STRATEGY FOR VICTORY

COUNTER-INSURGENCY IN THE BORNEO BUSH

by James Penha


We stopped for a night in the longhouse
where the Dayaks live in congress
each family extended among itself
on platforms stilted high for breezes
but also against floods, animals, and Umot,

the beasts who rule the Borneo night. Umot
Sisi look like wild men, covered in hair;
they whoosh and whoop with the wind
among the trees until the morning shines
on branches denuded of their fruit and nuts.

We hoped to see such fearsome brutes in full
moonlight but the chief said, “Sisi are not
fools; they wait for darker skies and fuller forests.
But you will hear Umot Perubak beneath us
in the shadows of the longhouse where they

snort as they take their fill of our droppings
and our garbage and any pup or child who
fails to keep to the longhouse after dusk.”
After midnight, we heard Perubak munching
and felt the foul odors of their breath

between the floorboards. But what riled us
was the patter of claws and the ripping
of our backpacks. “What?” we yelled,
while the chief pointed to the rafters where
        “Perusong, the slyest of all Umot, enter

even our longhouse at will with the power
of transparency. Or they take the form
of rats and devour all we rely on and live for.
There. You see.”
                                I saw the rats. “Why don’t you
trap them?”
                                “If they were rats,

we would use traps, But against Umot
Perusong, incarnations of Evil,
we have potions, spells, and ancient crafts
our shamans have devised and ordain.
Only this faith in magic keeps our fears at bay.”


James Penha edits The New Verse News.

THUNDER DRUMS

by Jill Gabriel


Heat beats down unbearable
churning skies pass over
earth rises into waves of cloud.
Dull reports from long-forgotten dirges
collectively pitch national anthem thunder
rumble to the hearts deep within us.

Heaven's doors slam shut
lightning slashes black velvet,
universal principles, the golden keys
stricken from our kite tails.
Mute, we see sound break stone.

Afterwards, we hold some noise within us
quarrel over what religion means
why darkness in daytime isn't safe.
We feel saved or damned
fantasize about selling life insurance.


Jill Gabriel is a walker in the Hudson Valley and a catboat sailor on Cape Cod. Her poetry has appeared in Space and Time magazine, in Quarter Moon, and in Inside Cape Cod.

THE SHORTEST REVOLUTION

by Thomas D. Reynolds


Dragging his chain,
the dog nears the car.

I judge at once
the level of threat.

His chain is small.
He's no rebel, but a pup

who doesn't know what
to do with his freedom.

Oh, he raced for the squirrel,
chased a squirrel,

but now he is tired,
devoid of ideas, and lonely,

jowly imploring face
staring through the glass.

The chain tugged him
all through the grass.

Not recognizing my face,
he makes his way up the street,

to lie on his front step
and wait for the blue car,

the harried master
to see the chain,

swat his nose,
and tie him up.

"Good dog!"


Thomas D. Reynolds received an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University, currently teaches at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, and has published poems in various print and online journals, including New Delta Review, Alabama Literary Review, Aethlon-The Journal of Sport Literature, Flint Hills Review, The MacGuffin, The Cape Rock, The Pedestal Magazine, Eclectica, Strange Horizons, Combat, 3rd Muse Poetry Journal, and Ash Canyon Review.

FAKE BUTTER FLAVORED FUMES

by Mike Marks


Fake butter flavored fumes won’t make you fat,
but they kill your lungs in the Gilster-Mary Lee
Jasper, Missouri microwave popcorn factory.
And a jury has determined that
the smell will get you millions
if you were a popcorn packer who
collected wages mixing the offending goo
and halved your years compared to other civilians.
Was trading your time on earth any stranger
than dancing with that impostor flavor,
choosing it instead of your life to savor?
Now workers wear respirators to avoid the danger,
while lawyers invade this sleepy soybean town
to drink coffee at Judy’s Café and hang around.


Mike Marks is a baby-boomer, the middle child of five born in a six year span. His mom escaped to teach horseback riding full-time, obviously overwhelmed by her progeny. His dad was a traveling shoe salesman. Gwendolyn Brooks became his mentor in 1967. Mike is riding his poetry horse somewhere between Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan. Anita and he had their own five children, while he operated an art gallery for thirty years. The children are gone, but the poetry stays.

SIMI@N TH@NKSGIVING

A PSEUDO-SONNET
bY Bill Costley


A year ago, I began singing
in an Episcopal church choir
as 2nd bass-baritone, joking:
"I'm one of the singing apes!"

after seeing a TV-documentary
on a family of singing tree-apes
marking their aerial territory
by singing out its boundaries
to each other, from tree to tree.

Singing's output; eating's input;
'sing' for simi@n-supper & eat it.

Few 1st-world poets refuse to,
so Gary Corseri's daring us to
refuse by f@sting on this day.


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union.

AMERICANS PAY MORE TO KNOW MORE

by Rochelle Ratner

'People are starting to want to know more
about the food they put in their bodies,'
Patrick Martins of Heritage Foods USA,
said on Thursday. --Reuters

He watches one video three times, wishing he'd invested in
a larger monitor. He watches two other videos, then goes
back to the first. Aunt Stacy, they've named her. Small-
breasted but well-bred. No drug ever entered her body, or
her mother's body. Her lineage can be traced back to the
mid 1800s. She seems happy running about in the sun,
doesn't get ruffled when others try to share her midday
snack. YES! He calls his wife in from the kitchen, shows
her the video. She nods, smiles, then begins calling the
family. They're all looking forward to Thanksgiving. Her
sister's bringing the sweet potatoes, her daughter's
bringing two apple pies and a pumpkin pie, her son's
bringing more wine than they'll ever use, Aunt Stacy will
arrive fresh from Heritage Farms the morning before.


Rochelle Ratner's books include two novels: Bobby's Girl (Coffee House Press, 1986) and The Lion's Share (Coffee House Press, 1991) and sixteen poetry books, including House and Home (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003) and Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, October 2005). More information and links to her writing on the Internet can be found on her homepage: www.rochelleratner.com

BOMBLETS

by Paul Hostovsky


The army spokesman
explaining the use
of the diminutive
cluster bombs
by American forces
in every war since Vietnam
says bomblets are small
shaped charges
that fall to earth
on tiny parachutes
and are capable of penetrating steel
of up to five inches thick
and are used for attacking
armored vehicles
and troop concentrations,
bunkers and other
dispersed targets.
It's their diminutive size, he says,
and bright color
when they alight unexploded
and sit in a field
or a meadow
or a backyard,
deadly,
that makes them intriguing
to passersby,
especially children,
and gives them their name.


Paul Hostovsky has recent work in Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, ByLine, Switched-on Gutenburg, New Delta Review, Alimentum, White Pelican Review, FRiGG and others. He works in Boston as an interpreter for the deaf.

IF YOU KNEW MY STORY

A NEW VERSE NEWS SUNDAY FEATURE
by Karl Williams


CHORUS:
If you knew my story if you heard my song
I bet you'd decide you've been looking at things all wrong
If you saw this old world through my eyes
I got a funny feeling that you'd really be surprised

VERSE:
No she can't hear you when you speak
You could just go on thinking she's out of reach
And he can't see you when you come in
You could keep right on pretending you don't see him

CHORUS:
But if you knew his story if you heard her song
I bet you'd decide you've been looking at things all wrong
If you saw this old world through their eyes
I got a funny feeling that you'd really be surprised

VERSE:
Yes he's failed every test you give
In the back of your mind you wonder 'bout his right to live
I spend my whole life in this chair
It's so easy to overlook me like I'm not here

CHORUS:
But if you knew my story if you heard his song
I bet you'd decide you've been looking at things all wrong
If you saw this old world through our eyes
I got a funny feeling that you'd really be surprised

CHORUS/TAG:
If you knew my story if you heard my song
I bet you'd decide you've been looking at things all wrong
If you saw this old world through my eyes
I got a funny feeling that you'd really be surprised
I got a funny feeling you'd really be surprised
You'd recognize the way that you've been treating us is a crime


During the 1970s Karl Williams worked with children with cognitive disabilities. His prose and poems have been published in magazines and books; songs from his five CDs have been aired on television and radio around the world. Williams' first play is now being made into a film.

INTELLIGENCE REPORT

by Deborah P. Kolodji


Exiled to the fringe,
Pluto goes his own way
in a different plane
from the rest of us.

There's a rumor circling --
two more followers have joined
this subversive orbit.

We just need to figure out
if the moons are real
or a Halloween trick.


Deborah P. Kolodji's first chapbook, Seaside Moon by Saki Press, is a winner of the Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Chapbook Award. She is one of 16 haiku poets selected by Red Moon Press to appear in The New Resonance 4: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku.

STRANDED (WHILE THE WORLD WAITED)

by Jen Hinton


Stranded
on rooftops
in Ohio precincts
by roadside bombs
by Enron, Exxon
by stop loss
by freedom
on the march.
Sorry Rosa.
Sorry Cindy.
What on God’s sweet
green earth will it take
to get millions
into the streets?
Here.
Do we think
some better reason
is coming along
tomorrow?


Jen Hinton lives in Schaumburg, Illinois. She has been published in several anthologies, including Skin Deep, Prairie Hearts, and Alternatives: Roads Not Taken.

THE BALLAD OF THE TRIPLE FREETHROW AMIGOS

by Bill Costley

“Cheney Bush & Rove: the holy Trinity
…for the Republican base.” -Rich Galen,
a GOP consultant & Cheney defender.

They are the Triple Freethrow Amigos,
This every base-Republican™ knows,
The Triple Freethrow Amigos,
The Triple Freethrow Amigos!

They thrive on Frito-Lay’s Fritos ™
& their hard, knobby Cheetos ™
The Triple Freethrow Amigos!
The Triple Freethrow Amigos!

Where one goes, they all go...all-go...-go,
Tho just one shows, only one shows,
The Triple Freethrow Amigos!
The Triple Freethrow Amigos!

When one goes, they’ll all go...all-go...-go,
To run their greedy-show, greed-show,
The Triple Freethrow Amigos!
The Triple Freethrow Amigos!

Look for their triple perp-photo, photo, -o
In the glass case at the u.s.p.s. p.o..
Those Triple Freethrow Amigos!
Those Triple Freethrow Amigos!

Refrain

O, where did They go, go-oh, -o?
O, where did They go, go-oh, -o?


Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco chapter of the National Writers Union.

PASSAGE WAY

by Carol Elizabeth Owens

to Rosa Parks—a spirit, at liberty, at last

no inch
along the road
would be given to you
on a measured journey of miles
the distance between stops
somehow moved me
backward

but once
the day arose
for you to be seated
where freedom often found itself
i was moved forward, black
like those wheels of
progress

we turned
a right corner—
left injustice fuming
in the movement’s exhausting wake
at last we grew closer
to being first…
human


Carol Elizabeth Owens is an attorney and counselor-at-law in Western New York (by way of Long Island and New York City). She enjoys technical and creative writing. Her poetry has been published in several print and virtual publications. Ms. Owens loves the ways in which words work when poetry allows them to come out and play. The poem "Passage Way" above is written in a form called eintou (which is West African for "pearl," as in "pearls of wisdom").

BUSH'S NOVENA

by Paul Renato Toppo


Down at the fireplace the shadows throw
little missives,
at the base of a titanium heart

while the bloodless thumping
beneath the roots

caves to its own echo, and ends, each wave
overtaking the effortless wake

shutting out light
tight,

against a hurricane of tears

Amid bemused and bewildered black contractions,

he arrives and ejaculates at the Superdome,
perfecting,
articulating
a Fox with eyes like rubies of the thousand points of light
which mutate into a kinder and gentler
hyena

killed
inside cages of water,
(because wrath must reach out
to kiss even Parishes
of the soul),

they rattled their pistol-hot bone chains,

the moist air carried footnotes from a sax, down
to the 9th ward, as if
a riff
would suffice
(ne c'est pas, cher?)
to save their black asses.

Time around frames
the dark with blue
and rises

and so forth

through the branches toward
where the hummingbird was stilled
by a machine gun

Here I wait for the bus to the day
before yesterday

I'm strung along in semicircles,
by politics
in
fat
evenings with bored looks
Nancy Grace
and dead babies
that flash for a moment on screens
of the subconscious

Time to fly to the eye:

voices slide like a sleet of sorrow
vague and silly,
presidential

I feel pressure, a refinement of
gravity whose hue
I never knew

couldn't be bribed but

could clap bones on a drumhead,
so violently
independent
of the country
of the three-fifths
of themselves.

Now, he
calls the twitching toads down to a pious lunch
with cookie sheet Gospel music,

while horses reappear on Bourbon Street,
born again the electric atmosphere that

Conjured the exceedingly small love
which may play underneath,
banging skin
hard enough to raise the dead.


Born 1959 and raised in the New York city area, Paul Renato Toppo graduated from the University of Connecticut with degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics. He has lived in Spain, Puerto Rico and México and currently works in Trenton, New Jersey, but spends half the year in Mexico City with his son, who continues to be his adoration.

METEORITE THEORETICALLY FOUND IN KANSAS

by James Penha


A meteorite hunter has discovered a million-dollar gem
seven feet below a field in southern Kansas:
an asteroid to make collectors drool, says its finder
who will sell it to a museum for study and display.

The rare oriented pallasite—conical and crystalline
and fourteen hundred pounds—did not tumble toward earth,
according to scientists, but followed a stable trajectory
centuries ago to what is now the State of Kansas.

But that State, unsure meteors are anything more
than theoretical, may argue that the rock was placed
where it was placed, at creation, in a place that always
was intelligently designed Kansas, and so it will

it will
it will not be moved.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.