HALLOWE'EN FEAR

by John Newmark


I fear I'm becoming old
as I react negatively
to the growing cleavage
on Hallowe'en costumes
marketed to pre-teen
males, and females.

I'm not likely to vote
Republican, or start protesting
at the local costume shop
with picket signs denouncing
our nation's declining morals.

But I will write a poem,
to lament the changing seasons
and how the world seems
to be growing colder.


John Newmark lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and works as a professional mendicant for a local 501c3. His poetry and fiction have appeared at Newspoetry, EOTU, Mother Wit, The Landing, Bewildering Stories, MillenniumShift, and Scared Naked Magazine.
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ACUPUNCTURE

or
BEING A CANDIDATE IN ‘08

by Art Goodtimes

Everyone’s focused on Obama
to win this year. His face
like moxie held to the sky.

Me I'm taped
to the campaign wallboard
waiting on pins & needles.

My poster’s the wood rooster.
Happy to work as a team
player. Not just top cock.

Still, the future’s as binary
as dandelion plucking.
They love me. They love me not.

Art Goodtimes is a candidate running for his fourth four-year term as a Green Party county commissioner in San Miguel County, Colorado. He runs Talking Gourds, an annual earth festival dedicated to the word in performance. He will soon appear in a new Ron Mann film about the Telluride Mushroom Festival (where's he's been poet-in-residence for 28 years) called "Know Your Mushrooms."
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POSTCARDS FROM THE NEWSROOM

by David Chorlton


I
With all their appearances
on late night television
we can’t tell politicians
from comedians. The situation
is serious. Nobody knows
when to laugh.

II
The numbers just in
from the Nasdaq, the Dow
and the Sierra Club
show a bear market
with futures declining
at the same rate as the house sparrows
once common in our yards,
and a decline
in the growth rate
among trees worldwide.

III
Now these messages
from the manufacturers of pills
the side effects of which
overpower their healing properties
but whose presence
is the only way corporations know
to package hope.

IV
Finally sport. Or back to politics.
Either way it’s a race,
winner take all.


David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix for 30 years and come to love the desert around it. He recently won the Ronald Wardall Award from Rain Mountain Press for The Lost River, a chapbook whose contents reflect his unease with what is happening to our planet. More of his work, including paintings, is at his Web site.
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ANTARCTICA

by Ed Webb


In the least accessible place on the surface of this infested earth
A statue of Lenin protrudes from snow,
Abandoned camp below him,
Face toward Moscow,
Endless sky.

How far does he see though that peerless clear air?
Has news yet reached him of capitalism's chaotic collapse?
I dream of his face, frozen in a grim smile.


Ed Webb teaches and studies Middle East politics. His poetry has appeared in the New Verse News and Quiet Feather magazine.
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MONEY GO BYE BYE

BANK ACCOUNT DOWN WAY DOWN--DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN--NO END IN SIGHT WISH I HAD MORE BUT I DON’T HELLO LONG LINES AT THE CAR WASH EMPLOYEE APPLICATION DESK I’M REALLY GETTING TIRED OF DRINKING KETCHUP STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE I’M SORRY ARE YOU GOING TO FINISH THAT TACO

by Dale Goodson


I
am somewhat fearful
about
the future

last night
I tried to sleep as
they repaved 12th St.

at least those guys
had something new to offer
as they ground yesterday
to a pulp


Dale Goodson is a writer from Seattle currently living in New York City.
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CONCERNING THE WAR IN __________

by Janice D. Soderling


Rapid changes in media focus make it difficult to assign an attention-grabbing title to this poem. The reader is requested to fill in an appropriate country. Consult your morning paper or favorite news program. Thank you.


Where are the brass bands?
Where are the waterfalls and the blue lagoons?
And the girls in sarongs, sloe-eyed and sexy?
Where is the team of white huskies racing under
          the cracking whip?
I mean, like, where is Joe Palooka?
Where is Bob Hope?
All we got here are morgues full of little kids.
          Also some pregnant women who claim they
          have been raped.
Why are all these people crying? Why?
Get me somebody who knows what’s going on.
We got top-level statesmen on live telecasts,
          waving like rock stars or a sales convention.
We got boy soldiers killing their parents.
We got torture camps that everybody knows about
          and that’s no way to build up suspense.
I want a close-up of Randolph Scott's strong jaw.
I want church bells ringing in the distance and
          a cowboy in a white hat settling firmly
          into the saddle and the sun going down like
          thunderous stripes of Cinemascope
          and a little blond girl in a sunbonnet,
          riding in a covered wagon.
This war is hell.
I ask you: Where are the brass bands?


Janice D. Soderling has contributed to online and print journals in several countries. Her fiction got a first prize at Glimmer Train, and poetry is recent or forthcoming at Blue Unicorn, Anon, Orbis, Nthposition, Stirring, Mannequin Envy and Literary Bohemian.
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BY ONE VOTE

by Robin E. Sampson


Maybe it was mine.
Another referendum
up before the voters,
yea or nay, they want
more money. So do I.
Especially now.
If only it was so easy.
Well, sorry, I screwed up,
could I please have
six million more
to make up
the difference?

The last one passed
so easily. We needed
more room in the high school,
no question about that.
But this time, it lost
by twenty-six votes,
one over
the legal recount cut-off.
Don’t tell me
my vote doesn’t count.
This time
I voted NO.

Robin E. Sampson’s poetry has appeared online in Bent Pin Quarterly, New Verse News, Wicked Alice as well as various print locations. She also has an essay included in the book Poem, Revised: 54 Poems, Revisions, Discussions (Marion Street Press, 2008). She is one of the hosts of the Bethel, CT Wednesday Night Poetry Series, and a member of the performance troupe Shijin. She lives in Sandy Hook, CT.
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LET US PRAY

by Anne G. Davies


McCain didn't see the warning signs:
How brightly her ambition shines
How easily she turns abusive
Or did he wish not to seem intrusive?

He failed to do sufficient vetting,
Didn't realize what he was getting
A permafrost babe who loves the action
And yearns to be the main attraction.

Did he sense that she would soon outpace him
And, like Dick Cheney, scheme to replace him.
Did he see her lust to be top banana
Winning the right-wing's top hosanna?

Does he encourage grinning and winking
As a substitute for rational thinking
Or is Macbeth now his Lady's minion
Deferring to her royal opinion?

Let's pray she's a nightmare we can shelve
Until she goes for first prize in 2012.


Anne G. Davies is a fund-raising writer by profession and a writer and versifier by avocation. Her work has been published in local and regional papers. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
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FACE

by Mike McCulley


I dread a different face as naturally as a sandpiper
dreads a falcon, and the alert sandpipers
survive to hatch chicks with the same falcon dread.
I'm an old white guy, my picture

is on the money, there's a lot of us on the TV.
When I see another guy rambling
down the street I look in their face for clues.
I can tell if they are in the old-white-guy tribe

as easily as a ruddy duck can look
across the pond and tell a canvasback
from a ring-neck. A prettied-up politician
struts under banners in a campaign tent,

they battle to be leader of the old-white-guy
parade, the one migrating into the dim glow
coming from the kitchen window. The prettied-up
face has a different fit and finish,

but I don't see a ring-neck and I don't see a falcon,
prettied-up must be a part of my tribe
from the other side of the tent.


Mike McCulley: Retired from educating / rewired for recreating / pastime birding, / part time wording. He posts his tweedledum / at wordanger dot blogspot dot com.
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THE FIRE (ANTS) NEXT TIME

A fable for our time; a nod to James Baldwin.


by Earl J. Wilcox


Many years ago, a few colonies
surfaced on the front lawn, under
the cherry tree, smaller communities
popping up, citizens gaining new
courage, building and staying put
instead of letting the property go
to ruin when times were hard.

Just a few years ago, more
neighborhood families, several
buying into local real estate—
near the front stoop, in the petunia
patch, colorful habitats in the mounded
hills underneath the crape myrtles,
dogwoods, green spring grasses.

This year, serious staying power
in the loamy soil of beds, red clay
enclaves with hundreds of ebony
citizens, speaking up at board
meetings behind the old pear tree,
church gatherings in rotting pots
beside the carport. We have
learned our myrmecology lessons
well this season: give them room,
space to be seen, heard.

Feeling their sting does no one good.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he has contributed 41 poems to the New Verse News.
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SOUTH DAKOTA

by Buff Whitman-Bradley


On our way east across America. Stopping one afternoon in Rapid City to see Marletta Pacheco, whose grandmother was a little girl at the Wounded Knee massacre, whose imprisoned nephew hanged himself in his cell when the guards who knew he was suicidal put him in isolation and walked away, whose daughter is in federal prison for 30 years for half a gram of meth because her co-defendants copped a plea and named her as the kingpin and the prosecution figured any Indian would do.

You’re burying my daughter alive, Marletta told the judge when he sentenced her.

Marletta remembers how children were taken away to boarding schools, remembers hearing stories about the beatings for speaking the Lakota language. Her father moved the family off the rez to keep that from happening to his kids. She talks about how whites still take Indians out into the countryside and beat them up for the fun of it and take their shoes so that they have to walk barefoot on the gravel roads back to their homes in town or on the reservation.

Marletta whose heart is a thousand times broken prays to Jesus and goes to prisons to meet with the Native sisters and brothers because Jesus keeps saying, “I was in prison and you visited me.” And she goes to the state capitol and Washington DC to tell the people who think they are the only ones who matter how their criminal justice system is continuing the genocide.

Leaving Rapid City and continuing east across America. Stopping the next morning in Mitchell to look at the Corn Palace and to have breakfast and finding of all things a Jamaican café. Scrambled eggs and fried plantains and harddough toast with guava jam. The owner says he left the Caribbean to go college in Boston, met a girl from Mitchell, fell in love and followed her here. The first week he was in town he was stopped every single day by the police. He went to see the chief and said, Look, I’m black and I’m here and I’m planning to stay, and was never bothered again.

It’s not so bad for a black man here, he says. Who I really feel sorry for are the Indians.


Buff Whitman-Bradley is a peace and social justice activist in Northern California. In addition to writing, he produces documentary videos and audios. With his wife Cynthia, he is co-producer/director of the award winning video Outside In, about people who visit prisoners on San Quentin's death row.
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DAD CHASES NUDE BOY FROM DAUGHTER'S BEDROOM WITH PIPE

by Amy Holman


Governor Sarah Palin,
too, likes abstinence for our eager youth.
That poor lovin' boy is wailin'

from his bloody head, fallen
by a pipe swung by a Ruth.
Governor Sarah Palin

cannot see the whale fin
as epochs older than the human tooth.
That poor lovin' boy is wailin'

for his sweetie's smile, wanting his girl in
bed with him, each other's secret sleuth.
Governor Sarah Palin

doesn't see the body's scale in
society, the adolescent mind, or fossil earth.
That poor lovin' boy is wailin'

from his stapled wound. A gail wind
has toppled Dad. No one seems to like the truth.
Governor Sarah Palin,
that poor lovin' boy is wailin'.


Amy Holman has been playing around with current news and/or headlines for a couple of years, here and there, including publications in Failbetter, Archaeology (online), Unpleasant Event Schedule, Rattapallax, Shade, and soon, on the Red Morning Press web site. She is the author of Wait For Me, I'm Gone, which won the 2004 Dream Horse Press annual chapbook prize. She writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and work freelance as a Literary Consultant out of her tiny apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
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DICK TO LARRY

by George Spencer

". . . if you closed Guantanamo, you'd have to find
someplace else to put these folks."
--Dick Cheney to Larry King

As the presidential straw sucked the remaining petroleum deposits dry
to fill the national cup to overflowing,
marshmallows roasted alongside Sunnis and Shiites on a spit
turned by congressmen and basted by lords of the law disguised as John Wayne.
Waiters tuniced in the best money could buy
and beach sandals by guess who arrived in Hummers.

On this day of the annual constitutional joke
at the dinner table were two raped Sudanese twins, cute in their look-alike tears,
some recently rendered Afganis sad because they had no fingernails to paint,
two dead Iraqis representing Abu Ghraib's bleeding hearts society
and the usual suspects protesting their treatment at Guantanamo.

This annual expiation took place during the World Series
when attention was elsewhere.


George Spencer lives in Ecuador half the year where he started its first poetry slam. Recently, he had poems in CLWN WR, Stained Sheets, Rain Tiger, 63 Channels and Poetry MidWest. PWP is publishing his chapbook Obscene Richness of Our Times in '09.
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F-LIES

by Sherman Pearl


This is the season they swarm--
into your mouth so you’re forced to swallow them,
into your ear whispering secrets and rumors;
the big ones lodge in your brain.

God knows where they come from
or where they’ve been. All you know is the house
is infested. You turn off the lights
hoping they’ll miss you in the dark, shout curses

to scare them away
but no use. Next morning
when you set out Revere-like to warn the town
they’re waiting for you, buzzing with news.

City Hall is loud with them but refuses
your demand for action. The fly-specked police
promise to investigate.
In a church offering shelter you find them feasting

on the minister’s words. Fearing for your sanity
you visit a therapist--there they are,
thriving in the air of reason. He counsels you
not to worry, just live and let live.

His eyes bulge–so big now they see inside you.
He folds you into his transparent wings.


Sherman Pearl was a co-founder of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and co-editor of CQ Magazine. His work has appeared in more than 50 literary publications and has won several national and international awards. His fifth collection Profanities was published in July, 2008 (ConfluX Press). He lives with his wife, artist Meredith Gordon, in Santa Monica, CA.
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