EVER GIVEN

by Kat Frabotta

“Ever Given” by DaveRiver at Deviant Art.

She trudged on, steered towards Rotterdam

The captain’s son called him. Something pestering

The wind. He felt itchy. His grip tightened

He jerked the wooden wheel

Left. Left. How fucking far can you go.

Too far, it seems.

A simple, swift U-Turn will fix things

She had other plans.

Had since leaving Taiwan, but now he spurred her on.

Now it wasn’t just a magical dream of a looming, vast, powerless vessel

He had actively propelled her, set her off, equipped her with the tools needed

To make her mark.

Ever Given,

For decades, Passing various goods to every spot she’s been told

Humans have not moved her.

People shoot Asians, step on the necks of black men,

Buy plastic to put on top of plastic

As the world burns.

Incredulous, she did what she could

With her mass and the blessing of propulsion

She burrowed deep.

She takes to Egypt, ignoring the cries of the Captain

Slowly entrenches herself into the sand of the canal.

And now she sits.

She sits, she blocks. She has no intention of budging.

Why should she?

We don’t budge.

And maybe we need to get stuck for a while right now, she thinks,

Shutting her eyes and making herself comfortable.

Kat Frabotta is a 29 year-old living in New York City. She is currently an advertising student and aspiring creative. In her freetime, she loves cuddling with her orange cat and talking to friends over a bowl of penne alla vodka.

A WOMAN IN TIGRAY

by Sarah Mackey Kirby

Britain's Channel 4 recently aired a devastating report on these atrocities. One survivor recounted a harrowing 10-day ordeal to the network during which she said she and five other women were gang-raped by Eritrean soldiers. She said the troops joked and took photos as they injected her with a drug, tied her to a rock, stripped, stabbed and raped repeatedly her. Doctors who've treated Tigrayan women have said one woman's vagina was stuffed with nails, stones and plastic. —CBS

is filled with stones,

nails. By her captors.

If she is not human,

if she must be bloodline-cleansed

from existence,

then why does crying matter.

 

The sun rises all over the world

as if it doesn’t know.

And sets apricot embers

each evening.

In darkness, a woman in Tigray

is filled with stones.

Filled with soldiers.

Alone below Orion’s belt,

sharp in the night sky,

glowing fire

three stars in a row.

Sarah Mackey Kirby's first poetry collection The Taste of Your Music (Impspired) will be published in May 2021. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Chiron Review, Connecticut River Review, Impspired Magazine, and elsewhere. She and her husband live in Louisville, Kentucky.

CALEDONIAN FIGHTING FISH

[Scotland's] First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said there are "significant questions" about Alex Salmond's political comeback. Her comments came after Mr Salmond revealed he would be among the new Alba Party's regional list candidates. The former first minister said his aim was to build "a supermajority for independence" after the May election. —BBC, March 27, 2021

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, and edits the verse quarterly Lighten Up On Line. His work has appeared in a wide variety of British magazines and anthologies as well as UK, European, and North American web publications such as Amsterdam Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Asses of Parnassus, Better Than Starbucks, The Hypertexts, Light, The New Verse News, and Snakeskin.

EXPOSED IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

by Sandra Sidman Larson

A fist sculpture is situated at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, also known as George Floyd Square, on March 25 in Minneapolis. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)

As a spring storm begins to rumble outside, I wrap

my dog in his thunder shirt, yet I must remain calm

and unprotected from what bears down

on us, whether it is thunder, city coyotes howling,

the probable headlines of the Star Tribune—the paper flung

outside my door this morning, as every day, by a poor man,

his young children waiting in his idling car.

The fate of George Floyd’s murderer is soon to be

determined by twelve citizens in a courtroom barricaded

with barbed wire as have been the halls of Congress,

precautions against returning mobs, recently sicced

on the representatives of our frail democracy

by a crazed president who we supposedly ushered out

the door. But what to do about the cop who puts his knee

for nine minutes upon the neck of a Black man,

smothers him to death, stopping all our lives, turning us

to marching in the streets, while troublemakers—homegrown,

or blown into Minneapolis—set the city streets and stores afire,

inciting chaos among thousands of protesters, many of us

now realizing we need other gods or old gods to appear,

to stop us from killing each other, we who are filled with love,

hate, hope, and despair, stirred up by the fates—

so little to protect us?  All I can do is close the window

against the thunder, the smells of rain-damped debris;

note the snow almost gone from the ground, now newly bare.

Sandra Sidman Larson, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has three chapbooks to her credit: Whistling Girls and Cackling Hens, Over a Threshold of Roots (both Pudding House Press Publications), and Weekend Weather: Calendar Poems. Her chapbook Ode to Beautiful was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016 and her first full manuscript by Main Street Rag Publications in 2017. Her poetry has been published in many venues such as the Atlanta Review, Grey Sparrow, Earth’s Daughters and on-line in The New Verse News and others. Her work has also appeared in numerous anthologies, one being what have you lost? edited by Naomi Shihab Nye.  (Who nominated her for one Pushcart Prize). With a Masters Degree in social work and community planning, Sandra’s primary career was in social service and social justice work. Her poetry career began at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. As a poet with grandchildren and great nieces and nephews she longs for a world where all children are cherished and cared for and justice reigns for all.

SWEET APRIL SHOWERS

by Earl J. Wilcox

Larry Parks lip-synching to Al Jolson singing "April Showers' in The Jolson Story (1946).

Already primed by fading February

snows, brash, thrashing March

winds, come softly sweet showers.

 

Make us mindful of your spring spirit

here where pandemic surviving souls

surely long to go on pilgrimages

 

to the beach or baseball game. O,

sweet showers fall gently today on

dogwoods and azaleas in our back yard,

 

where sparrows and chickadees still

sleep with open eyes, as in Chaucer’s

day & cardinals and Carolina wrens

 

build beautiful nests. O blithe spirit

of mockingbirds, we seek only blissful

martyrs of courageous care givers,

 

vaccines’ power and glory, blessed

assurance that this April thy showers

nourish and sustain this good earth.

 

 

Earl Wilcox dedicates this poem to the spirits of all who did not live through the pandemic to see this spring’s colorful flowers nor hear the mockingbirds sing or feel the comfort of a warm April shower. 

SERMON FOR SPRING HOLIDAYS

by Catherine Gonick

Source: Image from NewVoices.org via Haggadot.com. Adapted from Dinah Winnick.

In a just and regenerative world

cooperation and honor

a given

 

no one would be made a slave

but we are all traffickers

 

                  Gloria

and violence would be only

the absence of good

but we’re all mass shooters

 

                  In excelsis

our souls

are returned to us pure

aach morning

 

                  Deo

and we repollute them

 

beggared

imaginations can’t be trusted

with much freedom

children must be taught to share

although adults

can’t do it

 

in the nineteen hundreds

sperm whales learned

to swim upwind

of sailing ships’ harpoons

but now can’t escape our noise

 

alone on rising

stolen seas

our Jonah spat out

floats on plastic

 

in our hopeful house

chametz is hunted

a beast sacrificed

another Passover feast prepared

 

we pray       tikkun olam

for whomever shall inherit     our Earth

                                   

 

Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Silver Birch Press, and in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, and Dead of Winter. She works in a company that seeks to slow the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.

FLOWERS FOR SARAH EVERARD

by Jenny Middleton

because we have to buzz—home safe—home safe—

yes—me too—home safe

peppering What’s App with the obvious

because we walk gripping keys

between middle fingers

harrying skin

with shelled expletives

hoping the only use of their jagged

steel edge will be to unlock

the front door

we think—can’t stop

thinking of

your last walk home

caught on keyhole camera

casual, then

over Clapham Common

 

we light candles, Sarah,

watch them blink

in the shadows of ringed shadows

at the base of trees

and lay flowers in a crackle

of cellophane

against the fear

of dark emptied spaces

and words that spit

from a policeman’s mouth

sticking this in you

kidnapping, murdering, mutilating

leaving you in a builder’s sack

only identifiable by your dental records

in Kentish woodland

 

crimes unlovely as the sick

absence of spring leaves

un-grown on laurel trees.

Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the chaos of family life. She lives in London with her husband, two children and two very lovely, crazy cats.

FLASH NEWS

by Angelica Whitehorne

I heard there was a time when the news was dropped off at your front door, tightly wrapped like a present of sorts and printed with dark black importance on the backs of dead trees, your unrolling of the world’s enrichment, the first sacrifice of your morning, right after sleeping, the last sacrifice of night and right before your first ritualistic kitchen devour. And I imagine how these readers of past would go to find a place, probably the same place as last week, and flap open the butterfly wings of the newspaper, nonchalantly hungry for the best worked happenings, so they could go into the talks of their day feeling primed, well read, and ready, aficionado on stock prices, lost dogs, drug scandals. And how sweet it must have been to read the typing of the world, curated and succinct. And even more how sublime it must have been to have it all end, to put the paper down and be done with it, close your shades to society and its grimy violence, back deals, syrupy success stories, headlines of hazard. To go about your day untethered to it—now the news envelops us always. I open the app to see my friend’s faces and there it is, news of a baby falling from a 12-story building. I scroll to my home screen and Apple positions all the world’s affairs in front of my eyes, and it is like lightning across the window of my phone, who could manage to look away? Our world is like a car crash, no like a highway pile up, and all these news sites are like watching the fenders collide into each other over and over again. The notifications announce themselves to me this midday and I see that another story of nature’s revenge, hurricane or tsunami or landslide has come, I slide the message away, but I do not turn them off. Turning them off would be like turning away from the awful. I grow guilty whenever I do not hold the tragedy of these stories second hand, continual consumption seems the least I can do. Me and my entire generation have lost our ability to put the paper down, and so we read from morning to night and roll it all over a second time in our dreams, almost as penance for the bad news not having our name in it. 

Angelica Whitehorne is a New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, and Hooligan Magazine among others.

VACCINE REACTIONS

by Claudia Gary

On April 18, 1955, 8-year-old Ann Hill of Tallahassee, Fla. received one of the first Salk polio vaccine shots. Credit AP via NPR.

Seeing a needle, I slid off the chair,

ran down a hallway to the waiting room,

then circled it until the harried nurse

and my mother corralled me. No amount

of coaxing to be good, no bribes of candy,

no warnings about polio could stop

my tears that day. The rest I don’t remember. 

Autonomy, “freedom,” was everything

to a three-year-old. Last weekend I saw

a needle and shed tears of gratitude.

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, and more through writer.org (currently via teleconference). Author of Humor Me (2006) and of chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019) and Bikini Buyer’s Remorse (2015), she is also a health science writer, visual artist, and composer of art songs and chamber music. Follow @claudiagary.

PAGE FROM A BOOK OF DAYS

by David Chorlton

Swallows at the windswept pond

this morning, quick as good fortune, make the light

sway back and forth above

the water while it keeps

its secrets dark.

                         It’s a quiet time;

Say’s Phoebes barely clear the grass before

returning to the fence from which they came,

and a Loggerhead Shrike moves down

from the desert

with a prayer in his beak.

                                         The Red-tailed Hawk

has made the streets his hunting ground

where the pigeon flock

scatters left, right and skyward

as his shadow scythes between them.

One more day;

                       another step toward

the unknown, with a moodswing peak

to peak along the mountain

as it leans back against the sky. A different

message blows

                         from each direction: another

ten killed in Colorado; the doves

returning early from the tropics; music

on the radio so old

it wouldn’t recognize the world today;

and the voice within, too long

in solitude to know

what its next word should be.

Throughout the pandemic David Chorlton has lived quietly and communicated with the local wildlife. His new book Unmapped Worlds from FutureCycle Press features poems that hid in his files for too many years and which now enjoy new exposure. 

LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF JOE BIDEN

by Chad Parenteau

The Boston Herald says

when Joe Biden falls

it is spring

 

black farmers were rescued

but press

begged for pageantry

 

for interviews

hot breathing mouths

near

 

the edge of six feet

obsessed with

closeness

 

waiting in the sun

the children

in the camps

 

incidentally

in Georgia

there were

 

the dead Asian women

but look

Joe Biden falling

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He is a contributor to Headline Poetry & Press and serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His latest collection The Collapsed Bookshelf was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

THE NEW MATH

by Howie Good

If a total of eight people

are shot to death

at three massage parlors

in Atlanta, Georgia,

 

and the following week

10 people are shot

to death at a supermarket

in Boulder, Colorado,

 

how long before

the next mass shooting

in the U.S. occurs?

 

Show all work.

Howie Good's most recent poetry collection is Gunmetal Sky, available from Thirty West Publishing.

SECOND SHOT

by Tracey Gratch

Crocuses through morning frost feign hope

that even in this time of gloom, as Cambridge

bars are shuttered tight and on Mass Ave.

foot traffic’s light, and yet, and yet it’s barely

spring, despite the losses reigning in—

The moment for a second shot; resilience

grit, on second thought.

Tracey Gratch lives south of Boston with her husband and their four children. Her poems have appeared in publications including Post Road, Mezzo Cammin, The Literary Bohemian, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. Her poem "Strong Woman" is included in On Being A Doctor, Volume 4, from the American College of Physicians.

LETTER FROM SOLITARY

by Katherine West

March 2021

The birds are singing 

and it isn't snowing 

We have our vaccines 

and schools are open 

It is warm enough to sit outside 

but too cool for forest fires 

In sunny spots brown grasses are turning green

from the inside out 

The cat hasn't shed her winter down

still sits on my lap for warmth

She is my most intimate companion 

on this March afternoon in 2021

I have survived the shipwreck 

that tossed me up on this desert island 

on this alien planet 

this solitary confinement 

for a crime 

I didn't commit 

And although Spring is coming 

I'm cold

I could be old and all 

my relationships memories 

I could be dead 

and all my lovers ghosts 

sitting on the side of my bed 

that empty symbol of sleep

and love 

that flag 

that empty symbol of unity 

at half mast 

Half the time 

the ghosts hold my cold 

hands in their cold hands 

whispering platitudes 

like therapists 

over the phone 

like friends 

on a screen 

They cannot hold me 

They cannot hold me down 

as I drift like old smoke 

old scarves 

as I fray

unravel 

silk skeins 

cool 

weightless 

slim 

as threads 

of red sunset 

resting like raptors 

on the updraft 

like strands

of blood 

lovely 

and unloved 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel, When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited has just been released, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in March of 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing. She is presently at work on the sequel to When Night Comes. It is called Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist.