STEREOTYPE

by Joan Mazza

The unlikely faces of same-sex marriage. --PostPartisan, The Washington Post
Larry Duncan and Randy Shepherd (Meryl Schenker Photography)

Seated— two white haired, white guys
with long white beards down their chests,
their right hands raised to take an oath
or pledge. Each wears a flannel button-down

under a dark blue quilted jacket. Their USMC
camouflage baseball caps look new.
They could be lumberjacks or loggers buying
hunting or fishing licenses, might be taken

for brothers. A wooden cane leans against
one’s chest. Harley- Davidson logo peeks
from the other’s unbuttoned winter layers.

Good ‘ole boys who love their guns and brew.
In another era, each might have lived alone
in a remote cabin, called hermit, loner, scary.
Do they chop their own wood and have a still?

But this is the state of Washington at the end
of 2012. A black man has been re-elected
president, and these two men, ten years
together, finally get to marry.


Joan Mazza has worked as a psychotherapist, writing coach, certified sex therapist, and medical microbiologist, has appeared on radio and TV as a dream specialist. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/Putnam). Her work has appeared in Kestrel, Stone’s Throw, Rattle, Writer's Digest, Playgirl, and Writer's Journal. She now writes poetry and does fabric art in rural central Virginia.

REVIEW: FALL CONCERT 2010

by Robert Farmer

 

To the piano in his own sweet way
on the arm of the conductor,
while the packed-house crowd stood,
sang Happy Birthday through tears.
On his ninetieth, not just another gig.

He pulled us back to festivals
and the 50’s college stands,
our youth now gray throughout,
old ladies in dress circle
dancing again to Take Five.

His chops still simple, straight, lyrical,
no pyrotechnical improvisation.
Our age ordered silence on the solos
as we grazed back through lives
to sounds once lost,
now avengefully heralded
by today’s Downbeat recognition.

The Cleveland Symphony played backup,
then stood and cheered.

 
Robert Farmer is a retired professor of forest ecology who lives in Cleveland. He occasionally publishes poems in various journals, including New Verse News.

SOCRATES AND CASEY ANTHONY, A DIALOGUE

by Jan Keough

The poet's photoshopped image of Casey Anthony with Socrates and a young student in Raphael’s "School  of Athens".

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The Florida sheriff's office that investigated the disappearance of Casey Anthony's 2-year-old daughter overlooked evidence that someone in their home did a Google search for "fool-proof" suffocation methods on the day the girl was last seen alive. . . . WKMG reports that sheriff's investigators pulled 17 vague entries only from the computer's Internet Explorer browser, not the Mozilla Firefox browser commonly used by Casey Anthony. --Huffington Post

The wily fox, as some called Socrates,
spoke with Casey Anthony the other day
at an unknown cellular location.

Casey, in hiding after the trial, and Socrates,
freed from bodily inconvenience after his trial,
converged to resolve a thorny dilemma.

“Which is best,” she texted, “to escape punishment and live to regret?
Or to face the punishing side-effects of actions
made from a selfish and immature attitude?”

Socrates, reclining on his metaphysical marble couch,
lifted the Droid close to his eyes.
Texting was not his favorite method of communication.

He preferred to gaze directly at those
who wished to be freed
from the burning disgrace of ignorance.

“Tell me,” he began,
“which Browser is best to use,
Internet Explorer or Firefox?”


Jan Keough lives in RI and the internet.  She is co-founder of The Origami Poems Project which aspires to free the poet by promoting micro-chapbooks of original poetry.

MARS

by Robert Wooten

This artist's rendering provided by NASA shows the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. NASA announced Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2012, it plans to send another Curiosity-like rover to Mars in 2020. (AP Photo/NASA)

Mars would be the perfect place to begin
to look for water underneath the surface.
It is under something, under my skin.

After we get there, we may find it in
the rocks, when we arrive by outer space.
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.

If not in rocks, it may be frozen
under the soil or in a deeper place.
It is under something, under my skin,

that to find it we may go deeper, then,
going down farther at a faster pace.
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.

But will we become earth’s poorest citizens,
taxed by vast holdings in the Martian race?
It is under something, under my skin.

What next?  the chance of oceans deeply hidden,
drillings with the hope of finding a trace?
Mars would be the perfect place to begin.
It is under something, under my skin.


Robert Wooten's poems currently appear in Long Story Short, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Trajectory, Convergence, and  The Fifth D . . ..

TO PISS WHEN YOU CAN'T WHISTLE

by Kim Doyle

"A Warden Says No to the Death Penalty" --The Story, APM, November 29, 2012

The minatory prayers, the hoarse clanging bells,
the procession westward from Newgate to Tyburn.
To sit in the cart facing the rising sun,
the noose around your neck, not the only one.

The dismal ditty, Psalm 51 on your lips -
to recite at the hands of Jack Ketch.
The frolicking crowds dance at Paddington Fair,
the gaggler, the topping cove, the roper was there.

To mount the three-legged mare,
to ride the horse foaled by an acorn -
the morning drop, the nubbing cheat,
the rough wool of the winding sheet.

Capital Punishment in its worm eaten coat,
the old fashioned, drop dead, hearty choke.


Kim Doyle points out that the United States still executes - joining in with fellow third world countries.

UNETHICAL TRADE

by David Feela





If only the African moon
was made of ivory,

and as it weighed
so heavily on the horizon

poachers could cut it
into pieces and get away

by daybreak with a truckload
of the polished night.

I would give up the moon --
all of it -- let the earth

invent its own luminosity
if only to keep the elephants.

David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays, How Delicate These Arches  , released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.

JAIL BIRDS

by Ed Shacklee

Artist: Marcus A. Bedford, Jr. (K-00220, Y-Wing 204L, P.O. Box 689 Central Fac., Soledad, CA 93960)
Image source: “Comix from Inside” at The Real Cost of Prisons

A captive flock, a clip-winged throng
Whose fledglings start to lose their song
So cheery in the nest, its tone
So much like children of our own,

Their rookeries are known for squalor.
Jurists never see their color
Is all too often blacks and browns,
Though cartoons show them striped like clowns;

Now caged in millions, hard to tame,
Just strings of numbers for a name
Who must make do without another,
But answered once to sister, brother.


Ed Shacklee is a public defender who represents young people in the District of Columbia. His poems have appeared in Angle, Contra, The Flea, Light and Lucid Rhythms, among other places.

THE ELECT

by Sondra Zeidenstein

Image source: Wicked Mike

I woke from a dream
in which I had curly hair,
a bushel of it, unkempt,
uncombable, beyond
messing with
and I was smiling,
I who have always had
scanty hair, flat
to my narrow Rumanian
Jewish skull. I didn’t care
that it wasn’t beautiful,
just that there was
so much of it.

So I’m slow this morning
letting myself down
into reality, the disrepair
our ship of state displays
two days after we won
by one percent, the victory,
a gift from Blacks and Hispanics,
our traditional country
gone, said a pundit.

But my traditional country
has always been
diverse and I remember
how proud I was to be
standing in line in the gym
at school next to the one
black girl in my grade
and when we were told
to hold hands to our left
and our right, my brain
hesitated a second, imagining
the other to whom I’d never
spoken and then
without looking at her,
since we faced forward
so stiffly, I reached sideways
took her hand, and she
took mine. She was thin, my height,
I can’t recall her name,

but that her hand was
slighter than I expected,
her fingers without grasp
to reach for what she knew
by now at twelve
did not belong to her,
her palm flat and dry,

and I felt secretly proud
that I was called on
to extend my privilege
and well being, to someone
less sure of what if anything
belonged to her and I lived
for a moment joined, saying
to my proud, ignorant self,
what I have she must have too.
Here. Take it.

So Obama won again.
He walked on stage at two
in the morning when I could
barely stay awake and his women
wore taffeta, the girls’ legs
exposed above the knees,
their hair flattened and shining
under the lights, their parents
never leaving them for an instant
under the roars of thousands
joined as I had been
seventy years ago
at Morningside School.
This family had it all
for a moment in our country,
something I always believed in.
I was part of it or
I was nothing.


Sondra Zeidenstein is a poet and publisher of Chicory Blue Press. She has published three books of poems, including A Detail in that Story and Contraries and edited several anthologies, including A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence.

OH! CHRISTMAS TREE!

by Lynnie Gobeille

Rhode Island Holiday Tree: State To Leave 'Christmas' Out Of Lighting Ceremony-- Huffington Post

I live in the State of Rhode Island

A place governed by folks refusing to see –

That no matter -  what you call it

It’s still a Christmas tree.

The food pantry shelves are empty

Sandy’s “Homeless” remain in the cold

Let’s all hold hands, raise our voices together

Sing the story that needs to be told.

Flip the switch! Go ahead turn the lights on

Gaze at the beautiful Tree

You can call it whatever you want to

It’ll still mean:  HOPE : to me.

Lynnie Gobeille is passionate about poetry. She is one of the co-founders / editors of The Origami Poems Project, a world wide “free poetry event” based in Rhode Island . Her micro-chapbooks can be found there. Her work has been published in various journals and on-line poetry sites. Her mantra?  “We can change the world, one free poetry book at a time”.

WILL WORK FOR FOOD

by Janice D. Soderling

Madrid Homeless from The Sketchbook Blog of Louis Netter

If the 44m people who are unemployed in the mainly rich members of the OECD lived in one country, its population would be similar to Spain's– The Economist

Rain trickles down the pane
in unpredictable paths.
A flyspeck, a chance gust
can alter water's course.

In the cold glare of a department store window,
a coughing man beds down on the sidewalk,
inside a black garbage bag. Only eleven pm
and already November. I think of socialism
as a bird, or a tree; as upward motion, dignity.
It is not a coin tossed grandly in a cup.
Some define it as a moral choice,
a plan for upholding civilization.
Others simply call it fair play.


Janice D. Soderling is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. Recent work at Kin, Prose Poem Project, Origami Poem Project, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Thrice Fiction and forthcoming at American Arts Quarterly, Literary Bohemian, Boston Literary Magazine and Penduline Press. In October 2012, she was featured reader at the Rattle Reading Series (La Cañada/Greater Los Angeles), and special guest at First Wednesday Formal Reading Series (Oakland/Greater San Francisco).

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON DANIEL DAY-LEWIS

by Earl J. Wilcox

After some days of wandering around in his skin,
I found myself imitating his spikey voice, his iconic

glazed look. His crooked nose fit my face when he
scratched his scraggy chin. When he got down on

his hands & knees, crawled to stir the logs in the drafty
White House fireplace, I felt the creak in his battered bones

from years ago when he’d trained his body to deal
with a typing left foot. O, I cannot say just how many

times I felt Godawful, day after day, night after night
of the movie making because the sumbitch kept

pushing and pushing himself to get my stoop,
my lumbering gait just so. Dan’l was maybe best

when he sat or slept on the floor with that little child
actor playing my son Tad, especially when the kid had

to hide his electronic game so the camera could not see
how bored the boy was. Watching the two of them I can

even now feel Tad squirming like a little tadpole,
never still, running around and around---loving me

like I loved him. I am cold to the core today when
I recall that scene early in the movie in the bitter,

falling rain. I hear Dan’l made a movie about Mohican Indians,
so he adapted to the woods, felt as much at home there

as I might have in Kentucky or Indiana. No matter that now.
What I do remember is being soaked through my scruffy

underwear when I visited the battlefields, listening
to the young, death-driven soldiers, sometimes praise me,

lamenting at length, finishing each other’s rendition of
my little Gettysburg speech. The pain, the pain, the pain.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.

GAZA REDUX

by David Radavich

From Yahoo News: "A Palestinian worker shovels sand as he repairs a damaged smuggling tunnel dug beneath the Egyptian-Gaza border in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip November 26, 2012. Knee-deep in craters carved out by Israeli air strikes, Palestinians wielded shovels and planks to reopen tunnels used to smuggle in goods from Egypt to Gaza, as international aid agencies raced to replenish Gaza's supplies." Photo by REUTERS/Mohammed Salem.

This time invasion
may work.

Bombing, certainly.

We can’t allow ourselves
to be victimized.

You can’t complain
we shouldn’t assassinate
your leaders.

We have declared you
terrorists.

We define you.
We can kill if we choose.

Don’t blame us
for the consequences.

All blood is
not created equal.


David Radavich’s recent collections are America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love’s Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011).  His plays have been produced across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  He is currently president of the Charlotte Writers’ Club.

NEWS ITEM ON HURRICANE SANDY

by Iris Litt

Image source: Jacksonville Wine Guide

According to the news report
some downtowners had to resort
to flushing their toilets with wine.
I think that’s fine
but the politically-correct are outraged,
they have a different take:
It’s like Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake”
since, in the projects, people hauled water
up many more flights than they oughta.
So toast this flushing way-to-go
with pinot noir, cabernet, merlot
chianti, montepulciani
or maybe an Italian bubbly
which may act doubly
on all that slush
and you’ll have a royal flush.

Let them complain.
If (please not) we have another hurricane,
me, I’m flushing with champagne.


Iris Litt’s most recent book of poetry is What I Wanted to Say from Shivastan Publishing. An earlier book of poetry, Word Love,  was published by Cosmic Trend Publications.  She has had poems in many literary magazines including Onthebus, Confrontation, Hiram Poetry Review, The  New Renaissance, Asphodel, Poetry Now, Central Park, Icarus, The Rambunctious Review, Pearl, The Ledge, Earth's Daughters, Poet Lore, Scholastic, and Atlantic Monthly (special college edition).  She has had short stories in Travellers Tales, Prima Materia, Out Of The Catskills,  and The Second Word Thursdays Anthology; and articles in Pacific Coast Journal, Writer's Digest, and The Writer.  She teaches writing workshops in Woodstock, NY, and has taught creative writing at Bard College,  SUNY/Ulster, Arts Society of Kingston, Writers in the Mountains, Educational Alliance, New York Public Library, and Marble Collegiate Church. She lives in Woodstock and in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

WHEN ISRAEL WAS ATTACKED

by Laura Eklund

"Contrary Theses,"Acrylic on Canvas by Laura Eklund

I imagined men in bare feet
and soldiers building the toolbox
that was never big enough.
Half of the stars forgot to see
though I could see Heaven
dotting the sky
in the far-off distance.
We talked over dinner
with faces in the background
though it was barely enough
the roots of the earth kept growing
toward the aspects.
Compressing the story
that could never be told

the protestations of children
tucked into the night.


Laura Eklund is an artist and poet. She lives and works in Olive Hill, KY with the poet George Eklund and their four chldren. She has been writing poetry since she learned to read and write, which was about third grade. She writes in order to breathe and survive.