The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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Cassandra is remembered more for being mad than being right, says a friend
bowed under his burden of consciousness.
Sharing the load does not lighten it,
and we've yet to find a balm
for the chafing beneath its weight.
Nor are there enough drinks to dilute
the day's high tide of graphs.
Though ragged, the saw teeth of data points
belong to blades that level islands,
slice through tusks and hives
along with the customary forests
and, snagging, bring up empty nets.
The menu is long, and served with questions.
Whose sins are we eating besides our own?
When might this banquet end?
J.D. Smith’s third collection of poems Labor Day at Venice Beach was published in 2012; his first humor collection Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth the following year.. His poems have appeared in journals and sites including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, and Dark Mountain 3.
It’s still raw there, there at the lunch counters
of our minds, our souls. Closing Woolworth’s
could not erase it, not given its firmly-fixed seat,
nor could putting sheets back on beds,
snarling dogs back in kennels. Patronizing
faces in high places, crosses still
burn, codes still smolder, singe
those too young to know what a noose is.
Suit and tie it, it’s still a night rider.
Margaret Rozga has published three books: Two Hundred Nights and One Day,Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad, and her latest Justice Freedom Herbs.
They have paid all they have
to enter this cramped space.
They no more know
when they will sleep again
or where, than the blind
mole knows if it will escape
the cat outside its hole.
Universe, be kind.
Bill, they say your magic pill
would rob a woman of her will.
You always seemed so wise, so chill,
it’s hard to watch you go downhill.
No laugh track with its canned applause;
no time for a commercial pause;
the cameras fixed on you because
success like yours defies all laws.
David Southward teaches literature in the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His poems have appeared in The Lyric, Verse-Virtual, Voices on the Wind, Unsplendid and Measure (forthcoming).
Don't say glam. Everyone always says that.
Neither say alien nor say stardust.
Invent a brand new vocabulary.
Say moonage. Say sula vie milejo.
Before heavy metal, before eyeliner
for rock gods, before electronica,
there was Bowie, self-named after the knife,
himself the blade, separating spirit
& the body, feminine from female,
mask from masculine. Androgyny and.
All of us & simultaneously
none of us. He went to hard rock's bombast
& distortion to find soul. To Berlin
to find the blues in a synthesizer
orchestra. Called himself the Thin White Duke,
thus freeing himself to write R&B.
He knew what everyone craves most of all
is a mystery. It's why our gods ask
us to carry what we can never hold
up some sacred, burning mountain, why love
comes laced with heartache, why such queer lyrics
keep us awake in the night, wondering.
He understood that to write a hymnal
for the spiritually dispossessed
he must himself become a borderland.
What is the sound a soul makes as it leaks
from its seams? Bowie. How keens the heartcry
of a person born out of place in time?
Bowie. How echoes joy on your second
wedding day, after you'd all but given
up on love? Bowie. Say the hot demon
of the drink or drugs still bucks in your veins,
say you think you can't leave the one who hurts
you, say you're harrowed by an old music
you heard once on an aging stereo
as a child. Say Bowie & he'll appear,
screwed up eyes & screwed down hairdo, well hung
& snow white tan. Saint Satellite, my dim
dreams need your code-switching & baritone,
my hetero tongue, needs your gender
bending & the high holy spark & howl
of your guitar, my weekday commute needs
your compact rebellion & scattershot
crimes of fashion. Let me borrow your mouth
& be beautiful, if not for a life
time then for just today, just one more day.
John Paul Davis's poetry has appeared in Muzzle, Rattle, Four Way Review, The Journal and many others. He lives in New York.
"I can't breathe." Eric Garner, who died on July 17, 2014 after a NYPD officer put him in a chokehold. NY Times, July 18, 2014
"I can't breathe." Barbara Dawson, who died on December 8, 2015 after a Blountstown FL police officer removed her from a hospital where she had gone to complain of abdomenal pain. NY Times, Jan. 7, 2016
We have got to teach these folks
That there ain't no such thing as the right to breathe.
If you haven't learned to do it the American way
And gobbled up all the air you can swallow,
The cops will not care
And hospitals will tell you to hit the road.
This ain't no socialist state, but one
Built by self-reliance and know-how,
Making us a nation of self-made men who
Won't tolerate weakness or pay for the wages of poverty.
So, get with the program and make enough dough
To pay for the air you pretend God gave us to share.
Let go of such un-American drivel and cant,
And maybe you will never again have to say "I can't."
After teaching German at several East Coast colleges George Salamon breathes the air and writes in St. Louis, MO, primarily for the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and TheNewVerse.News.
Imagine a city where nothing’s forgiven your deed adheres to you like a scar, a tattoo but almost everything’s forgotten . . . —Adrienne Rich, “Rusted Legacy”
When you follow any code, given or stolen,
echoes come through opaque threads discovered
necessary as drone attacks whose trajectories
leave you a euphemism and a mother and her child
wrapped in heavy black preparing mutton and maize,
or absconding to a school, or weaving the bits
and flecks of a life never really their own
suspended in a space not your city or home today
but available as your spare, collectable change.
Billy Clem, a gay and disabled radical feminist, lives outside Chicago where he teaches writing and literature. His work has appeared in Radical Teacher, Counterexample Poetics, and Moon City Review.
George W. Bush infamously claimed to have looked into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s eyes and gotten a “sense of his soul,” but perhaps he would have learned more by watching him walk. A recent paper in the British Medical Journal takes up the unexpected question of why Putin, as well as several of his subordinates, walk with an unusual gait, swinging the left arm normally but keeping the right arm close to the hip. Bastiaan R. Bloem, a neurologist at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands, says he was first tipped off to the strange gait by one of his former instructors, who noticed it in a video of the Russian president. For Bloem and his co-authors (all “movement disorder enthusiasts,” as he puts it), the video, and others in which Putin walks the same way, set off alarm bells since “unilaterally reduced arm swing” can be a sign of several neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease. . . . Videos of other senior Russian officials show the same unusual gait, including Prime Minister (and former president) Dmitry Medvedev, former defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, and current chief of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov. “The first thing that came to mind is, ‘What the heck? Is there a Parkinson’s epidemic in the Kremlin?’ ” says Bloem. Another possible explanation surfaced when one of Bloem’s colleagues found a KGB training manual, which instructs operatives that “[w]hen moving, it is absolutely necessary to keep your weapon against the chest or in the right hand. Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.” The authors have called the ex-KBG agent’s John Wayne–esque walk a “gunslinger’s gait.” This doesn’t mean, literally, that the president is packing. Putin probably never did much gunslinging in the KGB, where his job was to recruit potential operatives in East Germany, but the walk may be a tough-guy affectation akin to his often-coarse choice of language. “Putin is a macho leader who kept his gait to show that he is a KGB veteran,” Bloem says. --Slate, Dec. 15, 2015
Look at Putin's walk.
Right arm doesn't swing,
left does the usual thing.
Seems kinda awkward.
Dutch neurologists took a look.
Nothing new they say,
just a gunslinger's way.
It's in the KGB training book.
Faster to go for their guns.
It might just be,
but let's wait and see
if it's not Parkinson’s.
A loss of control,
dementia and depression
explain his aggression,
lack of soul.
Diagnosed with Parkinson's 10 years ago, Bill Petz' right arm doesn't swing without meds. He 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, Artists & Writers Quarterly and TheNewVerse.News.
A woman sleeping at a McDonald’s restaurant in Hong Kong in October. Across East Asia, 24-hour McDonald's have become a sanctuary for the downtrodden, providing a warm, dry place to sleep. Credit Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2015
After birthday candle whites
are blown out,
Kids all snug tucked
in their beds,
Once Invisible down-and-outs
retire to a corporate
Cash-cow Behemoth
For a good night's restless sleep,
To stay warm for a while.
No other shelters available,
No families of their own to turn to,
“McRefugees" of East Asia,
With no other place to go.
On a good night: Feed on
half-eaten Big Macs,
Chew on salty stale fries,
Lie down in a padded
booth for comfort,
'Til just before dawn,
the dominion call comes:
“Put on your shoes,
this is not your home.”
Then just enough time
to comb your black hair,
With a disposable fork--
and vanish.
Gil Hoy is a Boston trial lawyer, writer and poet. 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 poetry has appeared most recently in Third Wednesday, The Write Room, The Eclectic Muse, Clark Street Review andTheNewVerse.News.
Image by Adam Rosenlund via Boise Weekly, Jan. 3, 2016.
To you, the line between your version of us
and them comes down to a quick draw,
a pithy line after the bullet finds its mark;
dehumanization is the only way
you can justify your ammosexuality.
You ignore everyone that calls you 'terrorist'.
You point out that if you were a terrorist,
you would see drones flying above you
like birds of prey. You forget how terrorism
built this country treaty by treaty
blanket by blanket, ballot by ballot,
bullet by bullet. J. Bradleyis the winner of Five [Quarterly]'s 2015 e-chapbook contest for fiction.
Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers in 2015, according to the findings of a Guardian study that recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year. —The Guardian, Dec. 31, 2015. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY EDUARDO MUÑOZ / REUTERS / LANDOV via The New Yorker: A protest on the Brooklyn Bridge, December 28, 2015.
I killed Tamir Rice.
So what.
This is what you wanted.
Blood runs like red mercury
off this silver umbrella shield.
My heart is impenetrable,
oblivious to innocence.
I kill Tamir Rice every day.
I wear your list of signatures
like a cape while I fight crime.
You send your children to schools
like dreams sent to die.
I am the killer of those dreams
and you hired me to kill them.
Your rage is hilarious in its hyperbole.
Thousands of candles lit on a stage,
each one destined to fizzle out
and signify nothing.
The residue of gunsmoke
left on your fingers—
Swirl it in your coffee
before you drink it down.
That’s the taste of bitter truth,
a violence wound like wire
around the vocal cords
struggling to cry out
for change,
while a crescendo of gunshots
punching holes in the sky,
only pauses to reload.
Jay Sizemore hates when you call writing a hobby. His work has appeared in print and online. He just released a short story collection, as well as two poetry chapbooks this past year.
You saw the giraffes first.
Two heads. Heads held high.
High above the other animals.
What’s up with that? she asked.
Great flood where they came from.
Where would that be? Curious. Not caring.
The Mideast. The Near East. Somewhere east.
Great, she said, but they better
not land here. They smell.
We watched them approach.
We need the rain, she said.
I need a raincoat, I said,
holding my nose.
The latest rankings are out
Human beings are third in intelligence
Last in courage
But 43rd in good looks — an uptick due to an extinction
All agree and of course the humans most heartily support
We are keenest in imagination
Now if we can get our names off the endangered species list
But the monkeys say that we’re not smart enough
The lions say we’re not brave enough
The elephants say we’re not kind enough
The waters say we’re not strong enough
Michael Mark’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Spillway, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, TheNewVerse.News and other nice places. His poetry has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and the 2015 Best of the Net.
Howie Good’s latest poetry collections are Bad for the Heart (Prolific Press) and Dark Specks in a Blue Sky (Another New Calligraphy). He is recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his forthcoming collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.
