BETRAYAL

by Beth McKim

by EvanOfTheYukon at Reddit.

To think I trusted you all that time.
From the first, I revealed intimacies:
what I ate (and with whom), where I went

(and with whom), my sacred political views,
the deaths of my parents, birthday greetings,
family photographs, reunions with friends,
exotic travel plans. In other words, touts

of the good parts of my life. You seemed
to be my friend, asked only for a personality
test, occasionally, to display my narcissism.

You were sterling, helped me renew friendships,
introduce beloved newborns to our world,
confirm my wit and smarts to everyone.
Now I am shocked, baffled by your betrayal

of my love. You apparently sought the money,
sold my secrets to the most lucrative bidder,
placed my finances in jeopardy,  traitorously

sabotaged a presidential election, made fools
of us all. And suddenly, you want me to pay
for protection against thieves.  Not on your
life.  I’ll miss you the way we miss habits

thwarted . But I won’t have the pressure to record
my life for the world to admire. You’ll never know I’m
gone. Goodbye Facebook, my unfaithful friend.


Beth McKim is a writer and actress. Her poetry, essays, and  short stories have been widely published in anthologies and literary magazines.

ZOMBIES

by A. Miller 

We do not recognize the mangled faces of the bodies we take as trophies
We do not hear the sounds of their tortured wailing as they flee for their lives
We are complicit in their deaths because we do nothing to stop it
No matter how much we want to believe we are/aren’t the servants
     of a less violent world
Our children die the same and what can we offer but more guns and
     more bullets in their backs
And more bombs and more heroin and more opioids and more lies
     and more false hope
That’s it we’ll gaslight them all until corruption looks like truth and truth
     looks like lies
We are mass murderers we are tools of destruction we are killing ourselves
     and we don’t care

A. Miller has poetry and essays featured in Aois21 publishing, Making Queer History, TheNewVerse.News, Anti Heroin Chic, and SubverSions: a journal of feminist queries.

AGAIN, A GUN

by Akua Lezli Hope

As Stephon Clark’s death shows, we live in a time when the term “unarmed” is becoming inconsequential—and, for a black man in certain settings, meaningless. —Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker, April 5, 2018. Photograph by Max Whittaker / NYT / Redux via The New Yorker.

Whose cell phone is a gun
Whose frown is a gun
Whose toy is a gun
Whose today is a gun
Whose smile is a gun
Whose tomorrow is a gun
Whose wallet is a gun
Whose loud is a gun
Whose soft is a gun
Whose CDs are a gun
Whose silence is a gun
Whose protest is a gun
Whose stop is a gun
Whose go is a gun
Whose yes is a gun
Whose no is a gun
Whose pipe is a gun
Whose hand is a gun
Whose stand is a gun
Whose advance is a gun
Whose retreat is a gun
Whose plea is a gun
Whose kneel is a gun
Whose showerhead is a gun
Whose question is a gun
Whose answer is a gun
                         is a gun
                         is a gun

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, handmade paper and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, adornments, sculpture and peace whenever possible. A paraplegic, she has founded a nonprofit paratransit firm. Her poetry collection Them Gone will be published by The Word Works Publishing on June 1, 2018.

RED HAT

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco


On our way north,
red brake lights
slam like doors.

We see debris
before we see anything
else:

a half-rolled license
plate, glass stars
ground into dirt.

The car is smashed
in on itself—rain
streaks along each

shattered window. A man
bends

down with his hands flat
on his thighs

to see inside,
his shoulders

tight. Someone has put out
flares.

The thing I can’t
believe

is the man’s MAGA
hat, clean like it is new,
holding the rain up

off his face.
I have to read it twice
to get it’s not

a joke, and then
it aches

and I’m ashamed,
the afterimage of the hat

and the wrecked car

drifting with me
all day long
like floating leaves.

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks Various Lies and Lion Hunt are available from Finishing Line Press and forthcoming from Plan B Press, respectively.

SO TWO GOATS WERE STUCK ON A BEAM UNDER A BRIDGE

by Jill Crainshaw

Amidst a turbulent week on Wall Street, two goats were found stranded on a bridge beam in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Goat photo source: Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission via NPR.

stormy

with a chance of thundersnow

these are the headlines we are living in

curators clamoring for credibility on facebook fake newsfeeds

talking heads trading on trending turbulence

the bald eagle has landed—on the mariners shoulder—looking for bears

hugging the life out of

fragile economies

while easter bunnies on the loose quadruple a towns investment

a teenagers hair creates a buzz breaking into the prophetic sound of her silence

as bells toll to remember the king who had a dream that one day—one day—

and a presidents goldilocks

blow in the

wind

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, NC.

WALDEN POND

by William Marr

Sunset on Walden Pond. Photo: John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images. Sediment samples reveal swimmers and tourists are polluting the lake where Henry David Thoreau sought solace in the mid-19th century. —Seeker, April 4, 2018

It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden


Shhhh!
don't say a word
you'll startle the birds on the trees
and the fish in the pond

worst of all
you'll draw the attention of the noisy tourists
they will pour over by busloads
to look into your eye
that is now full of human waste
and mearure the shallow depth
of their own nature

William Marr has published 23 volumes of poetry,  3 books of essays, and several books of translations.  His poetry has been translated into more than ten languages and included in over one hundred anthologies.  Some of his poems are used in high school and college textbooks in Taiwan, China, England, and Germany. He is a former president of the Illinois State Poetry Society and lives in the Chicago area.

WATCHING NAT GEO WILD FROM A SMALL APARTMENT IN A CROWDED COUNTRY

by Jessamine Price

Korea’s national creation myth also tells of a tiger and a bear who asked the son of the ruler of Heaven if he would make them human. He agreed, but only if they could endure 100 days in a cave eating nothing but garlic and mugwort. The steadfast bear endured and became a beautiful woman, who gave birth to Tangun, the legendary father of Korea in 2333 BCE. But the tiger grew hungry and impatient. He left the cave early, unable cope with the hunger and waiting, and has been slinking through the Korean mountains ever since. That is, until the last century when hunting and habitat loss pushed the Korean tiger over the brink of extinction in the wild in South Korea. With it went an important symbol of Korea’s identity. —ExpertSure. Image source: Zenzar.

The tiger’s eyelash
brushes the arc between sky and skin,
between sleep and the sweep of a vigilant paw.

Lash upon lash,
stripe upon stripe,
such dangerous grace is made.

The boar, the antelope, the bustard,
fed these teeth for a million years.
But the oceans rise—the deserts grow.

Drop by drop
drought by drought
such dangerous grace is maimed.

Jessamine Price, an American poet from Virginia, lives and teaches in South Korea. Her poems and essays are published or forthcoming in publications such as Hunger Mountain, the Lascaux Review, Delmarva Review, Poets Reading the News, and Rust + Moth. She has an MFA in creative writing from American University and an M.Phil. in economic and social history from Oxford.

STATE OF THE UNION: A DIALECTIC

by Karren LaLonde Alenier

with “IN BETWEEN” from Tender Buttons: Objects by Gertrude Stein

In between a place and candy

                                                crush

is a narrow footpath that

                                          ran to a sham self-clapping presi-

shows more mounting

                                     dent more shame

than anything, so much really that a

                                                            stormy

calling meaning a bolster measured

                                                           six inches

a whole thing with that.

                                       and could it be

A virgin a whole virgin is judged

                                                       ass not candy catcher

made and so between

                                    soft puta

curves and

                    hard cógeme duro

outlines and real

                           ITY

seasons and more

                              spies look-

out glasses and a perfectly

                                            candy-assed

unprecedented arrangement between old

                                                                   soldier

ladies and mild

                          wall-less

colds there is no satin

                                     sheet no

wood

         pecker

shining.

Karren LaLonde Alenier is author of seven collections of poetry, including Looking for Divine Transportation, winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature and her latest collection The Anima of Paul Bowles. Her poetry and fiction have been published in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Poet Lore. Her opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On with composer William Banfield premiered by Encompass New Opera Theatre in New York City June 2005. For Scene4 Magazine she writes a monthly column about Gertrude Stein and the arts called “The Steiny Road to Operadom.” 

DC APRIL '68

by Sally Zakariya

Front pages of The Washington Post, April 5 (left) and April 6, 1968, during the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. (The Washington Post)

I was there when the city burned
smug-safe in white girl invulnerability
watching the angry smoke rise
over 14th St., hearing the sirens blare.
Mother wanted me to leave but
D.C. was my city too. Evenings
I’d walk home up 18th St.
with my black boyfriend
in time to meet the curfew
the acrid smell of tear gas
clutching at our throats.
And then we’d stop and kiss
good-night as soldiers watched.
It felt like a small victory
proof that it would all come right
but in my heart I knew
some dark veil had been lifted
some page turned and we
could never close our eyes
again to the cold facts
of what my people
had done to his.

Sally Zakariya’s Pushcart Prize-nominated poetry has appeared in some 70 print and online journals. She is the author, most recently, of When You Escape (Five Oaks Press, 2016), as well as Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic and other verses (2011), and the editor of Joys of the Table (2015). Her chapbook Personal Astronomy is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

ON THE BUS

by Karen Greenbaum-Maya





On the long bus-ride home, spring day in SoCal, we talked about Simon and Garfunkel until news broke into the top 40 station the bus driver permitted. Dr. King was shot. He was already dead. And we all stopped because what else can you do and we all kept talking because what else can you do. No one at home said a thing, usual routine, tutoring my sister in math, the dishes, my homework. They had hated that I belonged to the Brotherhood Club. Now that too was dead. I held the cats close.

I wore my black dress. Homeroom announcements told us where the service would be if anyone wanted to skip school and go, a church on 17th and Wilshire. I thought I’d go. I thought I should. I was the only kid there from the high school, I was the only white person there, the speakers were bitter and all the words that go with bitter, and how not? I kept my head down. Even at fifteen I got that it wasn’t about me.

The next day I fasted, as on Yom Kippur because that was how you marked great sorrow and great complicity. Fasting won’t bring him back, my folks scoffed, but it was something I could do, though there was nothing I could do. And when Bobby was killed later that year I went inside a little more, a little lower but nothing more, because now this was what could happen, all the time.


Karen Greenbaum-Maya, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, feels very tired these 50 years on.

CARAVAN OF HONDURANS

by Ben White

After days of walking from Mexico’s southern border, the caravan of hundreds of migrants that has drawn President Trump’s Twitter ire has now halted on a brown-grass soccer field, its participants unsure and anxious about the way forward. —The Washington Post, April 3, 2018

There is a caravan of Hondurans
Gypsying its way
Through Mexico
                                    And headed north
To the border
Of milk and honey
Where there’s nothing funny
About the fear
                                    Of American values
Holding tight to beliefs
That have lost anything
To believe in
                                    As the caravan grows
In numbers to become
A mythological beast
Ready to feast
                                    On the benevolence
Of citizens
Who stopped
Demonstrating benevolence
Sometime around 1776
                                    And who now hide
Their truest attitudes behind
Stacks of dead, rifle-shot children,
Prison walls full of minorities,
And credit cards stacked high
                                    With dream-debt
And yet,
The people remain
Hypocritical enough
To claim a national perfection
That has never existed,
                                    So as much
As honesty
Has been resisted,
It is not a surprise
To see the disguise
Of greatness
                                    Fading and falling
From the face
Of patriotic
Ideologies and ironies
                                    While preparing
                                    A hate-filled response
Against the all-destructive
Caravan rolling closer
To the closed communities
Unwilling and unable
                                    To practice
The righteousness
Of strength
                                    And virtue.

The author of Buddha Bastinado Blues and The Kill Gene, Ben White was convinced he was a poet only to find out he is not a poet at all—he is a witness.  What he writes is testimony.

A MESSAGE FROM THE SECOND PLANET

by Martin Elster

A composite image of the planet Venus as seen by the Japanese probe Akatsuki. The clouds of Venus could have environmental conditions conducive to microbial life. IMAGE FROM THE AKATSUKI ORBITER, BUILT BY INSTITUTE OF SPACE AND ASTRONAUTICAL SCIENCE/JAPAN AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AGENCY via University of Wisconsin-Madison News, March 30, 2018.

On Friday, astronomers announced a new paper laying out the case for the atmosphere of Venus as a possible niche for extraterrestrial microbial life.—EarthSky, March 31, 2018


We’re microbes in the clouds of Venus
of an otherworldly genus
gobbling CO2 and spitting
out sulfuric acid—fitting
for a life form that can waft
akin to an ocean-going craft
far above the rocks and soil
whose heat will make lead bullets boil.

We’re vitamin D3 gourmets,
drinking ultraviolet rays
as we have done for donkey’s years,
wild about the atmosphere’s
asphyxiating greenhouse gas,
so reflective that your glass
sees only jewel-like radiance.
You scientists are on the fence

on whether there is life on Venus,
but only cause you haven’t seen us
yet. And we don’t want you to,
for if you poke and probe, you’ll strew
our virgin world with noxious matter.
All tranquility will shatter.
Goggle at our planet. Stand
in distant awe. But please don’t land!

Martin Elster is a composer and serves as percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poetry has appeared in Astropoetica, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Chimaera, and The Road Not Taken, among others, and in anthologies such as Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 and 2015 Rhysling Anthologies, New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, and Poems for a Liminal Age.

INTERSTITIUM

by Harold Oberman

With all that’s known about human anatomy, you wouldn’t expect doctors to discover a new body part in this day and age. But now, researchers say they’ve done just that: They’ve found a network of fluid-filled spaces in tissue that hadn’t been seen before. These fluid-filled spaces were discovered in connective tissues all over the body, including below the skin’s surface; lining the digestive tract, lungs and urinary systems; and surrounding muscles, according to a new study detailing the findings, published today (March 27) in the journal Scientific Reports. Image source: Getty Images via Scientific American, March 27, 2018.

The hidden waterway beneath our skin
Flows freely.  For the moment
It's an organ unburdened by metaphor, unlike the heart.

Undiscovered rivers in the modern age are rare.
Deep in the Amazon perhaps, hidden from satellites
By tree cover and a murky flow
That mimics the surrounding underbrush,
Banked by birds so exotic they were indexed one time and forgotten,
There is a tributary no one has seen.

It hid in plain sight, the interstitium.
The chemicals used to study the skin
Destroyed it.  Dissected, it collapsed from the weight of its discovery.


Harold Oberman is a lawyer and poet living and writing in Charleston, S.C.

EASTER

by Howard Winn

Easter Island is critically vulnerable to rising ocean levels. . . . Many of the moai statues and nearly all of the ahu, the platforms that in many cases also serve as tombs for the dead, ring the island. With some climate models predicting that sea levels will rise by five to six feet by 2100, residents and scientists fear that storms and waves now pose a threat like never before. “You feel an impotency in this, to not be able to protect the bones of your own ancestors,” said Camilo Rapu, the head of Ma’u Henua, the indigenous organization that controls Rapa Nui National Park, which covers most of the island, and its archaeological sites. “It hurts immensely.” —Nicholas, Casey, The New York Times, March 15, 2018

Discovered by the western world
on that religious holiday
although the residents of
the island knew it was there
at the end of long canoe trips
some thought the huge heads
could only be the work of beings
from other planets not of this
world until inquisitive explorers
found the remnants of unfinished
heads and now as the seas rise
despite the anti-science deniers
and the islands sink beaches
disappear and vacations to
swim with warm sand under
foot are no longer what the
adventurous wealthy can
indulge in as trees vanish
and Pacific waters wash over
farm lands and orchards of
tropical fruit while history
and inexplicable stone heads
vanish into the southern seas
to remain only for a time in
memory or in history books
the fate of things in a world
of times past and legend
takes the place of scientific fact

Howard Winn has just had a novel Acropolis published by Propertius Press as well as poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.