The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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only to continue
bowie-ing
my way
through
transparent
walls
in a pearl
grey suit
that
was
more
Cohen
than
Bowie
more
femme
than
butch
never
finding
anybody
much less the dance
my eyes
under a wide-
brimmed
hat
stage-worn
& hushed
as Mars
Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). He’s a recipient of an Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. A native of Argentina, he now resides in New York City.
generosity suffocates
under the weight of incivility
the tongue bludgeons
with fudged facts and loud voice
slips like reality from smiling lips
snippets of sound bites
recast a person’s words
gives the crow’s croak
to the nightingale
the cloak of honesty
does not conceal intent
nor does it disguise
the will to mislead
fraudulent films damage
before they’re found out
editorials emerge as rants
headline news stories
turn print yellow
truth sacrificed
to emotions unrestrained
Dorothy Baird has taught writing and literature in both high school and college. After frequent relocations took her family zig-zagging across this country, she considers herself a corporate tramp. Now happily settled in Chapel Hill, NC, she is busy with poetry.
"Cosmic Chirp From Black Holes Colliding Vindicates Einstein:" The sound of the collision from a billion light-years away is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. —NY Times, Feb. 11, 2016
Waves in space and time:
a billion light years away
black holes whirl and dance.
Geoffrey A. Landis is a scientist, a science fiction writer, and a poet. As a scientist, is a fellow of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, working on developing new concepts for space missions. As a science fiction writer, he's written one novel and over fifty short stories, winning the Hugo and Nebula awards. As a poet, he has written numerous poems, including this one.
Cornrow Braiding Originates in Africa: Like many other “Africanisms” in the new world, knowledge of African hairstyles survived the Middle Passage. Heads were often shaved upon capture, ostensibly for sanitary reasons, but with the psychological impact of being stripped of one’s culture. Re-establishing traditional hair styles in the new world was thus an act of resistance; one that could be carried out covertly. Photo source: Yarbrough, Camille. Cornrows. (with illustrations by Carol Byard). Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 1979 via Cornrow Curves.
“Those rows in the backfield, they need more water,”
Mom whispered.
“More cow dung,” Dad claimed.
I guess he meant more carefully manicured manure.
It’s not as if I am new to this old field.
It’s not as if I am a hired hand or something.
I have planted these rows before, seen rain
change to sunshine, change to rain.
I have seen floods like tears run through
old furrows between rows, between hard dust.
I have carefully tended these corn rows before.
I have even pictured them growing firm roots.
Lind Grant-Oyeye was born in Nigeria. She has work published in several literary magazines world wide and recently won the UHRSN human rights poetry award.
An image taken from social media shows the child soldier Wasil Ahmad being declared a hero last year for leading a militia’s defense against a Taliban siege. The Taliban announced on Monday that they had killed Wasil. —NY Times, Feb. 2, 2016
Born into war,
delivered by history, blood spilled
with your birth, spattered on unseen hands.
The messengers raced away,
gunmen on motorbikes, their message delivered
two bullets to your head, no motorbike for
you, but a gun as big as you were,
a uniform made for a man, a helmet on your head,
a child soldier, a human shield. The Afghan government
has no details. There will be
an investigation of a child walking to his
fourth-grade class. What did he see on his way?
Not the mountains in the distance,
Not the flat land beneath his feet, not the
hands of fruitless war, only the marketplace of his world.
Lucille Gang Shulklapper’s work appears in numerous journals and anthologies, including TheNewVerse.News, Strand magazine, and Poetic Voices Without Borders, as well as in five poetry chapbooks and a picture book, Stuck in Bed Fred. Having taught reading K-college, made recordings for the blind, and raised a family, she is presently a volunteer with Caregiver Youth of America.
In early summer 2011, a taxi driver working in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, which had been devastated by the tsunami a few months earlier, had a mysterious encounter. A woman who was wearing a coat climbed in his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman directed him, “Please go to the Minamihama (district).” The driver, in his 50s, asked her, “The area is almost empty. Is it OK?” Then, the woman said in a shivering voice, “Have I died?” Surprised at the question, the driver looked back at the rear seat. No one was there. A Tohoku Gakuin University senior majoring in sociology included the encounter in her graduation thesis, in which seven taxi drivers reported carrying "ghost passengers" following the March 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. —The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 21, 2016. Photo by Getty Images via International Business Times.
There was something
I was trying to finish—
A lunchbox
for my little one:
balls of pearled rice,
the pale white body
of a radish undressed
on the chopping board.
*
Take me to Hiroriyama,
I say to the driver.
After we crest
the hill he stops.
The road disappears.
There is nothing there.
Every time, I die again.
*
I am a shimmer
in the twisted grass,
a shadow on rusted
copper. My hands,
two pale fish lost
in a river of red
at the ends
of my sleeves.
Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world's first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.
I too wore a paisley shirt like the drug kingpin
in middle school, and girls thought it was sexy,
because paisley says, “I’m macho and I’m crazy.”
A paisley shirt looks like the world from space,
swirling clouds over continents, how loco fame
is just a form of fireworks. There he is. It is.
A peasant who knows as much as a rich man,
with the confidence to smile, escape the slammer, un wey with the touch of gold, his shirt collar
too big, like a satellite dish, a flagship’s flag,
or the scarves on the mic of a rocker. Yet Penn
wanted to show what little choice the narco
had, whose poor voice was topped by a cock
inside a chicken coop, crowing under the sun.
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.
Aboriginal Brass Band Offers Burst of Hope in a Bleak Community —NY Times, Jan. 24, 2016
I write back to tell her
about the Brass Band revival
in Yarrabah, Australia. How Anglicans
made the mistake of dragging Aboriginals
over to their mission and forced
them to labor in the 1890s.
How their children got yanked off
into dormitories, stripped
of their culture and language
like saplings with the wrong kind of bark.
Again, this white failure to understand
how the harness of racism
traps us all in a world without mercy.
Again, this felling of trees
in a forest already depleted and suffering. Rosemerry, I say, I couldn’t ever believe in a journey from revulsion to hope. But look, I say, but look, right here in the New York Times, even this story has one slice of sun in the chapel of despair—the Brass Band.
Listen, can you hear it as background
for Christian hymns, its instruments
able to withstand humidity
and heat, the music shimmying up tree trunks
into bluesy sky, unable to be enslaved.
And here is the band coming
out of its silence of fifty years.
Here is Greg Fourmile on euphonium
and Paul Neal, tenor sax,
didn’t know how to clap to rhythm,
let alone make music. Here are
the school kids and the grandmothers of Yarrabah
doing the best they can
to take the beat of healing into their hearts and ours.
They play for us, for everyone
who wants pride to replace shame,
for the terrible things we have done
and had done to us, and the need to go on.
For the meanness of power
and the sirens of greed.
For the insistence on healing,
the reforestation of what has been cut
but not destroyed.
Author’s Note: This poem was written in response to a poem by Rosemerry Trommer published in Rattle, Poets Respond.
Phyllis Klein believes in poetry. Her work has appeared in the Pharos of Alpha Omega Medical Society Journal, Emerge, Qarrtsiluni, Silver Birch Press, and The Four Seasons Anthology (Hurricane Press, 2015). She is very interested in the conversation between poets and readers of poetry. She sees artistic dialogue as an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area as a psychotherapist and poetry therapist.
Cattle at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge wait out the fog of a cold, winter morning January 11, 2016. Image source: Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Her childhood cards said interested, alert, and eager to learn.
In her twenties she was an associative thinker and loved
to work numbers, fold them like origami in a spread
sheet. But she has no head for numbers, they slip through.
Her boyfriend said it was obnoxious to put him on a list
after laundry, and eventually he slipped through too.
In her thirties she had babies, became a thing of many:
mouths, wakings, -pieced toys. By her forties she is simply scattered. "Get your [ship] together" reads the tote bag
in the store. (She has become a shopper, provisioning being
the only news she can solve.) This week she thinks often
of white men in the cold, in the bird refuge
they have claimed as their own. If they stay long enough
will we come look at them through binoculars, mark them
by the particular scruff on their duck canvas chests?
On so much land the fog must roll in layers: blue, sooty,
breathy, tinged with sun, filling secret baskets in secret
Paiute graves, filling the bunchgrass and the people squatting
in it--new arrivals with binoculars in their mitts watching
us watch the tribe watch the birders watch the ranchers (oh, the ranger and the cowman should be friends)
and the vision of what you can own in a glance
multiplies to a power, like Galileo's scope, devised
to make a man on a ship fifty miles away appear five.
You can see the ship, you can see the man,
but what can you own but what you admit?
Amy Eisner teaches writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her poems have appeared in Confrontation, Fence, Valparaiso, and other journals.
my town council convenes
in suits and dark dresses
up on their dais
far away from us
their voices are soft
speaking through microphones
talking in monotones
one phrase then another
they talk of budgets
fire fighters and police
buildings and zoning
garbage and streets
i know this matters
i know it's important
but i cannot give it
the attention it needs
instead i think
of the planes and the drones
the missiles and bombs
the guns and the soldiers
the rubble of buildings
the dead in the streets
the refugees fleeing
the cities and towns
but the things we do there
to the people in those towns
are not the decision
of anyone here
not the decision
of those in my town
of those on the council
not even the mayor
the things that we do
far away in those places
are decided by others
in chambers like this
in chambers like this one
where some of them sit
on daises much like
the one that is here
their voices are soft
speaking through microphones
talking in monotones
one phrase then another
they too talk of budgets
but for soldiers and guns
for tanks and bombs
and planes and drones
i know this matters
i know it's important
but i cannot give it
the attention it needs
instead i think just
of the fear and the pain
the wounds and the blood
the loss and the grief...
the council adjourns
and everyone smiles
their work for the night
is done...
but i can’t i can’t
keep thinking of fear
and pain and loss
and grief
i know these things matter
i know they’re important
but i cannot give them
the attention they need
perhaps
if the guns
and the bombs
were right here
perhaps
if the planes
and drones
roared above me
perhaps if
the rubble
the dead in the streets
the refugees fleeing
the fear
the pain
the wounds
the blood
the loss
the grief
all came to my town
then perhaps
then perhaps
it would matter
then perhaps
it would matter enough
to give it
the attention
it needs
Roger Stoll is a retired music teacher in San Rafael, California. He has published political verse in the North Bay Progressive Newspaper, the Pacific Sun and TheNewVerse.News, as well as essays in the San Francisco Examiner, ZNet and Counterpunch. He has been arrested numerous times while committing civil disobedience on behalf of numerous causes and is a member of the political affinity group ¡Presente!.
then what would you have me say
to this Veteran of Foreign Wars?
Retired military. He’s living PTSD.
Attends therapy weekly.
Day by day -
dust covered cobwebbed dreams
spin into hellish-waking nightmares
filament by filament
each strand a broken memory.
War’s understated motto: Kill or Be Killed.
Served 26 years, since he was 19.
Straight out of high school
entered camel humped wars
of dirty sand and intense heat.
While in Iraq wandered
into their market place
into the minotaur’s “staged” rage.
An Iraqi (barely able to speak English)
said, “Chop Chop! Come on – Chop Chop!”
Communal eyes followed
a buff-built man dressed as evil genie.
A downward swinging wave –
one-cleaved sparkling and sharp cut.
A hooded head, beheaded.
As if lawlessness ended
with a thud.
Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, a native Philadelphian, is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Images of Being (Stone Garden Publishing, 2011), Lights Battered Edge (Anaphora Literary Press 2015), and Night Sweat (Red Dashboard Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in a number of on line and print publications. Awarded a grant in poetry from the AEV Foundation in 2013; served as Poet in Residence at Ryerss Museum and Library and as Poetry Editor of the Fox Chase Review. On Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qir5_xPSNiU
The crash of an MQ-9 Reaper drone near Creech Air Force Base in Nevada on Dec. 11, 2014. The investigation determined the cause of the accident to be pilot error during a training flight. (U.S. Air Force)
"A record number of Air Force drones crashed in major accidents last year . . . Driving the increase was a mysterious surge in mishaps involving the Air Force's newest and most advanced 'hunter-killer' drone, the Reaper . . . ” The Washington Post, January 20, 2016
Poor Reaper, no longer able to tell
Which way is up and which is down.
Swept away, as the Bible tells us,
Like beasts in the sky.
Its guidance system is no match
For the wrath of the Lord, and
Reapers are dropping out of the clouds.
Grim news for the Air Force's favorite drone
That could signal the demise of its Reapers
And turn its Curtis Lemays into weepers.
George Salamon has seen a cruise missile but not a drone. He professed German at several colleges and wrote about "weapon systems" for the St. Louis Business Journal and Defense Systems Review.
Landlocked again in frozen Iowa,
I’m still the captain of my ship,
I’ll still charm all of you sardines
and mackerel until you swoon,
all of you sharks and seagulls
who’ll swallow anything,
I won’t show mercy when you
float in the fever you catch.
I can cajole you to destroy each other,
or dazzle you to hug in a unified trance
before you lose grip and slide
into the twilight of your dance.
I can convince you to swim in oil-soaked ice,
and you’ll delight in this devilish smile
while we brandish my motto for the mission:
Our Love of Me Beams Like a Hundred
Lighthouses. Your wet minds are useless,
I’m a trickster who’ll defeat any fool
or liar, so when belief sinks in your
hypnotized faces, I’ll swagger
toward you — I’m a riot of one,
and you’ll stutter at my beck and call,
for I possess the ships, the oars, the nets,
I’m my own harpoon: none of you can
elude the epidemic of me as I gore
you, skewer you, and sell your
sorry souls to the highest bidder.
David Spicer has poems accepted by or published in such magazines as Reed Magazine, The Curly Mind, Slim Volume, Yellow Chair Review, Jersey Devil Press, TheNewVerse.News, On the Rush, Circle Seven, Phantom Kangaroo, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., and elsewhere. He is also the author of one full-length collection of poems and four chapbooks, plus eight unpublished manuscripts.
