VIETNAM WAS YESTERDAY

by Alan Catlin


                                      WARNING: This video contains disturbing scenes of war.

                                      The American war in Vietnam ended
                                      with the dissolution of the Saigon government 
                                      on April 30, 1975.

In Proctor’s theater lobby
after hearing war stories,
dramatic monologue presentations,
vet with gray/ brown hair tied back
in pony tail, unkempt beard,
black t-shirt that says:
Harley Rendezvous Florida,
“Man, brings it all back.
So good to hear it said like that.”
Same basic look, same aged
bro says, “Man, don’t I know it.”
“Realist thing I ever heard.
Forty years later, I can
still feel the heat.”
“Come to the meeting, Man.
Lots of guys you need to know.”
“No, Man, don’t need to know
nobody or know nothing. Know it
all already. Trying not to know, Man,
that’s what I’m all about  Look at this,
Man, still got the blood on my hands.”
They both look down in silence.
Vietnam was yesterday.
Today too.


Alan Catlin has published numerous chapbooks and full-length books of poetry and prose, the latest of which, from Pygmy Forest Press, is Deep Water Horizon including several poems originally published in The New Verse News.
_____________________________________________________

HYMN

by Karen Schubert


If you were the god you believe in
what planet would you make? Me, I like this one,
but I think I’d talk to my humans,
say something like imagine
you are walking around in a world
I made for you. Clean up the air, the ground.
You’re making your own kids sick.
It won’t be easy so get started.
Tough love. Then once they did that,
who knows what else?
If I had a company maybe
I’d say, hey, I can’t run this place
myself so if you help me run it, I’ll help you
thrive and we’re in this
together. If I had a state
and I knew some schools were,
you know, the way some schools are,
maybe I’d go there, talk and talk
until everyone said, ok, ok, we hear you
and everyone picked up books,
the parents, the teenagers, even the little kids,
they’d picked up newspapers, too,
I’d make sure they all got what they needed
to help me run the state.
I’d tell them, that’s the way it is
in a democracy, you gotta help. If I had an income,
in April I’d pay my taxes. I’d say
I love this country, and I want to do this
thing to make it strong on the inside.
No more wars, dirty air,
working poor, kids who can’t read.
Wait a minute, I already do that,
pay my taxes, that is.
And I’d  write a song, I’d call it Utopia
or Wisconsin, whatever name we want,
and we could sing it together. One line is
we might not get there, but let’s go towards it.
Let’s just go.


Karen Schubert is the recipient of a 2012 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in poetry. Her poems, interviews and essays appear or are forthcoming in the Review Review, Best American Poetry blog, riverbabble, AGNI Online, Knockout Literary Magazine and others. She is the author of Bring Down the Sky (Kattywompus, 2011) and The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House, 2008). She lives in Youngstown, Ohio, among poets and artists and some beautiful sculpted bike racks, and she teaches English at Youngstown State University.
_____________________________________________________

ELECTION YEAR GIFTS

by Diane Payne

Source: condomania

Daughter receives a text message from her mother stating:
Wear a condom.
Republicans are pro-life.
You know what that means.

Daughter receives an Obama nightie in the mail,
a weirdly political gift from her mother.  It’s pink.   Perversely
cute.  Libertarian boyfriend shakes his head in horror.
She moves Obama’s lips and whispers, “Don’t you
want me tonight?” He wonders if he’ll ever want her again.

Daughter receives an envelope filled with Obama  2012 bumper
stickers. For your friends at college, Mother scrawls on the
note. It’s daughter’s first presidential election.  She
has no use for bumper stickers.  Sighs.  It’s only March.
Eight more months of merchandise propaganda.

Daughter longs for old days when apolitical cookies arrived in the mail.


Diane Payne shares her home with several dogs and cats, and during breaks from college, her daughter reappears.   Diane  teaches English at University of Arkansas-Monticello.   She has been published in hundreds of literary journals.
_____________________________________________________

REUSE, RECYCLE, REGURGITATE

by Crystal Simone Smith


There’s a set-aside broken teacup look you shall receive if you mention Wal-Mart. Please Note: We have driven twenty-two miles west to the local farm to kindly request any hay that may no longer be suitable for nesting the grain-fed quails. We have taken this hay and soaked it for days in spring water and dried it for many more in the sun. During these days we have taken up weavery at the arts center. (The truth is you can self-produce almost anything you will ever need). We have whittled the handle from old firewood, bundled and tied off the hay. All for the good sense not to support a wicked, monstrous monopoly that’s making little Chinese women do this for FIFTY CENTS A DAY!

Source: 123RF Stock Photos

Reuse, Recycle, Regurgitate Response

Please Note: While you are a finer citizen than I for not supporting this, I should explain that oil prices will not allow me to drive twenty-two miles anywhere. Also, the art center class sounds enriching, but like spring water, expensive, and lastly I’d be hard-pressed to find some spare hours in the week to dry hay and whittle wood. I’m certain a $4.00 broom will kill no one any more than the $24.00 local quail one would consume in the Franklin Street Bistro and regurgitate in the bathroom. Besides, the fifty cents a day may pay for dinner for an entire Chinese family, rice, mainly, but nonetheless nourishment they will ingest and keep down.


Crystal Simone Smith is a graphic designer, artist, and poet. Her poems have appeared in The African American Review, Louisiana Literature, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Southern Women’s Review and are forthcoming in Spillway, Nimrod, and Alimentum. Her work was nominated in 2011 for the pushcart prize. She holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte.
_____________________________________________________

EAU DE POPE

by Jesse Millner

Photo: Vincenzo Pinto / Pool via Reuters

“He is picky about his robes and his red shoes are tailor-made, but Pope Benedict has taken the meaning of bespoke to a whole new level by ordering a custom-blended eau de cologne just for him. The fragrance, which mixes hints of lime tree, verbena and grass, was concocted by the Italian boutique perfume maker Silvana Casoli, who has previously created scents for customers including Madonna, Sting and King Juan Carlos of Spain.”
                                            --Tom Kingston in Rome, The Guardian,
                                              Wednesday 14 March 2012 20.33 GMT


So, now the Pope’s got his own specialty cologne
that he can wear with his silk pajamas and fancy slippers
when he reclines in his Pope chair and convenes with the angels.

I imagine, that at this very moment, a thousand poets
are writing about the holy man’s perfume, and the sweet
irony of an alleged follower of a poor Palestinian carpenter

spraying himself with Eau de Pope before praying
to Jesus and then issuing his infallible commands
about birth control, aliens, and universal love.

I say, pontificate all you want, you good smelling old dude!
Personally, I prefer to wallow in my sacred human stink,
that odor of sweat, dirt, and righteous movement

through this humid, tropical world
where right at this moment light is assembling
the areca palms outside my window.

Because I am a failed Southern Baptist,
I have spent much of my life
defending the persecuted Catholics,

once a much maligned minority in Protestant America.
When I was little, the preacher told me
that Catholics and Jews were all going to Hell.

I rebelled by embracing polytheism
and looking for god in the green reign
of Whitman’s grasses.

These days, however, some Catholics
seem as silly as most Baptists,
and I wonder what’s the difference

between them, really?  Catholics like
pomp and circumstance, believe in mommy
Mary, fill their churches with iconic splendor,

while the Baptists insist on a leaner diet
of gospel pie, on a much narrower
road to salvation.  And there is

this: Baptists believe the Pope
is the Antichrist.  Which makes me
consider marketing an Eau de Antichrist perfume,

when properly applied, would cause
the believer to tremble and speak in tongues about
the coming Apocalypse.  My own wife

hates perfumes and colognes, complains
every time we fly, trapped in those aluminum
scent boxes with hundreds of other humans

who smell of fake flowers and  real b.o.,
who like us, fasten their seat belts and ascend
into the Florida sky.  Here’s the honest

to god, infallible truth: the Pope, like all of us,
is merely another mammal,
another smelly seeker on this journey

of stargazers and reality show contestants
all looking for that sublime moment
of delicious, good-smelling transcendence.


Jesse Millner's work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including River Styx, Willow Springs, and Pearl. His most recent poetry collection, Dispatches from the Department of Supernatural Explanation, was released by Kitsune Books in April 2012. Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.
_____________________________________________________

GIRLS AND THEIR BROTHERS

by Lynne Knight


In the shower this morning I saw the girl
my mother had been, gathered with her brothers
around the piano while her grandmother
played whatever tune someone called out—

laughing and singing and clapping,
a brown-eyed girl of seven, ten, eleven—
and then she was twelve, her favorite brother
shot dead—and again, again, a nightmare

she woke mute from night after night, like the girl
on KTVU news last week, and the week
before that, and back, and forward, and back
on the streets of Oakland or Richmond,

Newark or Pittsburgh, the list far too long
and the brothers too numerous
to name, those dearly beloved who never
finished their lives, leaving girls

who carry their names into prayer
until they become the language
of prayer, syllables attempting to still
those over-and-over cries in the night—


Lynne Knight’s fourth collection, Again, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press. Her awards include a Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America and an NEA.
_____________________________________________________

iACTION

by Judith Arcana

We sprayed graffiti on our Facebook walls
     tweeted outrage to the websites of senators
marched around our living rooms with Wii
     zapped cyber-petitions to the Pentagon –
some of us phoned in flashmobs; lots of us
     taped everything for You-tube. We were virtually
unstoppable! Actually though, some of us did
     hit the pause button. When sidewalk time
came, hitting the asphalt, fault lines opened
     up along the edges of our keyboards, striking
letters into questions older units used to ask –
     like, to be or not to be – you know that one?
Whether to take arms against a sea of troubles
     and, by opposing, end them? Question is,
is there – I mean, like, now – an app for that?


Judith Arcana writes poems, stories and essays; her books include Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography, the poetry collection What if your mother, and the poetry chapbook 4th Period English. Forthcoming are a poetry chapbook (The Parachute Jump Effect - 2012) and a linked fiction collection (Hello. This is Jane. - when it finds a publisher). Judith lives in an apartment upstairs of her neighborhood library.
_____________________________________________________

THE PENALTY

by Carol Alexander


We do it, but with less fanfare.
Where once a crowd in Sunday best,
munching chestnuts, held children up
to watch the jittery gallows dance,
we lay out sterile needles on the tray,
needles that betray the raging blood
short-circuiting riotous artery and vein.

Now rewind to the indelible frame:
the mother with her smoking pipe
attacks the rain upon the screen,
while children braided to a fault
anatomize the foul and flooding street.

Rough justice from the fraying rope
should bitterly appall the novice heart;
yet somehow thorns grow up around that heart.
Children of the pipe and drain, relentless,
stream into the city’s maw, tattooed and torn.
The rows of workers sit, unhinged,
uneasy buttocks on the varnished bench.

Such stories of the skin and knife,
such bitters left from judge’s glass of gin.

How should we plead in that great skein
that tangles knife and wound?
What sentiment should be crushed out
so that the bright annealing fire
burns the dross but spares the suspect gold?

In the strong cage of the city
in the stench of cells
the guards walk up and down.
A pack of smokes, a whispered curse,
the young girls weeping in their lace:
the judge instructs us
these are not our load, but rest upon
the burden or the flim flam of the state.

Once, twice, we sat on that same dreary bench,
a pulsing in our own precarious veins.
We could not help but look, to hold the eyes
of that young man, so unremarkable a child,
quartered here, soon to be drawn.

Blind justice, flakes of tobacco in its robe,
left us in a double blind, set upon,
smelling our way to Dover.


A writer for trade and educational publishing, Carol Alexander has authored numerous children’s books, served as a ghostwriter for radio and trade publishing, and taught at colleges around the metropolitan area. In 2011-2012, her poetry appears—or is scheduled to appear-- in literary journals and anthologies published by Avocet, Boyne Berries (UK), Chiron Review, Cave Moon Press, The Canary, Danse Macabre, Earthspeak, Eunoia Review, Fade Poetry Journal (UK), Fat Daddy’s Farm Press, Fried Chicken and Coffee, The Mad Hatter’s Review, Mobius, Numinous, OVS, Red Poppy Review, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, Sleeping Cat Books, The Whistling Fire, and Write Wing Publishing.
_____________________________________________________

ROBOTICS

by Laura Shovan



They are robotic at fifteen, some boys,
quiet as proverbial church mice. Their motors
skitter discreetly beneath the hum
of the family refrigerator, beneath their mothers’
“how was school” banter, beneath the nagging,
the talk-talk, the “I’ll try anything”
to chase him out of this Tin Man stage,
this heartless construction with its monotone
and monosyllables. Even his angles are jerky.

My son called from Nebraska, at last
back at the Best Western late
from Robotics, where his machine,
concoction of metal, gears,
arm lifting objects in its ingenious elevator,
was not picked for the team. It sat
in its 18 by 18 shipping box,
ignored and folded on itself,
elevator arm tucked away.

And in the morning, driving somewhere --
a distraction from my son’s distance -- the radio.
A boy in Datta, not yet sixteen, no church mouse,
volted into protest, its jolts in his wires,
powering up his voice box. Later,
when he called home from jail, his mother said
his voice had changed, the words almost
unrecognizable. Electric shock will do that.
Still, he said what they all say.
It’s in their wiring. We have programmed them
to say it. Now they are men
and they are fine.


Laura Shovan is editor of Little Patuxent Review. Her chapbook, Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone, won the inaugural Harriss Poetry Prize in 2010. Her work has been featured at Verse Daily and won an Honorable Mention in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. She is the editor of Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems (MWA Books), featuring 50 Maryland poets.  Laura is a Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence.
_____________________________________________________

DETROIT: WORD TO THE WISE

by Kelly Fordon



Census takers, television producers,
urban explorers come to the
tall grass prairie, gawk at the ones
who stayed, the two people who are still
constructing motorized boxes,
the decimated buildings where they
crouch wide-eyed through the night,
like owls, like coyotes, like
whacks in the rafters. Train your cameras
on the swirling graffiti maelstrom,
all the meaningless desperate words
draining down the sewer grate.
Here we dissemble. We say the sky is not falling,
that if we use the magic words,
Renaissance Center our sweet talking
mayor will ride back into town
with all of our money.  This
is a dead zone with an attitude problem.
Nobody will admit that we are
no longer empowered. Plant a garden
in this toxic wasteland and watch
the flowers twirl like disco balls.
We are the ones who built the
Empire State, we are America ’s
empty bread basket.  In our town,
snipers lurk behind gargoyles,
the water has stopped seeping through
the rusty pipes, the children have stopped
asking for toys.  Could this be your
final destination? Don’t rule it out.
You could end up sitting next to us
on the curb dreaming about
rejuvenation.  You could find yourself
recalling how beautiful you once were,
before all the people you carried
turned their backs.  It happens
all the time.


Kelly Fordon’s work has appeared in The Kenyon Review (KRO), NPR’s This I Believe, Flashquake, Red Wheelbarrow, The Windsor Review and various other journals.  Her poetry chapbook On The Street Where We Live won the 2011 Stranding Rock Chapbook Contest and will be published in February 2012. She received third place in the Katherine Handley Prose Poem Contest, was a finalist in the 38th Annual Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest and received an honorable mention in the 2011 Tiferet Journal fiction contest.  She is currently working towards her MFA in fiction writing at Queens University. 
_____________________________________________________

TAX TIME

by Bill Costley

Gareth Pugh Tessellated Gold Wallet

In the cold back room
golders stack gold coins;
coincidentally as they’re
increasing their wealth
increMentally, the world’s
wealth’s being tallied,
told out metallically.

Specie still speaks loudly
in gold bars stacked up
to lie in cold rooms, but
the world’s money moves
digitally over copper wires,
in satellite-signal pulses.

Old golders feel oblivious
to this until they cash out
in curious tesselated codes.
Tax-time translates them all.


Bill Costley has served on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers Union. He lives in Santa Clara, CA. The latest volume ( Number Eleven)  of Costley's  New Verse News epic The Chen@id can be accessed by clicking here.
_____________________________________________________

PIETA

by Richard Storm

                                              for Judy Shepard and Sybrina Fulton

Another mother’s son is dead.
He was different, out of place,
perhaps underestimated his enemies.
Hardly capital crimes.

The mother could be curled up in her bed,
blinds drawn, taking sedatives.
She is making statements, talking to reporters,
thanking supporters, crying out for justice.

She knows it will not bring her son back.
She hopes it may prevent another
mother feeling what she feels.

My son is dead.
Let it mean something.


Richard Storm moved from his native Oregon to Manhattan in 1978 to pursue an acting career. A charter member of brevitas, an email poetry collective, he believes poetry need not be obscure to be poetic.
_____________________________________________________

PLUTOCRACY TRIUMPHANT

by Richard Meyer


Look! Deep inside the devil’s den
nest bankers, lawyers, businessmen
who weave a diabolic spell
that leads us blindly down to hell.
But they’ll not share our fiery fate
because they’ll own the real estate.
We’ll pay to keep the furnace fed
and they will watch from overhead.
From heaven they will rule the horde,
for I suspect they own the Lord.


Richard Meyer, a former English and humanities teacher, lives in the family home his father built in Mankato, a city at the bend of the Minnesota River. His poems have appeared in various print and online publications, including Able Muse, 14, SCR, The Flea, and The Classical Outlook.
_____________________________________________________

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

A New Verse News Classic
Originally published in 1915

by Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)




I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...

VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

X
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.



Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorsetshire, England, in 1840. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years. Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication and Hardy was criticized for being too pessimistic and preoccupied with sex. He left fiction writing for poetry, and published eight collections, including Wessex Poems (1898) and Satires of Circumstance (1912). Hardy's poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition. A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with an extraordinary variety of meters and stanzaic forms. A significant influence on later poets (including Frost, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased during the course of the century, offering an alternative—more down-to-earth, less rhetorical—to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of Yeats. Thomas Hardy died in 1928. Source.
_____________________________________________________