The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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of narcotics or an epidural, pain searing, I called
for my Mama. A grown woman, already a Mama
and I called for mine.
It wasn’t something I planned, the cry shot out
my grimaced mouth, my husband sitting by my side,
a nurse coaching me on. I shouted for my Mama
because somewhere in my subconscious I believed
no one else but my Mama could relieve me of my pain.
Not even the man who loves me could do that.
When I heard George Floyd called for his Mama,
(not his girlfriend or brother) I thought, Of course he did.
Who else but a Mama might rescue a son from the grip
of a cop determined to strangle the life out of him?
And when I learned Duante Wright called his Mama,
just before a cop shot him dead, I imagined him reaching
for his Mama. Who else but a Mama would lay their body
across a son to shield him from the bullet
they both knew was coming.
Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poems have appeared in The London Reader, Muddy River Poetry Review, Beach Reads (an anthology from Third Street Writers), Peregrine, Oddball Magazine, and other journals.
fight never has a winner. i do not understand the gun-
ned down making hard history or gun
stock rising, the real people at the end of the gun-
play left to bow under a white curtain. Gun
again. Gone again.
Rebecca Surmont is a poet from Minneapolis, MN, whose work has been in Silver Birch Press, The Southwest Journal, and the book Seasons by Trolley Car Press.
As Bernini would have it, Teresa entered a quasi-orgasmic
state, calling out to her would-be husband Jesus! and explaining
later how the prick of the arrow exulted and burned at the same
time
and I think of my Mr. Moderna, the jolt he gives me, the fever,
the chills, the battle royale he is willing to undergo on my behalf,
even though he is not entirely faithful, as I hear others claiming
him
think of the lily and its deep chamber penetrated by the sharp
bill of its hummingbird swordsman, we do not hear her cry out
or think he has forsaken her by darting into the orifices
of all the neighbor lilies
and yet in this year of multiple piercings, the throngs of the would-
be vaccinated circling in the vestibules, the ante-chambers
of their chosen clinics, the buzzing and murmuring will be
echoed even
by the hosanna of the seventeen-year emerging cicada swarm,
Brood X they are called, like the crucifix but here only a reference
to the number 10, the power of their song jacked up to the nth
degree, what has got into them, what probe, what stick?
Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who has recently moved to Annapolis, Maryland. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. She will be getting her second dose of Moderna today.
Trying to appeal to your humanity after the actions you have taken, the words you have said, seems as futile an exercise as can be imagined, but still I would like to gather you in a room, let us say the sanctuary of a church, as I am sure you all consider yourselves Good Christians, and introduce you to my son and make you listen as he tells you how going through transition as a teenager saved his life, and have me tell you, no, it was not easy as a parent to understand and to know how best to help and how many talks we had and the tears that we shed and the love that was always in the room and the help and compassion that the doctors gave and what a delicate delicate thing is the soul of a young person going through such an experience and to say
How Dare You
impose your complete ignorance, your unknowing fear, your pathetic insecurity, your contemptible political calculations on these young people, the most vulnerable among us, and to tell you so that you cannot pretend not to know, that your law which makes compassion illegal, which outlaws informed medical care, will without doubt condemn transgender kids to death, will without doubt inflame hate and abuse of these gentle souls who harm no one, who are only seeking to heal themselves, to become whole, which is something that you, as long as you are disfigured by fear, ignorance, and merciless cruelty, can never be.
Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Mist in Their Eyes (2021). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.
Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Novels include Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love, a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, UK, 2019). In 2020, Grandma Moses Press released the poetry micro-chapbook Florida Man. The Physics of Grief puts the fun back in funerals while taking a serious look at the process of mourning (QuoScript, UK, April 2021).
The SS officer rolled the corpse over, and the girl saw the face of her music teacher, with blood here and there. He had gone to fetch a ration of bread, and a loaf was sticking out of his coat. The girl drew closer. It looked like a serious piece of bread, and Jews had little to eat, soup that was mostly water with grass. Her instinct was to grab the bread and run. But she left it. She left it because she saw his face, with blood here and there.
&
When someone complains to me about trivial stuff, I’ll say, “Oh yeah, try going through life as a Howard.” In Judaism, at least as practiced by my parents, one is named in honor of a person who has died. I was named in honor of my mother’s father’s brother. I never met him. I’ve never even seen a picture of him. He died long before I was born and without leaving a trace—except for the 100-year-old man, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, arrested in Germany on 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder.
&
It’s spring in name but not in substance. The land, to my amazement, seems to constantly rearrange itself in wild new patterns of rage and decay. On the border, small brown children languish in lockups. On city streets, young black men in police chokeholds beg for breath. There is something I have to do. I don’t know how I will do it. I just know from the pressure of tears behind my eyes that it has to be done.
Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).
A patron of a laundromat near Cup Foods watching the Derek Chauvin trial on Monday. Credit: Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times, April 6, 2021
for George Floyd
Nothing can be true, so the dog barks all night
missing the man who feeds him.
Into the fire go the stars. If the garbage is collected
in the morning, the moon will go too.
Without evidence of insects, birds have nothing to eat.
He’s talking so he’s fine.
Nothing but a man, a sizable guy who loves his Mama,
who lost his Mama.
I kneel in case the sun will intervene in time.
Inside the car, the back seat is a thick darkness.
A black man could get lost if the air is handcuffed.
Even if he pleads 20 times, he is under the influence,
under suspicion, under the knee, undertaken.
All for 20 dollars, supposing that, even if, as long as…
Diana Cole, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has had poems published in numerous journals including Poetry East, Spillway, the Tar River Review, the Cider Press Review, GBH Public Radio, Friends Journal, Verse Daily, and the Main Street Rag, and upcoming in Crab Creek Review. Her chapbook Songs By Heart was published in 2018 by Iris Press. She is an editor for The Crosswinds Poetry Journal and a member of Ocean State Poets whose mission is to encourage the reading, writing and sharing of poetry.
theater, solstice estivals, state fair curly fries,
Aunt Moo’s 75th birthday at the river
but I’m thinking of what I don’t miss
yellow fever polio lockjaw
flu hepatitis diphtheria
because I learned a thing or two
from mumps measles chicken pox
whooping cough
see I’m old enough to have had those
but not the firsts because I got the shot
and I’m old enough to have had
my two COVID quick pricks
so I don’t miss holding my new grandson
on the way, seeing our plays unfold
on a stage with open curtains.
Amen and thank you.
Tricia Knoll just got her second COVID shot. She took the "quick pricks" from Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Dear Vaccine." Knoll's new chapbook Checkered Mates is available from Kelsay Books and Amazon.
The United States Country Report on Human Rights Practice in Nigeria, published on March 31, 2021, tepidly states that “On October 20, members of the security forces enforced curfew by firing shots into the air to disperse protesters, who had gathered at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos to protest abusive practices by the Nigerian Police Force’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). Accurate information on fatalities resulting from the shooting was not available at year’s end. Amnesty International reported 10 persons died during the event, but the government disputed Amnesty’s report, and no other organization was able to verify the claim.” The US government report is seriously at odds with the CNN report reproduced above.
A subsequent CNN report documents how the Nigerian government edited a key piece of video evidence. "The Lagos State government's security camera footage of the Lekki toll gate shooting did not capture everything."
We don't have evidence
but we have our truth.
We don't have evidence,
because it was ripped away from us
with guns aimed at our heads.
People were shot and taken away to unmarked graves.
We have their faces crested on our hearts,
the nameless uncounted for.
Protesters waving their flags were shot in their heads
in their guts
in their backs
in all the places that could kill a man.
The numbers of the dead increases by enough.
A bullet goes through a youth's
throat like hypens
silencing the anthem in his mouth.
Mustapha is down. John too.
How many brothers do I have to bury
to know how hard it is to dig a grave?
Peace and bullets ain't mixable,
Don't you agree?
Our blood is also red like the blood of Abel.
The dead are restless.
The dead were shamed:
Their bodies were washed off the cameras,
washed off the internet,
washed down the filthy drains like shit
by the unremorseful ruling monsters?
But the dead have many tongues: so listen
to me, you proprietor of death—
This is our Homeland!
It's our right to sing,
think, and talk.
We will not yield
even if you level us like fields,
and cut us away from our names and identity.
Turn us to organic manures
and we will still grow trees
whose adventurous roots will infiltrate your resorts (Aso Rock)
to strangle you
and your ignoble generals.
We are too stubborn
to be wiped off clean.
We'll continue to speak underneath the earth
until someone up there hears us.
Joseph Hope is writing from Nigeria, a student of Usman Danfodio University. His works are either forthcoming or already published in Reckoning Press, Evening Street Press, Praxis Magazine, Gemini Spice Magazine, Spillwords, SprinNG, Writers Space Africa, Nthanda Magazine, 5th Chinua Achebe Anthology, Ariel Chart, Best "New" African Poets 2019 Anthology, and many more. He's a young man running away from his name. How absurd!
A row of flowers with tags of the victims’ names are tied to a fence at the site of a shooting at King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colo., on March 24. (Alyson McClaran/Reuters via The Washington Post) "Over the past three weeks, 22 people have died in three major mass shootings in the United States, according to a Washington Post database that tracks those events." —The Washington Post, April 4, 2021
Again,
spring comes around
and people talk of hope
The coming of columbines
daffodils and hyacinths
the way the greening willows
weep
Squirrels,
working in the dark
moved many bulbs
so no one knows where
they will sprout this year
But who is speaking
about spring as the season
of mass shootings
The ammo crop that is ever ripe
When young men emerge
from the long, dim winter
and find themselves
deathly pale
in the too brilliant sun
Who is watching out for them?
Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. Recent work appears in Dissident Voice, Jewish Literary Journal, Bewildering Stories, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Chiron Review.
America’s growing Black community is “not a monolithic population, but one that has people of many different demographic, social and economic characteristics and many different experiences in their backgrounds.” Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of Race and Ethnicity Research at Pew Research Center, told The Root in an interview, March 30, 2021.
On the other side
of the street
walks a young
Black man
going to work
perhaps
or perhaps
like me
getting a coffee
while the clothes spin
Perhaps
his great great great
grandfather
was a Buffalo Soldier
Perhaps
his family
settled here
before New Mexico became a state
Perhaps he's a painter
that paints his
history
how history
surrounds him
like a herd
steaming and stamping
in the morning cold
jumpy
dangerous
or quietly
pulling
at the turf
The herd contains him
shifts
when he takes
a careful
step
but any sudden
movement
could cause a stampede
leaving the painter crushed
to nothing
at one
finally
with his desert home
with the dry grass
the wind riffles
like the tawny fur
of the great cat
he becomes
when he paints
at one
finally
with the invisible wind
uncontained
free to walk the world
unhated
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.
Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, and peace. A third generation New Yorker, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, SFPA, Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations.
