THE MAKING OF A DEMOCRAT

by Gil Hoy

A young boy 

was still growing. 

Still learning 

whether he’d be happy

or he’d be sad. 

 

Early one morning,

his mother was slowly 

backing the family car 

out of the driveway. 

 

She began chanting:

“I love life, 

I love people,

I love the earth.”

 

While tapping her foot

and gently honking 

the car horn.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet, nominated for a Best of the Net award in 2020, who studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy's poetry has previously appeared in The New Verse News, Best Poetry Online, Muddy River Poetry Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Rusty Truck, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, The Penmen Review, Misfit Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms and is a semi-retired personal injury lawyer.

BEYOND PANDEMIC FATIGUE

by George Salamon

"The first step is to understand that it's not just about exhaustion or tiredness or depleting a mental resource.” —David Badre, “How we can deal with 'pandemic fatigue,’”  Scientific American, January 24, 2021

Grief has made himself

at home inside of us, he

lives in our house, he

will depart eventually,

leaving behind a piece

of himself, the stuff of

future conversation.

Not everything can

be dealt with or gotten

over, no matter how

many steps the

the program has.

George Salamon contributes some of his Un-American attitudes to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice and The New Verse News from America's heartland, St. Louis, MO.

LESSONS FROM THE DEAD

by Gilbert Allen

The Arizona Republican Party on Saturday approved resolutions to censure Cindy McCain, widow of the late Senator John McCain, and former Senator Jeff Flake for endorsing President Joe Biden, and Governor Doug Ducey for enforcing the state's coronavirus restrictions. —Newsweek, January 23, 2021. Cartoon by Nick Anderson, January 26, 2021.

They Zoom from their refrigerated trucks: 

You are the slowest students on God’s earth. 

We’re sick of lecturing, you stupid fucks. 

They Zoom from their refrigerated trucks 

that, for the record, Purgatory sucks. 

And now their message buffers. For what it’s worth 

they won’t stop Zooming from their hopeless trucks. 

But we’re the slowest students on God’s earth. 

Gilbert Allen lives in upstate South Carolina, where he still encounters unmasked persons in indoor spaces. His most recent books are Believing in Two Bodies and The Beasts of Belladonna.

TISSUE & NERVE

by Art Goodtimes

Illustration: Jonathon Rosen for Mother Jones, 2011.

One of the books Capt. Barefoot’s been reading

Crews’ Freud: The Making of an Illusion

details how Freud’s entire legacy

constitutes a tissue of lies

 

Only 'tis you and yous who believe

who put the lie to lies, even

poorly disguised with political handstands

cheap shout-outs & calisthenic flash mobs

 

Truth is, truth can be torn

& so mangled it’s not just-us or justice

but tissue & nerve that compensate

for the loss of all muscle

 

Just one rip & a deep

unconditional dive into the bliss of belief

whether odi et amo, for, out of the fabric

to leap lizard bots & borgs

 

Aye, citizens. Let’s inaugurate our hills to climb

Unzip the science. Unmask the threats. Let’s be

born again believers in the freedom of choices—not so

much the answers, but the friends we make of the questions

 

Art Goodtimes was an Earth First! poetry editor before getting elected to five terms as a Green county commissioner in Southwestern Colorado, where U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Rifle) now represents the Third Congressional district in Congress. Art is co-director of Talking Gourds, a local and regional poetry program under the non-profit aegis of the Telluride Institute.

PRAYER FOR SYRIA'S TRASH PEOPLE

by Steven Croft

Plastic bottles, aluminium cans, clothes, sometimes spaghetti. When a tractor tows in new rubbish at a dump in northeast Syria, men, women and children rush to find the best pickings. Photo credit: Delil Souleiman/AFP via Aljazeera, January 20, 2021

In a land where dreams are invaded

by nightmare year after year,

houses broken,

families fled, 

buried, 

this is the worst shadow

of living, amidst the slough

of better lives

May you patch together a world

in these heaps and spillways,

everything you can build

from this crumbling

find some reason, like a trash bag

of moldering fruit and meat pies,

for sudden joy

as we pinch our nose

and look away

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Canary, The New Verse News, The Dead Mule, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart

Prize and Best of the Net.

CONSUMER CULTURE

by Mary Clurman

EL ANATSUI is a Ghanaian sculptor who has spent much of his achievement packed career living and working in Nigeria. El Anatsui currently runs a very robust studio in Nsukka, Enugu, Nigeria, where some of the most beautiful and touching works of art in the world today are created. He is one of the most highly acclaimed artists in African History and foremost contemporary artists in the world. El Anatsui uses resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps and cassava graters to create sculpture that defies categorisation. His use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work can interrogate the history of colonialism and draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment, but at the core is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice. Above: El Anatsui’s “New World Map,” aluminum bottle caps and copper wire, 2009–2010.

El Anatsui’s elegant creations— 

assembled bottle caps

glorious detritus from

a million billion bottles

reimagined as a map

in fabric 

Christo-like

but shiny 

weight enough 

to smother Mother Earth.

Let us all now drink to El

his wit and grace and hype.

He’s seen a value we have not

Until we learn to do without

he weaves with what we’ve got.

After two years in Art History at Bryn Mawr College, Mary Clurman transferred to Cooper Union Art School. Now a retired Montessori teacher, she lives in Princeton, NJ, summers in Barnard, VT. A jack-of-all media—woodworking, cooking, gardening, local issues—she is finally focused on poetry.

INTERSECTION

by Dick Westheimer

after the reading of "The Hill We Climb” 

Your sons and daughters shall prophesy; 

Your old shall dream dreams, 

And your youth shall see visions.

Joel 3:1

The poet shown like a nova, a new star rising from the dais, 

She spoke brilliance that rivaled the light that streamed through 

the parting clouds, but like any sun, could not see the shadows 

cast by her own bright light—only the glow on the faces 

of a nation reflected back to her as she rose fierce and lyrical.

Most of the elders gathered there—like lunar satellites 

in a sky of her making—were made luminous by her, 

reflected on her words, were dazzled by what she saw. 

Others, blind to her light, heard only 

the cawing of the crows nested in their heads. 

The wise ones there knew all about the casting of shadows. 

Some had even traded in darkness—had forged troubled unions 

of dark and light. But they knew this Black star before them 

was Antares to their lurking Ares. In that moment they felt  

that this night’s moon, bathed in her corona, could make them 

brave enough to face what lurks in the penumbral places.

Dick Westheimer writes poetry to makes sense of the world—which is made easier by the company of his wife of 40 years, and the plot of land they’ve worked together for all of those years. His poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, For a Better World, and Riparian.

CINEMA INAUGURAL

by Alejandro Escudé

It isn’t power, but a podium levitating over a row of graves. You know you’ve heard the word, America. And you sense it, the birds circling over the dignitaries entering the Capitol, where the shadows played weeks before. Weakened, we bow before the ghosts of revolutionaries. It’s all cinema, really.

With the frigid heart of the laborer, I watch, sore yet awake, vowing to do this and that and to do it despite broken hopes. One can’t help the wicked who insist on wickedness, dopes who carry another skeleton body stuffed in their dirty Levis. I can’t help seeing the skull behind the sputtering speech,

lime-white, cracked, battle-bruised as an Apache warrior, porcelain daughters in little Puritan boots climbing steps, old senators making deathly eye contact, defiant smiles. Harrowing wind where Whitman once walked too, to aid the wounded with his round, poetic soul. I am aggrieved

by the last four years, shreds of history, the unholy present of mad insurrection. To see the Viking faces of blowhards storm mahogany chambers only to wander, stunned, hooting devilish battle cries, brandishing antebellum flags, vomiting half-baked theories, chanting croc-shit demands, whaling

creepy hide-seek queries up stairways, around sacred halls. Upward, democracy falls. We’ve been leaping sideways.

I mute the new President, turn to my laptop screen, mask laying on my teacher’s kitchen desk. My students are real; I’m not sure my country is. Even the sun needs a webpage

today and has to publicize the need for its warmth, its rising and setting. Devils wander the corridors having broken

the golden gates of heaven and beaten sword-wielding Michael with a simple, splintered stick. We step forward torn yet illumined. The exodus out of an exodus continued. 

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.

DEPARTURE

by Thomas R. Smith

January 20, 2021

The helicopter circling Washington

before the inauguration—what was it

really we were seeing in the sky over

the Capitol going farther away,

growing smaller in the eyes of the nation?

Almost pure archetype, the Unloved One

inflicting his unlovedness on the kingdom.

And perhaps nothing human could have changed that.

Too late, the damage done in the cradle

cemented, a secular damnation.

Everything ruined, everything fallen, and

worst of all nothing learned. I don’t want

to wallow in the pathos of that self-

inflicted doom. Far better to save our

tears for those four hundred thousand who

needn’t have died, and for the uncounted

number of injured he’s left in his wake.

Air Force One lifts off from Andrews

to the strains of “My Way,” a last bloody

handprint blazoned on the wall of ego.

It didn’t have to end this way.  Or more

terribly, maybe it did.  Do you

remember how Mary Shelley ended

Frankenstein? “He was soon borne away

by the waves and lost in distance and darkness.”

As the wind blows the clouds away from

the sun on a January day above

the Capitol, a helicopter like

a dark airborne wound grows smaller and

smaller until it can no longer be seen.

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collection is The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press).

DREAM OR NIGHTMARE

by George Held

1.

 

Is this dream or nightmare

from which we awaken?

 

Do we live still in the age of Frost

or T***p? The answer is debatable,

 

But our destiny is unknown: do we have

the strength to preserve our ever-

 

challenged democracy, the republic

for which "Old Glory" stands?

 

2.

 

The old, glorious words Hemingway

declared dead in The Great War

 

need renewal or replacement,

but how replace “honor,” “integrity,”

 

“truth”—just uttering that word

in the Senate after the Insurrection

 

earned Romney applause— when “disgrace,”

“fake,” and “disaster” still ring in our ears

 

and lesser poets fill Inauguration Day

with shibboleth and cliché?

3.

 

“The Gift Outright,” while not the poet’s best,

still provides us food for thought—

 

“The land was ours before we were the land’s…”—

 

as we waken from the four-year dream

or nightmare.

George Held is a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA WINTER

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Illustration by Matthew Laznicka for In These Times.

A day of soaking rains.

Crowds of sparrows

Foraging in garden mud

For seeds exposed by the downpour.

Gutters and storm drains

Clogged with great clumps of wet leaves.

Persimmon trees 

Stripped of their foliage

Their naked bodies ornamented

With glowing orange lanterns.

Shiny, water-slicked buckeyes 

And bay nuts 

Littering the ground.

We have waited and waited

And waited

For the rains to arrive

To drench the soil

To fill the creeks

To bathe the dry woods

That throughout the hot, dry, red-flag season

Whispered in our uneasy dreams

Threats to erupt in flames

That would come fee-fie-foe-fumming 

Down the mountain

Like a malevolent fairy tale giant

With a hunger for our homes,

For our neighborhoods,

For our bones.

Rest easy sing the little silver-footed fairies

Dancing on the roof,

For now.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and only journals. His new book At the Driveway Guitars Sale is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. He podcasts poems of aging, memory, and mortality at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife Cynthia in northern California.

NO TWO ALIKE

by Felicia Sanzari Chernesky

          for B.A.

 

In the night snow fell

upon the bittersweet

and lined the land from stone

to sleeping limb with hope.

 

The waking sky reveals

it’s hardly deep enough

to cover the frozen leaves

of grass, but having fallen

 

far and wide, traces

each intention—tire tracks

down a road, fox footprints

fading into the woods

 

dividing neighborhoods.

Despite these separate paths

the snowfall wakes me up

again to the bracing truth

 

that we are joined to one

another and this place,

fragile icy pieces

formed in community—

 

We robe ourselves in frost

yet thrive in unity.

Felicia Sanzari Chernesky is a longtime editor and picture book author who tracks life’s footprints with poetry as her lens. Her microfiction has been nominated for a 2021 Pushcart and Best of Microfiction. She lives with her family in Flemington, New Jersey

THE VIEW FROM WHERE I SIT

by Brooke Herter James

 

The cloud of fog

hovering

over the mountain

has shaped itself

into a jaunty cap—

the kind one might wear

to a party 

or a parade.

Brooke Herter James is a poet living in Vermont.

BREATHLESS

 by George Salamon

"Joe Biden must usher in a new era," —The Hill, January 20, 2021

"Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip." —Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World.

We can stop and draw our breath,

like we did as children, playing,

the flotsam of years is not gone,

the losses of just one year took

on such proportions that the days

grew dark, the stories in the papers

were too much to bear, we grew

hardened, now we can return to

the world of the visible, the world

of the reliable, return to hear the

rustle of the human and the animal,

see the reliable green of forests and

wilderness, touch the solid walls of

houses that did not crumble and be

touched by pictures of painters that

are art until we are ready for the  

journey inward to recover the light 

of logic we lost in a long and dark tunnel.

George Salamon not sure we are on the threshold of a "new era" yet, or are ready for it, but he hopes we will get there. In the meantime, he expects he'll keep contributing to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice and The New Verse News from St.Louis.