CALLING THE ROLL

by Pamela L. Sumners

'Black lives don't matter,' lawyer says after jury awards $4 in police killing. —CNN, June 1, 2018. According to Lawyer John M. Phillips, Greg Hill “opened and closed his garage door deescalating the situation. Police shot through his closed garage door.” —CBS, June 1, 2018. Photo at the gofundme designed to provide for Greg Hill’s children.

Let me be the curator on the day
In the long hot summer
When all hell breaks loose.
Someone needs to be in charge.

Ferguson!  Hands up or I’ll shoot.
Don’t think I won’t do it, either.
Charleston!  Stop crying.
You put that thing down right now
Or I’ll give you something to cry about.

San Bernardino, you’re in time out.
Go to your mat.  Baton Rouge!
Redstick—go get me your switch.
Orlando, I told you you’d get burned
If you touched that.  I told you
A burned child dreads the fire.

All of you!  Back up.  Get down.
Show of hands.  Show me your hands.
Keep everything where I can see it.
Dallas—Dallas, now what did I tell you
About parade routes and snipers?

Pay attention.  Listen.  Settle down,
All of you.  Use your indoor voice
But use your words.  You have to
Use your words.  Meantime, what
We need—are you listening to me?
is a little
order
here . . .

Pamela L. Sumners is a civil rights and constitutional lawyer who writes poems. She lives in St. Louis with her wife, teenage kid, several dogs, and unwanted mice.

THE CHILDREN MAKE THEIR PRAYER RUGS

by Tricia Knoll

Make new the angel’s carpet.

—Nezami Ganjavi, twelfth-century Iranian poet

Their lesson aimed more at special space
than Islam. Rough sketches to begin –
where an arrow might point to more than home
or maybe home: an old oak with withered ways,
a swing or jungle gym, grandfather’s path
toward twilight. For Marcus the soccer field,
boot to ball. One drew lines of fields of maize.
Another lupine. Lines they erased of bullets
flying, having learned the word trajectory,
painted over with the flame-gold of stars.

Then to measure fabric cut for a lay-down,
a tribute to their sizes. Refuge trimmed to fit.
Help with sewing on a fun of fringe.
Though they could not spell reverence,
a girl with braids cut and pasted spaniel eyes.
The boy who lisped drew his mother’s cello.
Lilacs appeared here and there as the blue vase
in the classroom broadcast May.
Timothy made a map of where his bicycle
could and could not go.

The template suggested a centered door,
open to what lies inside.
Lily drew her heart caught in a rib cage.
Aneshia, the stone library at story time.
John, his father gone to war.
Alejandro, his mother on the other side.

Low, slow background tunes of flutes
and piano. Soft the teacher made the mood
for work, then lowered shades for rest
in a world which all knew well
floated no magic carpets.

Author’s Note: Recently I heard a Unitarian Universalist spiritual education teacher say that kids in her classes were going to make their own prayer rugs in celebration of Ramadan. That sparked my imagination: what would it be like to make your own prayer rug in the days of so many school shootings and the separation of young children from their parents due to immigration injustices. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet. Her most recent collection is How I Learned To Be White—poetry that explores the roots of white privilege in education, ancestry, childhood and culture. 

MAYBE WE NEED TO ASK HARDER QUESTIONS

by David Feela

A student from Gary Comer College Prep school poses for a portrait after Pastor John Hannah of New Life Covenant Church lead a march and pray for our lives against gun violence in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., May 19, 2018. REUTERS/Joshua Lott

Like what is it about
the culture inside our schools
that breeds these
hard kernels of contempt?
How is it a broken heart
inspires a lockdown shooting?
Why does bullying
lead to a beating with bullets
instead of fists?
Have we equipped our children
with a fully automatic
version of intolerance?
Have we taught them
life is so short
it starts with a bang
and ends with
an empty casing?


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.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . .

by George Held

by Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Gun control support fades three months after Florida massacre 

—Reuters/Ipsos poll May 23 2018

This time it was going to be different.
This time the losers were going to win.
This time the good guys were named Emma
and Cameron and David and the survivor
parents were hip, articulate, determined.

And then they ran into the NRA,
the intransigent bought legislators,
the Second Amendment zealots and the
nation’s sense of titanic inertia in
favor of the status quo, and nothing changed.

The wise guys were right: No massacre, like
Sandy Hook or Las Vegas, will change
the deep culture’s love of guns and aggression,
winners and losers…plus c’est la même chose.

George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, writes from New York. His twentieth collection is Dog Hill Poems (Seattle, 2017).

A GIRL MUST BE BRAVER THAN WE EVER ASK OURSELVES TO BE

by Michael Brockley

by Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

I wasn’t surprised, just scared. Chaos hides wild cards in its holster. An heirloom is twice as valuable when broken. My hair covers my eyes as I lean into the reporter’s mic. Those saxophone solos I listened to, those mad songs with titles I no longer remember. C’est la vie. I always expected it would happen here. I can no longer tell where you begin and I drop out. I fled past the echo of gunshots. Past the corpse of my first boy friend. Before a detective outlined his body with chalk.  I used to write poems with line breaks but now I write broken poems. The time we wasted on love songs. Thoughts and prayers. Chaos slipped a joker into my purse as I smiled the way one does when monsters hold five aces. When I found the jester entangled in my last kleenex, I read on the card the vow Chaos always honors: “Let me introduce you to your bogeyman.” 

Michael Brockley is a semi-retired school psychologist who works in rural northeast Indiana. His poems have appeared in Flying Island, Third Wednesday, Gargoyle, Atticus Review and TheNewVerse.News. 

DONNY'S MONEY

by Susannah Greenberg

Graphic from Mickey Mayhem Memes at The Daily Kos

Follow the money, the vodka, the honey.
Look at what's crooked, what's solid, what's runny.

Connect all the dots, like the stars in the sky.
Collect them like berries to bake in a pie.

Whatever he says, he will later deny,
with a twitch and a snort, and a lie, lie, lie.

Susannah Greenberg is an independent book publicist, who heads up her own eponymous firm, Susannah Greenberg Public Relations. Since T***p's election, she has become possessed by the compulsion to comment in verse on the absurdity of his administration.

ANOTHER MEMORIAL DAY

by Howard Winn

NORWALK, CT — While stationed in northeast India during World War II, Nick Samodel repaired cargo planes that hauled supplies over the towering Himalaya Mountains to allied soldiers fighting the Japanese. “We had five airbases close to the mountains,” said Samodel, who served as an aircraft mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Corps. “We had to change the engines and fix oil leaks — that was a big problem because at high altitudes the oil leaks out through the seals. It takes a lot of maintenance. We lost some planes. They found one 10 years ago on the side of a mountain.” On Monday, Samodel, 97, of Norwalk,  served as grand marshal in the 2018 Memorial Day Parade. —The Hour, May 26, 2018

Summer begins
and the ice cream shop
on the corner
opens for the season
while the families
gather on the corner
of Route 77 and Shore
Road to applaud
the earnest children
in the high school band
marching by led by the
grizzled World War II
survivor wearing his
old uniform which he
must preserve in a clothes
bag at the back of a closet
to remember once a year
the deaths in the Battle
of the Bulge or the killings
in the Western Pacific or
perhaps just service in Army
Supply in New Jersey where
heroes not quite lurked in view of
the sea and vacation beaches
and waited for discharge
while spending time being
entertained by the young
women volunteering for
time to party in the USO
so war could be forgotten
for a social moment to be
resurrected each year on
Memorial Day dedicated to
the waste of war even good ones
for patriotism is both the flaw
and the consequence of nationalism
even when reduced to jingoism


Howard Winn's novel Acropolis is published by Propertius Press. He has poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

THE EMPLOYED AND THE UN

by Judith Steele

Artist Mike Parr's head poked out of a stage for 36 hours at an exhibit in Hobart, Australia. —msn news, May 26, 2015.

We go fast
speed up
whiz past
whoosh
round we go
and here we come again
going past very fast
can’t stop must run
aspire higher
reach for the stars

If you can’t keep up
hide in a crack 
crawl in a log
Now you’re a myth
Now you’re a lie
Now you’re invisible
Must be a miracle.

Judith Steele lives in South Australia. Her poetry or prose has most recently been published in Gobshite Quarterly, (Portland, OR), in Mused, Bella Online Literary Review, Strange Poetry.com and The Merida Review.

MIKE PARR UNDER MACQUARIE STREET

by Martha Landman

The artist Mike Parr will be buried underneath a road for three days as part of a new performance work at this year’s Dark Mofo festival in Hobart. Parr will be buried below the bitumen in the central lane of Macquarie Street, which passes through the Hobart city centre, in a container measuring 4.5 metres by 1.7 metres by 2.2 metres, and the road will be resealed once the container is in place for traffic to continue as normal over the site. The work, entitled Underneath the Bitumen the Artist, is intended to be a comment on the violence of Australia’s colonial history. It will begin at 9pm on Thursday 14 June when the container is buried, and close at 9pm on Sunday 17 June, when Parr will make his exit. “When Mike Parr asks to be buried under the streets of Hobart, it’s hard to say no,” the Dark Mofo creative director, Leigh Carmichael, said in a statement.“Underneath the Bitumen the Artist acknowledges two deeply linked events in Tasmania’s history. The eventual transportation of 75,000 British and Irish convicts in the first half of the 19th century, and the subsequent, nearly total destruction of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population.” —The Guardian, May 25, 2018 Photo: Dotted white lines mark the spot where the hole for artist Mike Parr will be dug. —msn news, May 26, 2018

Let me be your experiment
I have nothing left to do
take me in your solemn arm
drown me in bloodshot eyes

Eat my fingers, my toes
I’m barefoot, supple as an apple
sip me through a bloody mary

thirty years’ fasting
unleashes a wishbone,
rainbows! Devour them!

Bury my madness in your rib cage
Paint me underground, taste the danger
                               beneath the surface

paint brushes, sketchpads, grinders explode —
a fire stoked in total silence
your walls breathe me

Mike Parr being painted in his own blood for his 2016 performance art piece Jackson Pollock the Female. Photograph: NGA via The Guardian, August 17, 2016.

Martha Landman lives in Adelaide, Australia.  Her work has appeared in various online journals and other anthologies.

FOURTH ASTRONAUT

by Rick Mullin

Painting by Alan Bean, the fourth astronaut (Apollo 12) to have walked on the moon. He died on May 26, 2018. 

“I think of myself not as an astronaut who paints,
 but as an artist who was once an astronaut” —Alan Bean, Apollo


His name connoting photosynthesis
in pods on earth, he traveled to the moon
and stood in fields of cobalt dust and darkness.
No one saw it in his way—the dune
of oxidates, the earthrise glinting fire
on the helmet of his mate. The silent night.
He gathered specimens of stone and scraps
of wreckage from an unmanned satellite.
He worked for seven hours, drawing maps
in his imagination to a higher
landscape in a timeless super 8
depicting the recurrent astral mystery.
The dream. While others met a common fate
in business, he resolved on painting history,
unpacking samples to a canvas of desire.

Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.

THE FABULISTS

by Devon Balwit

Alex Jones, whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, says that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”Credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times. “In three separate lawsuits—the most recent was filed on Wednesday in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn.—the families of eight Sandy Hook victims as well as an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting seek damages for defamation. The families allege in one suit, filed by Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport, that Mr. Jones and his colleagues ‘persistently perpetuated a monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.’” —The New York Times, May 23, 2018

In a post-truth world, your loved ones never died,
all 26 of them spirited back into bodies,
you, nothing more than performers of grief, hacks
for hire by unseen puppeteers. That pietà
where you held your six-year-old, confirming
his fatal wound, never happened, you expert
in manufacturing mourning. Your child’s brother
wonders how he can be told to doubt his memories,
wonders why anyone would suggest such an erasure.
Why would the President promise, I will never let
you down—but to the wrong ones, the deniers?
Fathers struggle to explain this to surviving children.
Mothers march grimly into the court house.
Twenty-six truths stand in stubborn admonishment.



Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

ANTI-LIFE RHAPSODY

by George Salamon

On the day seniors graduate from Lafayette High School in Wildwood, Mo., students walk past a memorial to victims of the high school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. (David Carson / St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Chicago Tribune)

     "School boycotts? Yes, parents must pressure Congress to pass smart gun laws." 
     —Chicago Tribune, May 23, 2018


It usually comes down to this:
Madness is always in fashion.
The world ignores what it knows not,
The world forgets what it knows.
They'll raise another dream for us,
And we will fight for it,
And time after time
Our hopes go unrealized.
We are left with memories
Of the trigger, the bullet
And the target, but hardly ever
Of the shield.


George Salamon lives in St. Louis, MO, where plenty of bullets fly.

STREETS OF RIO BRAVO

by Jan Steckel

A Border Patrol agent shot and killed a woman who had crossed the border illegally near Laredo, Tex., on Wednesday after the officer came under attack, federal authorities said. —The New York Times, May 24, 2018. Photo: A border fence in Laredo, Tex., not far from where a Border Patrol agent fatally shot a woman on Wednesday who the authorities said had illegally crossed the border. Credit: Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times.

As I walked out on the streets of Rio Bravo,
As I walked out in Rio Bravo one day,
I spied a body all wrapped up in Mylar,
Covered with Mylar, as cold as the clay.

I saw by ICE milling that she was a migrant.
Marta Martinez was filming that day.
Marta Martinez, she held up her cell phone,
Yelled at the agents who murdered the girl.

Why are you maltreating them?
What have they done to you?
You shot that girl, she yelled,
Now she’s lying there dead.

We only tased her, claimed one of the ICE men.
Tased her! snorted Marta. You shot her!
She’s lying there stone cold. She attacked us,
Said the ICE men, with blunt objects.

What blunt objects? demanded Marta,
As the ICE men dragged three campesinos
Out of the trees and into their wagon.
Plastic water bottles? I don’t see any rocks.

They were running from you when you shot,
Cried Marta in anger. She’s somebody’s daughter,
Sister, maybe mother. It’s hard to tell how old
She was with half her face shot off.

Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
Play the dead march as we carry her along.
Down in the green valley, lay the sod over her.
She was a young migrant they said had done wrong.


Jan Steckel was a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician who took care of Spanish-speaking children until chronic pain persuaded her to change professions to writer, poet and medical editor. She is an activist for bisexual and disability rights who lives in Oakland, California. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work won the Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest, a Zeiser Grant for Women Artists, the Jewel by the Bay Poetry Competition, Triplopia’s Best of the Best competition, and three Pushcart nominations.

MY BORDER WALL

by Kathy Dahms Roger

I fully understand the need
for an occasional well-built wall
but when its intent is cruel
and its purpose ludicrous,
I'm incensed and inspired
to submit my own designs.

First, for an easy climb, existing walls
will have ladders installed.
Shorter ones will be made shorter
to allow a quick step-over. Others
will receive functional stiles.

In the desert, each wall will have
a water fountain for cooling off,
drinking, and bathing. There will be
sheltering roofs with signs that read
Welcome! in rainbow colors.
Where there are rivers, there will now
be free ferries to provide safe passage.

My new-style walls, of such artful
materials as stone, brick, or wood
will curve with the earth and have
sturdy foundations. Any studs will be
widely spaced but with no crossbars.
This will allow effortless entry and give
the structures the appearance of open
gates. Some walls will simply be a series
of doors, all unlocked, of course,
that swing in either direction. And some
will be quirky curtains - of shiny beads or
canvas or even tissue for quick disintegration.

All new arrivals will be given
a handshake and a hamburger.


Kathy Dahms Rogers lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.