FREAK

by Terese Coe

In each pathological deal

Freak is petulant, false, and unreal.

His extortion and murk

are what passes for work

while he tweets about copping a feel.

The bigot’s a twist and a troll

whose psychosis has taken a toll

on folks who can’t cope

with a chief misanthrope

traitor who's deep in a hole.

It's past time he gave up the ghost.

Every tweet still drives home that he’s toast:

a demon enraged,

it's time he was caged

and dropped 90 miles off the coast.

Terese Coe’s poems and translations have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Agenda, The Moth, New Walk Magazine, New Writing Scotland, Poetry Review, the TLS, The Stinging Fly, and many other publications and anthologies. Her collection Shot Silk was nominated for The Poets Prize of 2017.

WET PROPHECY

by Gil Hoy

Image source: Politics PA

The sea is calling for you, like the Devil.
Like the father you could never best.
Like the Heavenly Father, you could
never see. Davy Jones’s locker is not
just a kid’s game. You deservith its depths.


Author’s note: My friend Devon made me do it.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer who has studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared (or will be appearing) most recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, TheNewVerse.News, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, I am not a silent poet, and The Potomac. 

OUR AHAB

by Devon Balwit

Photo from William Thomas Online.

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee … a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.


Daily, my stump percusses loss.
I punish the deck-timbers to-ing and fro-ing.
I hammer divots into pine. My underlings suspect
me mad but are too weak to topple me.
Somewhere a blanched and crenellated fin
froths the waters and flags my nemesis.
Bubble the very stench of hell
from my machinations, I will have him.
Not even my young wife slakes
this thirst. My gold doubloon
gaudies the mast. Whoever sings my foe
can pry it loose. I cannot sleep
for visions of ropes playing out
like spider silk, lance-men dangling
from his bulk. O to drain him and render him,
to spring a rib from his vaulted chest
and craft myself a new limb, an ivory needle
to tattoo the Earth with my passing over.
I count not the cost, so sweet my stupor.

Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in here as well as in Jet Fuel, The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, and Rattle among others.

THIS IS THE SEASON

by Damian Balassone

Photo of Greta Thunberg from i-D Vice.

for Greta

This is the season
where the chief commits treason
and the riddler hides behind his rhyme.
This is the year
where the king instills fear
and the atheist prays behind drawn blinds.

This is the show
where nobody knows
if the story is fake or is real.
We’re told this is war
but no one’s quite sure
if they’re meant to crush snakes or bite heels.

This is the night
where the girl of the light
summons the stars and the spheres.
She looks to the skies
with furious eyes
and glimpses the moon through her tears.


Damian Balassone is an Australian poet whose work has appeared in over 100 publications, most notably in The New York Times.  He is the author of three volumes of poetry, including the forthcoming Strange Game in a Strange Land.

AGAIN

by Lenny Lianne

Again the man said he’d just lost his job.
Again he said he lost his girlfriend.
            He’d just lost his way.
Again the man was lost yet
            said it was a free country.
            The man was lost in a free country and
again he said in this free country
            he’d lost everything,
                           everything that gave him any power,
                                                               any purpose,
                        — except his guns.
            He said in this free country the man with guns
                        had the power, was in power.
            The gun was all-powerful in this country and
again the man said he’d be damned
            if he’d give up this country
to low-life peons,
            said he’d go out of his way to shoot
all good-for-nothing outsiders
with their brown, black or yellow skin,
            illegals who didn’t look like him.
Again he said it was a free country
            and he was free to shoot riffraff
                        whether he looked in their faces first
                        or just aimed straight ahead or
                        to the left or the right.
Again the man said guns gave men power.
            In this free country the man with guns
                        was in charge.
Again he said he was in charge.
                                    In charge of the main event,      
                        the grand slam, the squeeze play,
            the final solution in his free country and
            he and his guns were center stage
                        and in charge.
       In charge of life and death
but mostly death.
Again the man with guns shouted “Charge”
            and shot straight ahead and
            to the right and the left.
And again death,
                   death again,
                        someplace, someday,
anywhere, at any moment,
                        in our country,
                        in this free country,
                   guns and death again
            and again and
again.


Editor's Note: President Trump met in the Oval Office on Friday with Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and discussed prospective gun legislation and whether the N.R.A. could provide support for the president as he faces impeachment and a more difficult re-election campaign, according to two people familiar with the meeting. —The New York Times, September 27, 2019

Lenny Lianne is the author of four full-length books of poetry. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, Third Wednesday, Southern Poetry Review and other journals and anthologies. She holds a MFA from George Mason University. She's taught poetry workshops on both coasts. Lenny and her husband live in Peoria, Arizona.

GOVERNMENT 101

by Marsha Owens

This thing called impeachment is a strictly political process I learned when I was 17, this thing is like a hurricane you hope doesn’t happen like you hope every elected official remembers Gov’t 101 too, and remembers that this thing exists like posts supporting the pier buffeted by waves and winds, worn with footsteps from end to end, decade after decade, a sanctuary where you go to feel sunshine, to hear birdsong, to throw out a fishing line, to sit, to dream, to contemplate Ethics 101,

to pray the posts never fail. 

Marsha Owens is a retired educator who lives and writes in Richmond VA. Her poems and essays have appeared at TheNewVerse.News, Huffington Post, TheWildWord, Rat’s Ass Review, and Streetlight Magazine. She is a co-editor of the recently released poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins.

CLIMATE STRIKE

DAYS I REMEMBER

by Tricia Knoll

Donald Trump with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the UN on Wednesday. Democrats said the transcript of the pair’s call represented a ‘devastating’ betrayal of America. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2019

for the times they portend,
the times we were called to hold in memory.

My old-maid French teacher weeping silently
when the high school intercom announced
     President Kennedy is dead. The horse
     without a rider and the little boy’s salute.

During a beer strike in British Columbia, the radio
     told us Nixon resigned.

A hush in the Yale Law School dining room
    when TV announced we were bombing Cambodia.

Assassinations of Reverend Martin Luther King,
Robert Kennedy, the slaughter of so many innocents
   in so many places with weapons meant for war

The piece of the Berlin wall in my desk drawer.

Oh, our parents told stories of Pearl Harbor,
D-Day. Yes, a man landed on the moon.
Yes, we elected a President with a darker
skin color than mine.

Others do not come to mind right now.
Add your own.

Whatever happens next, skullduggery and lies
or the light of truth pushing aside the shadows,

the day impeachment opens into T***p’s world
of bigotry, aggrandizement, and hate

I’ll know this as the day I worked out back
yanking invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle

how hard I had to scrub to remove
the dirt from under my fingernails.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who fears the coming disasters of climate crisis as much as she deplores the political nightmare of the Trump era. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. Her most recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for motivational poetry.

A CHILDREN'S CRUSADE 2

by Ralph La Rosa

This evolution of revolution
is a student-led crusade,
its first and foremost resolution:
saving earth can’t be delayed.

Ralph La Rosa remembers the good old bad days and hopes for better. His next book in the works is My Miscellaneous Muse: Poem Pastiches & Whimsical Words.

RED JELLYFISH

by Orel Protopopescu

Credit: necn

Let the jellyfish come,
bloated, like warming seas,
tying their tentacles
around the rudders of ships,
until even the willfully blind
will see smoke rising
from the scorched lungs
of the Earth.

Let the jellyfish come,
waving thin, pale arms,
peeling off the blinders
of indifference and despair,
awakening hosts of children,
stirring the birds
we shed like old moons
as we burn away skies.

Let the jellyfish come
with a sting for every sin,  
marking crime scenes
with their toxic,
bloody flowers,
flashing red alarms
through the acid oceans
we set on simmer.

   

Orel Protopopescu won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010 and a commendation in the Second Light Live competition, 2016. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, and paper-based reviews and anthologies. Her book of translations (with Siyu Liu), A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China, was honored by the NYPL. Other publications: a book for teachers of poetry, prize-winning picture books, a bilingual poetry app for children and a chapbook, What Remains. She is currently completing work on a biography of the legendary ballerina, Tanaquil Le Clercq. 

LAMENT OF THE HOMELESS

by Earl J. Wilcox

“Trump has ordered aides to figure out a sweeping plan to address staggering increases in homelessness in Los Angeles and other cities, particularly in California. One option being considered is relocating homeless people from “skid row” to the unused FAA facility in Hawthorne, government officials have told The Washington Post. One government official involved in the planning questioned the feasibility and legality of the relocation plan. ‘It is the stupidest idea I have ever heard,’ said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions.” —The Washington Post, September 17, 2019. Photo: The "skid row" area of Los Angeles in January 2018. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images via The Washington Post). See also “Donald Trump Knows How to End Homelessness” by David A. Graham in The Atlantic, September 19, 2019.

He who gurgled in a gilded womb,
was born in a Manhattan mansion,
grew up and lived in splendor,
was schooled in every grace
of wealth a millionaire’s family
could provide.

He who has spent seven decades
in a lavish lifestyle—towers and
trinkets and  trivial pursuit of money
and fame.

Supposes, proposes, disposes himself
to pronounce a funky solution for us
who sleep on heating grates,
who use supermarket carts for valets,
who cook and copulate under bridges,
who hunger in pain 24/7 in doorways
beneath rag-tag quilts.

Earl Wilcox’s poetry first appeared in TheNewVerse.News in December, 2006. Since that time, his poems have regularly found a home here and in various other print and online journals. In his 87th year, he continues to observe the world from South Carolina.

I PLAY INTO WHAT THEY FEAR MOST

by Guillermo Filice Castro

I have crossed you, taken your job. I am
a non-divine force, succubus to wholesome
American households. Here to clean you out,
me, a spick-and-span spic. May your ears
fester with my yips and squeals after you latch
the cage. Ay ay ay ay ay ay ay ay. But ah,
what an angel Earth once was to all creatures,
prey and non-prey. And your prayer is open carry
and semiautomatic. Build a wall, build a fire.
In your man cave we can safely un-selfie
one another. Mira, mister, I’m hungry,
a rude corpse. The zombie Uber you never called.
I will rise from wherever you toxic-dump me.
Darling, I’ve come to oxycontin you.

Guillermo Filice Castro is a queer immigrant from Argentina. His most recent chapbook is Mixtape for a War from Seven Kitchens Press. He lives in New Jersey.

I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR FOR THE APOCALYPSE

by Jessica Ginting

Photo: Noah Dillon/courtesy NRDC via Fast Company

There is something terrifying about reaching the end of a season
in this age of climate change.

Perhaps this will be the last time it will be like this
and every coming year will be the first time again.

How do we recall moments, or periods, in time without patterns?
Our tapestry needs to be redone, reworked
into a garment fit for wear; our seasonal clothes, replaced
with a wardrobe organized by survival needs.

A coat for the snowstorm, scarves for the haze, hard hats for the quakes,
sturdy boots for the floods & fashionable oxygen masks
for when we’re really at the end of all available seasons.

There is something terrifying about reaching the end of this season,
and not knowing what to wear for the next one.

Jessica Ginting, a writer from Jakarta currently residing in London, has completed a Master's degree in Publishing. Her poetry has been published in Anak Sastra, a South East Asian literary magazine, as well as other publications such as The Bristol Poetry Anthology 2018 and That's What She Said Magazine. Her debut poetry collection Moon Petals was launched at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali in 2017. She is also the writer and creator of the Indonesian superhero comic,  ROSANA!

CLIMATE STRIKE