GIRLS SAY YES

Poem for Veterans Day

by Sandra Anfang

Pictured L to R: Joan Baez, Pauline Baez Marden, Mimi Farina in this 1968 poster, from a Jim Marshall photograph, promoting draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Source: National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

to boys who say no.

The words ring hollow

in my ears like a looped refrain

from a scratched LP

a not-so-distant memory.

 

Aligned with the movement

I nodded and signed on. I never

gave my body—much less

heart—to a man in uniform, unless he worked

in the service of people, animals, or trees.

 

But what about the other war

the one that ogled us

from leering unshaved faces

from portraits on greenbacks

from slave ships and pedophile priests?

 

Blissfully unaware of the battle

that raged behind clenched teeth

we sailed along, soothed by the

waters of our beliefs, decades

before our lips would shape the words me too.

Sandra Anfang is the author of three poetry collections and her work has been published in numerous journals. She's also a visual artist, editor, poetry teacher in the schools, and host of a long-running poetry series. She lives in Northern California, where she looks for good trouble every day.

SAY SOMETHING NEW ABOUT NOVEMBER

by Penelope Scambly Schott

Source: Photos Public Domain

Nothing new.

Eleventh hour of the eleventh day

of the eleventh month, the end

of World War One. I was eleven

and stood with my young mother

in that railroad car on the siding

where back in 1918 they signed

the Armistice.

I was twenty-one, a new mother

scarcely able to mother myself,

that November twenty-second

when JFK was murdered. This

November I expect nothing, not

peace or murder, birth or death.

I should go outside and rake up

my fallen leaves.

I’ll stand under the cottonwood.

I’ll rake and rake and rake and

stuff leaves into a sack. Every

leaf is yellow or brown. My bag

will keep wanting to tilt over. I

won’t let it. I won’t let it. I won’t

let it.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

GHOST FORESTS EXPLAINED

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Ghost forests occur when high tides push seawater into forested areas and salt poisons the trees, turning them a bleached white. Ghost forests are currently appearing up and down the east coast of the US at an alarming rate. Photo: Cameron Pollack for NPR

The sun comes up

the sun goes down

the trees turn white

the beach looks skeletal.

The rain comes down

the sea comes in

the trees soak in salt

instead of fresh water.

The storms come up

the sea washes in

our forests poisoned

dead limbs in the sand.

We walk the beach

stuffing our sandbags

as storms come in

more storms come in

the tides rise up 

the tides rise higher... 

our bones flash white

littering the shore.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Novels include the mystery pandemic tale Songs of the Maniacs (Salt Publishing, 2014), Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, 2017), and What I Did for Love, a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). In 2020, Grandma Moses Press released the poetry micro-chapbook Florida Man. 

PALLAS (ATHENA) AT A SUMMIT

by Dawid Juraszek

Countries’ climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation finds. Photo: A large plantation of palm trees, which produce palm oil, borders an undrained peat forest in Simunjan in the Sarawak region of Malaysia. When peat-rich bogs are drained and converted to farmlands, they release a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the once-waterlogged plants’ remains degrade with the sudden exposure to air. —The Washington Post, November 7, 2021

The ways the wise ones of our pasts

warred on the bodies of the land

all the while

crafting key words and ideas

for you and me

to grow up with

shaped and scarred us for life

Mountainsides stripped bare

underneath the blazing Sun

is not how it always was

a side effect of wanting more

shrugged off

or sorrowed over

then accepted and assimilated

A shortcut to wisdom

when exploring a narrative

what & who & why & how

hindsight is best

not indulged

as belated foresight

everything so very clear all along

Words and ideas now being crafted

justify unjustifiable

with solutions that could truly impress

only in hindsight

premised on there being a future

to look back on this moment

and give us a thumbs up

Dawid Juraszek is the author of Medea and Other Poems of the Anthropocene (Kelsay Books 2020). A bilingual writer and educator based in China, he is working on a PhD project in cognitive ecocriticism at Maastricht University. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in multiple venues in Poland, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

SPOTTED FROM SPACE

by Martin Elster

In recent satellite imagery captured by Planet, which operates the world's largest pack of Earth-observing satellites, large groups of walruses can be seen crowding Earth's coastlines, all the way from space. The image shows ambiguous, "distinctive red-brown" blobs decorating the Alaskan coastline. Previously, walruses would gather in groups of up to many thousands, called "haulouts," on Arctic sea ice far from the shore. But with sea ice melting at rapid speeds due to climate change, they have no choice but to gather on land. —Space.com, November 5, 2021

Thousands of walruses (called “haulouts”) gather

along Alaskan shores, spotted from space.

They’re resting ample bodies, but they’d rather

veg out on sea ice. Yet there’s not a trace

of frozen H2O. A satellite 

has taken photographs. How can they eat

or sleep now? Humans may create a fright.

Many will perish in their mad retreat,

tumbling en mass to the safety of the ocean.

Monitoring their populations might

show how, through climate change, they may persist.

Yet when at last they’re gone, will they be missed?

These mammals know this world is not all right.

These mammals know there is no magic potion.

Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra (now retired). He finds contentment in long woodland walks and writing poetry, often alluding to the creatures and plants he encounters. A full-length collection, Celestial Euphony, was published by Plum White Press in 2019.

PANDEMICS, SO CALLED

by Julian O. Long

Tweet from the bouche du grand oiseau

A federal appeals court suspended the Biden administration’s new vaccine requirement for private companies, delivering a major blow for one of the White House’s signature attempts to increase the number of vaccinations to corral the pandemic. The decision was issued by a panel of three judges appointed by Republican presidents in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The judges wrote that there was “cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate,” staying the order while the court assesses it in more depth… The court gave the Justice Department until 5 p.m. Monday to respond to the challenger’s request for a more permanent halt to the mandate. —The Washington Post, November 7, 2021

So, could there be

pandemics, like georgics or

bucolics? To what lore might

they defer, not farmer talk

from the demobbed or mythic tales

cribbed from here and there.

They’d need to be straight

from the bouche du cheval

so to speak, hot off the press

pitch perfect, on point

get to the heart of the matter

etc., etc. And what if the heart

of the matter is no heart at all

now that three judges, appointed

by Trump and Reagan have delayed

the president's vaccine mandate

citing 'grave statutory and con-

stitutional issues'? Constitutional

issues, my ass! In all the blather

and politics of vaccination ob-

struction, there’s nothing to be

found resembling a constitutional

issue, or a human being for that

matter, except flipped upside down

and dying on a ventilator..

Julian O. Long is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. His poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

CRITICAL THINKER

by Cody Walker

"Look, I'm not some sort of anti-vax, flat earther. I am somebody who's a critical thinker. You guys know me. I march to the beat of my own drum. I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and the ability to make choices for your body, not to have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something. Health is not a one-size-fits-all for everybody. And for me, it involved a lot of study in the offseason, much like the study I put into hosting Jeopardy! Or the weekly study I put into playing the game." —Aaron Rodgers

Aaron Rodgers

mixed some codger’s

tooth powder with horse dewormer and molten gold. (His credit card: maxed.)

“Look!” he cried. “I’m vaxxed!”

Cody Walker is the author of three poetry collections, all from the Waywiser Press. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor.

Our Pushcart Prize Nominees

The New Verse News is proud to announce its nomination of the following six poems, published here during 2021, for the next series of Pushcart Prizes:

"Thinking About Love During Covid and Coups"

by Susan Vespoli 

"Mandate"

by Laura Rodley

"Brave Red"

by Ellen White Rook

"Free Range Bird"

by Indran Amirthanayagam

"Displacement"

by Erik Schwab

"Postscript to an Activist's Life"

by David Chorlton

COMES NOW

by Earl J Wilcox

Picture taken on March 23, 2018, shows a technician working on the clock of the Lukaskirche Church in Dresden, eastern Germany. (Photo by Sebastian Kahnert/DPA/AFP via Getty Images via AL.com)

That time of year

When we fall

Back

When time’s

Breath stirs

Our solitude

When nature’s

Calendar

Does not trick

Nor does our

Body fail

Though

Formidably

Confirms our time

Here changes

Course

Assuredly

As yesterday

Tomorrow

Forever remain

Unchanged.

 

Earl J. Wilcox has been writing for TheNewVerse.News through many turns of the clock.

PANDEMIC PANTOUM

by Catherine McGuire

KALISPELL, Montana — The October death by suicide of the ninth local teenager in 16 months prompted offers of counseling, training for teachers and visits from national suicide prevention experts. But it also whiplashed into partisan recriminations, as residents lashed out in public forums against the superintendent of schools for failing to impose dress codes and discipline, against parents for not securing their plentiful firearms — used in several suicides — and against the supporters of masks and other pandemic restrictions for stifling teenagers. An issue the valley might have rallied around, in another time, risked dividing it yet again. Photo: The Flathead Republican Party float drives on Main Street in Kalispell. (Tony Bynum) —The Washington Post, October 25, 2021

It started in panic, pulling in—

closed doors, empty roads,

huddling—unseen killer abroad!

Whole towns went still.

 

Closed doors, empty roads,

displayed by drones, at first.

Whole towns went still with

the novelty of crisis

 

displayed by drones, at first.

We drank in urgent news,

the novelty of crisis,

but weeks smudged together.

 

And we drank, as urgent news

became the same old: needles into arms.

The novelty of crisis

morphed to anger at refuseniks.

 

And now the same old needles into arms

became a rallying cry,

morphed to anger at refuseniks:

“How dare you endanger me?”

 

The same rallying cry,

spread like a virus on both sides:

“How dare you endanger me?”

revealing a comorbidity

 

that spread like a virus on both sides:

or like a wildfire flaring from a spark

to reveal a morbid comity:

we’re right; no sympathy for them!

 

And like a wildfire flaring from a spark

that falls on parched, unhealthy ground

this drought of sympathy for “them”

ravages communities more than virus did.

 

Self-absorption is parched, unhealthy ground.

How will we explain to grandkids that what

ravaged our towns more than virus did

was the climate that turned townsfolk into enemy?

How will we explain to grandkids that what

had us huddling—unseen killer abroad!—

was the inner climate that turned townsfolk into enemy?

It starts in panic, pulling in.

Catherine McGuire is a writer and artist with a deep concern for our planet's future. She has four decades of published poetry, four poetry chapbooks, a full-length poetry book Elegy for the 21st Century (FutureCycle Press), a SF novel Lifeline, and book of short stories The Dream Hunt and Other Tales (Founders House Publishing).

NO LAST HOMELY HOUSE IN LUETZERATH

by Frank Joussen

The yawning black-brown scar in the earth that is Germany’s Garzweiler coal mine has already swallowed more than a dozen villages. Centuries-old churches and family homes have been razed and the land they were built on torn away. Farmland has disappeared, graveyards have been emptied. “All destroyed for coal,” says Eckhardt Heukamp, surveying the vast pit that drops away from the edge of his fields, 20 miles west of Cologne. But there’s still more under his feet to be mined. Six more villages are threatened. —The Independent (UK), October 31, 2021

The last house in Luetzerath is white.

White like the presidential palace in Washington?

White like Thomas Mann’s house of exile in California?

White like a blank sheet of paper!

Words fail me to describe

the camp, the tree houses,

the posts of activists

directly in front of the oversized pit.

 

On my long bike tour, in the headwind,

from Erkelenz I planned on

calling it The Last Homely House.

Why not? Is the fruitful homeland of Erkelenz

with its old farms and villages

not a cosy, peaceful Shire?

Isn’t it the Fellowship’s aim,

en route to unknown, unprecedented dangers,

to gather strength at The Last Homely House

before the annihilation of the Evil

so that all of the cultivated world

won’t be destroyed?

 

Sure. But a homely house

needs homeland around it,

needs safety for heroes

recognized by all and sundry

instead of a stand-off between

silent security men

and masked activists.

The latter are friendly, talk to me.

Why not? Doesn’t the land

they wish to protect

belong to all plants, animals, humans

on it?

Even to the security men

when they, without their bright

yellow and black vests,

are back home with their loved ones,

reading their children stories

about the great adventure

to save the world?

 

 

Frank Joussen is a German teacher and writer, peace and one world activist. His publications include two selections of his poetry. He has co-edited two international anthologies of poetry/fiction in India and one of short stories in Germany. His poems and short stories have also been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies in India, Australia, G.B., the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Romania, Malta, the U.S.A., Canada, China, Thailand and Japan; some of them have been translated into German, Romanian, Hindi and Chinese.

THE BIRD IN A BUSH

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

A gardener who trimmed a 10ft hedge into a hand flipping the middle finger has been warned he faces police action if he doesn’t chop it down. —The Independent (UK), October 19, 2021

Throughout the lore of English countryside,

Home topiary's an art that has been prized—

Except by one whose eyes were mortified

By what a green-thumbed gardener devised

In Warwickshire: a middle-finger shrub

Raised 10 feet high to flip the bird, in jest,

Directly opposite a village pub

In Warton. For two decades, it impressed.

Now someone wants to kill the goose that laid

A golden egg—more tourists at the inn—

By chopping down the shrub. So calls were made

Upon the gardener. But he won't bin

Street art he's groomed for decades as a joke—

His bush still flips the bird at prudish folk!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, The Satirist, The Washington Post, and WestWard Quarterly.

ANGEL

by Alejandro Escudé

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022. Above: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas (three panels), 30 7/8 × 45 3/4 in. (78.4 × 116.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary 80.32. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the flag painting the flag

goes and is going into the flag

and it takes us with it

the flag that is into the flag 

beyond what we do when

we surf the net, as a nation

we’re a flag entering another flag

and a flag after that one. 

Jasper Johns knows this, 

or does he? You mustn’t ask

him you know. The interpretation

lags behind the artwork always

like a little girl struggling to keep up

with her father who is walking

too fast for her keep up 

but is she really unable to keep up?

The truth is leaving us, and you,

and taking a train to a new epoch

where a train will travel into

another train and another train

after that toward a sunset

that sets within a sunset and 

(you guessed it) another sunset

after that—because it was

Warhol who engineered the first

internet, an ad box for Brillo

that became box after box

after box. So Johns does too

with his flag and other things,

which is what a country is

…things.

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.

PANDEMIC ON MY MIND

by George Salamon

In my head nobody

knows anybody else,

men and women come

and go from long ago

and far away, but don't

say where they're going.

George Salamon had his two jabs and the booster shot in St. Louis MO where people ask each other which high school they attended, pandemic or no pandemic. He does not know if that is a good or bad thing.