
in thawed Arctic Sea ice uttering bloated
bubbles that debate and float away.

They ascend on stacks of money and hover
the Atlantic waves, awaiting the final swoon
praying for a proposal to surface.

The discussion gurgles on and on
through puffed, water-inflated robes.
The last life-preserver goes to the whitest scalp.


Donelle Dreese is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Sophrosyne (Aldrich Press), A Wild Turn (Finishing Line) and Looking for A Sunday Afternoon (Pudding House). She is also the author of a YA vignette novella Dragonflies in the Cowburbs (Anaphora Literary) and the novel Deep River Burning (WiDo Publishing). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines and journals.

UNITED NATIONS

by Howard Winn

My jeans were made in Mexico,
my shirt in Malaysia,
my shoes in China.
Socks were made in South Korea
and my jacket in Sri Lanka
although my underwear
remains anonymous
or perhaps I just missed
the country of origin
on some paper tag
that I threw away unthinkingly.
However it is clear that
my clothing is international
even if I am not and
I wonder what the now
unemployed workers of
my country are doing
with their spare time
and whether they will
vote Republican in
the next election when
pointless social issues
obscure the economic ones.


Howard Winn’s fiction and poetry, has been published recently by such journals as Dalhousie Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), The Long Story,  Cold Mountain Review, Antigonish Review, New Verse News, Chaffin Review, Thin Air Literary Journal, and Whirlwind. His B. A. is from Vassar College. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at N. Y. U. He has been a social worker in California and currently is a faculty member of SUNY as Professor of English.

BELATED

by Megan Collins

I’ll admit I did it, too—loved a lion
I’d never heard of until he was dead.
Scrolling through photographs, I fell
for his amber eyes. I even noted how—
in some poses—he seemed as benign
as my golden retriever, asleep at my feet.
When I read of the arrow in this lion’s side,
the forty hours he suffered, I felt my throat
stiffen like cooling wax, felt my eyes
sting as if exposed to flame.

For days, I said his name—Cecil, Cecil—
but I had to Google the woman (Sandra!)
who died in a jail cell, who’d been dragged
from her car, pulled by her collar like a dog.
I loved her, then, too—how she fought
in ways I’ve never had to, how her smile
in photographs made me want to smile back.
Her laughter, I imagined, would sound like a song.

But—how easy it is to love a victim.
How easy to love what’s already gone.


Megan Collins holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. She teaches creative writing and literature in Connecticut, and is also an editor of 3Elements Review. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Compose, Linebreak, Rattle, Spillway, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. 

ON THE CASE OF CECIL LION VS. POACHER PALMER

by Jen Hinton

Template source: PHOTOS5.com

I donno.
I need a little more information
about this lion first.

What did he do
to make the Poacher shoot him?

Did he look the Poacher in the eye
and roar,
causing him to fear for his life?

After he was shot with a crossbow,
and began bleeding out,

why did he run away?
What did he have to hide?

Perhaps he had some weed
in his system?

And where did he get that fancy mane?
Did he steal it?

My advice to all lions would be this:
Get jobs, start paying taxes;
Take care of your cubs;
Clean up your habitats.

Start showing a little more respect
for authority.

Next time a Poacher approaches you,
remember he might be having a bad day.

He paid 50,000 of his hard-earned money
to shoot you. Stop hassling him.

Stop being a lion.

Try being a lamb.


Jen Hinton is a writer and college administrator living in Chicago, IL. Her previous TheNewVerse.News poem "Something for Harvey" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

REQUIEM FOR A DOOMED YOUTH

by James Penha

A one-and-a-half year-old Palestinian infant was burned to death and three of his family members were seriously wounded late Thursday night after a house was set on fire in the village of Douma, near Nablus. According to reports, settlers were those who set the house on fire after targeting it with firebombs and graffiti. The Israeli military called the attack "Jewish terror," while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials echoed the claim, vehemently condemning the attack. —Haaretz, July 31, 2015

Rest

Ali Saad Daobasa (2014-2015)

In Peace

Ali had no GPS round his neck;
only the noose of the occupied.
Ali had no Oxford foundation,
only the ardent love of his family.

Ali had no arrow plunged into his heart,
no time even to scramble before he was killed;
only the shrill, demented firebombs of terror,
shouts of revenge and an invisible Messiah.

As the death of a lion is the pall
of all who allow the endangered
to die in powders prescribed for profits,
the ashes of a Palestinian baby settle
on this earth too silently before those who take
in the name of parties, apartheid,
and passing prophets.


James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News.