VANILLANELLE

by Susan McLean



Consistency is our delight.
Don’t make us try exotic flavors.
We want it plain; we want it white.

We think that blend-ins are a blight.
Your nuts or fudge do us no favors.
Consistency is our delight.

Our preferences are watertight.
Our love of sameness never wavers.
We want it plain; we want it white.

We shun sensations that excite
odd leanings or untoward behaviors.
Consistency is our delight.

We’re not repentant or contrite.
Change isn’t what the public savors.
We want it plain; we want it white.

Enough!  We have no appetite
for new ideas or dusky saviors.
Consistency is our delight.
We want it plain; we want it white.

Susan McLean is an English professor at Southwest Minnesota State University.  Her satirical poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Light, Lighten Up Online, and The Spectator (UK).

MY MOTHER’S OCEAN

by Bill Meissner

vis Giphy

I can never take just one photograph of
the ocean. The cerulean waves are too
lovely, too graceful, tumbling gently over themselves,
then turning to foam that kisses
the sandy lip of the world.
There are no other words for it—this
huge and endless ocean’s rise and fall, this
rocking back and forth, back
and forth, the way my mother used to

hold me when I was a small child, afraid
of the oncoming storm.
The brittle window glass rattled, but
she rocked me, and replaced the thunder
with a humming, a lullaby
that rose and fell.
It’s a melody I would,
as the years passed, remember,
then forget, then
remember again. There are no words

for this song my mother sang, her liquid voice
small, but still filling the room,
overpowering the fists of wind and stabs of lightning
with a language I couldn’t understand

at the time.
One single photograph
is never enough. I know now
that there is beauty in the things that are
closest to us, and beauty in the things
that we lose. She

is gone now.
But as a wave lifts itself and rolls
toward me, then bows down and becomes
a wing of bright diamonds,
I stand again on this shore, without words,
my bare feet sinking into
the hourglass sand,
and wait for that song to wash over me.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry.  His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.

WATER'S MEMO TO THE T***P ADMINISTRATION

by Meredith Stewart Kirkwood

We will have
what we want which is
to merge, to circle,
to never stay.
We will knock down
your wall
if we have to. We will
overtake your cities
if you don’t release us
to the sea.
We will pass over your farms,
we will seep through cracks
and expand them.

We do not mind your rhetoric.

We are not listening at all.

Meredith Stewart Kirkwood received an MFA in poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Santa Clara Review, Windfall, and others. Meredith co-hosts a poetry reading series at the Lents International Farmers’ Market in Portland, Oregon.

IN FAIRY TALES

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Piñata by Dalton Ávalos Ramírez.

There could be a stranger with a poison apple.
There could be a girl who flies to an island.
There could be a maiden in love with a monster.
There could be a bluebird, a blue belt, a blue light.
There could be a chicken that predicts the end of the world.
There could be an enchanted pig.
There could be seven henchmen men scattered across three decades.
There could be a puppet with a nose that grows when he lies, and he lies anyway.
There could be a celebrity who runs for office.
That big name could know nothing of geopolitics or governing.
That man could make a mess of our habitats.
That man . . . but no, the tale is too far-fetched.
And how could we tell it to the children?


Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the  Ozarks where she Resists Arkansas politics and politicians. She is the author of two books and five chapbooks.

T***P BUMPS HIS HEAD, A BIGGER

by  David Spicer  

                                         

Cartoon by Darcy, Cleveland.com, May 10, 2017

idiot than ever. No, not impossible:
decades ago he grabbed a Voodoo
princess by her pussy in his penthouse.
Curses galore at the height of your infamy,
Goldie Small Hands! T***p didn’t laugh
but drools today. Today, swastikas curve fetally.
Today, the sheets of KKKers bleed.
Beavis and Butthead chew Tic-Tacs.
T***p’s blonde miracle weeps tangerine tears.
Whitey Pence shocks himself into a coma,
handmaids arcing around him, praying to Buddha.
Chris Christie scarfs twenty cheeseburgers.
Kellyanne Conway talks circles around herself
like a carousel pony. Congress is revolting.
Eddie Munster for Prez! moderates roar.
David Duke for King! fascists yell.
I want Ted Nugent! the Alaskan nincompoop drawls.
On second thought, I want me! Anarchists, nihilists,
and poets celebrate with a three-day bacchanal.
T***p disappears, descends into the earth via ICBM,
lands in China, deported to North Korea.
SUPREME LEADER STUPID HAIRCUT
BEHEADS ORANGE FACE!!! shouts
New York Post. Putin mourns, then farts.
Throngs cheer and party in the world’s megacities.
Back home, T***p’s cronies and their carpet bags
red-eye to the North. Little Jeff Sessions preens
in the mirror of the Justice Department toilet,
tokes his Alabama Bound weed, and dances helter-skelter
like Lorde, collapsing. Eddie Munster! Eddie Munster
for Prez! Gut Medicare, Eddie! Gut Social Security!
his toadies leer and chant. We love Hillary! progressives
scream. Bill Maher, we demand Bill Maher! millennials
moan. GO FUCK YOURSELVES! Bill Maher megahorns.
You’re dreaming again, honey. Wake up,
my wife says, shaking my shoulders.
What’s he done now? I ask.

David Spicer is a retired proofreader for a medical journal and has had poems accepted by or published in Reed Magazine, Alcatraz, The Mocking Heart Review, North Dakota Quarterly, TheNewVerse.News, Chiron Review, Midnight Lane Boutique, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Nude Bruce Review and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Best of the Net twice and a Pushcart, and is the author of one full-length collection of poems Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books.

THERE'S SOMETHING DYING IN MY BRAIN

by Gil Hoy

Why, in wealthy America

must the beggared sick
lay ill in their beds

While a well-to-do
privileged white man

Dines on fine rich foods,
swings at a little white ball

at his country club
in warm sunny Florida.

While a smiling young girl
skips along the beach in her
wildly carefree exuberance

While an inquisitive circling
seagull soars overhead,

Searching for something
fresh to eat in the sea’s puddles.

Gil Hoy is a personal injury lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts, a former Town Selectman, and a regular contributor to TheNewVerse.News. His poetry has appeared in numerous print and online journals.

NOT ABOUT PROVIDENCE

by David Feela

Every night before sleep
deeds of maleficence
get counted like black sheep
in Paul Ryan’s head.

Hour after hour
tallying the flock,
pounds of mutton
lifted over his tiny fence.

Enough to populate
an elysian field
where the grass stays green,
locked in a banker’s vault.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays How Delicate These Arches released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

SNOT

by Katherine Smith

President Donald Trump stood alongside House Republicans in the Rose Garden Thursday to applaud the narrow passage of legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill, also known as the American Health Care Act, aims to effectively gut health care coverage for millions, cut Medicaid funding by 25 percent, and allow states to deny coverage for a slew of pre-existing conditions. —Mother Jones, May 4, 2017

Suspended in the blue horizon like a pale blue sea creature
we sing.  We sing of crown vetch rising from ditches like a minor god
that will still be here in a billion years, a music
we make each day. We believe in our solidity
like sea creatures under the ocean
in their geometric palaces made entirely of mucus,
whirling shells, transparent rooms that filter water
to feed pinkie sized larva. We build our cathedrals,
in love with monuments, marble columns,
the Nautilus of our constitution. In the Rose Garden
Americans have dragged a palace from under the water—
two children sleeping under a blanket on a beach
tended by a woman with a brain tumor who will die in a week—
heaved it onto the thorns, drip under collapsed walls.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

THEIR OWN SPIRIT

by Jan D. Hodge

T***p, GOP Leaders Take Victory Lap After House Passes ‘Trumpcare’ —NBC News, May 4, 2017

Thus sayeth the Lord God, Woe to the foolish prophetswho follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing.                        ―Ezekiel 13.2

When things get bad in the bog,
toads squat on the shoulders of pygmies.

Jubilant if they can see
clear to the next rotten log,
they trumpet farts of glee.

Two things about toads:
    they celebrate the smallest victories
    and always gloat with so little class.

Jan D. Hodge's poems have appeared in many print and online venues. His Taking Shape (a collection of carmina figurata) and The Bard & Scheherazade Keep Company (tales from Shakespeare and the Arabian Nights recast in double dactyl stanzas) have both been published by Able Muse Press.

SECOND COMING

by James Bettendorf

Detail of poster for The Young Messiah film.

Imagine Jesus is alive again.
He has to go to school,
it’s the law.
The kids tease him
his hair so long,
Are you a boy or are you a girl? 
He hears the judgments
echo in his head
as he walks home
to build furniture
with his immigrant father
while his mother
takes in wash
so they can eat.

He is smart, hides away
in his teen years, builds
a robot of wood and spare parts
from the appliance junk yard.
He covers it with silk and denim
so it looks like a real person
When his real father says

          IT IS TIME

he substitutes the robot
so he can avoid the pain
and won’t have to roll
the stone again.

He goes on to star
in Hollywood comedies
as a transgender female.

James Bettendorf is a retired math teacher who recently completed a two-year poetry internship at the Loft in Minneapolis  after having taken many classes over the years.  He is a member of the Forward writing group at the Loft.  James has been published in Rockhurst Review, Common Ground Review, Verse Wisconsin and Light Quarterly as well as the last eight volumes of Talking Stick.

NOW THAT MACKY'S BACK IN TOWN

by George Salamon

"Paul Ryan wins near-party-line showdown on Health Care.”

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 4, 2017

Mack the Knife

Has found new life

As cuttin' Paul Ryan.

Obamacare must burn in hell

So insurance companies do well.

The people? Who cares if they survive

As long as the wealthy continue to thrive.

Democracy has been sold for its market price

As the necessary national sacrifice.

George Salamon is in reasonably good health for a curmudgeonly senior citizen.

THE BODY POLITIC

by Edmund Conti

We both liked Istanbul.
She, having been there, and I
probably because I am,
as our President would say,
an international. I like
the idea of its being on two
continents. Intercontinental
our President might say.
I like the idea  that Istanbul
was Constantinople, that
Constantinople was Byzantium.
Wishy-washy our President
could say. Our President
talks turkey. But, then,
he’s a President and I?
I’m a Poet. And she?
She laughs at us both.


Edmund Conti's poetry is all over the place.

THE DEVIL OF A DILEMMA

by Regina Vitolo

Image by Matt Chase, The New York Times, February 17, 2016.

the mistress of the universe has deigned to immerse us
in the devil of a dilemma
as complex as puppet strings intertwined dancing
on a papier-mâché platform
the planets collide, missiles leave silos, gravity reverses,
earth trembles
nonsense makes the best sense, nonetheless, so say
the pundits of the day
the wrecking ball swings, misses the gringo living yuge
in the capitol—
claims Andrew Jackson could have resolved the Civil War
but for a few facts
be damned, like the Constitution (no longer relevant) and
the NINTH CIRCUIT
to be mission accomplished with a tweet or two or more.


Words fascinate Regina Vitolo and ignorance in a leader shivers her liver. She has been published, but is willing to absorb more.

QUEEN

by Scot Siegel

Image source: Pinterest

for Melania

One hundred days the Queen hibernates,
burrowed deep in a cavern of bark.

Every day, a star blinks on, or off,
birth of another scientist, or murderer,

and someone loses his or her job.
Every day is someone's first

at something, waking up married, burying
the dog, eating dinner alone as a widow.

Every spring, the earth gets back to work.
Queen searches for a dry place, a loft or shed,

a wedge of light between truss and stud,
someplace warm and undisclosed,

close to the source: Wood she'll strip from lap
or fence, chew and mix with saliva.

She works fast, connects petiole to rafter.
Spins the nest about the center stalk, weaves

combs for drones whose eggs take five to eight
days to incubate. Then they get to work.

Everything they do is for the Queen.
She never returns to the same nest.


Scot Siegel, Oregon poet and city planner, is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems (2016) and Thousands Flee California Wildflowers (2012), both from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. His poetry is part of the permanent art installation along the Portland, Oregon Light Rail Transit ‘Orange Line.’