The New Verse News presents politically progressive poetry on current events and topical issues.
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I am taking off my hat in prayer for Nicaragua.
I don’t have a black beret like Ernesto Cardenal’s.
I have a dark blue beret like my dead father’s beret.
It is my dead father’s beret. My father was no radical:
he was shocked to learn that a government will lie.
I’m not lying to you now: I don’t have a black beret
and I am no revolutionary. Our president keeps lying
while my trusting father lies in his grave, hatless.
Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Recent books are House of the Cardamom Seed and November Quilt. Forthcoming is On Dufur Hill, a sequence of poems about a small (pop. 623) wheat-growing town in central Oregon.
“Hello. I am Austin Baggerly and I am giving my speech
in Mrs. Colley's fourth grade class at West Park Elementary,
which you already know since you are my friends
and you are here too. Mrs. Colley said to give a speech
on something that our country needs more of.
I asked my mom what our country needs more of
and she said clearity. I asked her what is clearity
and she said the state of being clear. I asked her
which state is that and she said the blue ones. Mom says
a person can never ever be too clear. Never.
She says for example take our President who says
the first thing that comes out of his mouth only then
it is too late since it is already confusing everyone.
Like he said when it gets warm the virus will give up
and quit killing old people. I hope so cause Grandma Baggerly
is old and I do not want her to die. But how do we know
the virus does not like hot weather too? It could.
Or when he said he wants to leave the people
on the boat since that would be good for the numbers.
What does that mean? What numbers? Whose numbers?
I heard my mom on the phone telling Aunt Alice
that she is surprised to learn Mike Pence has balls.
She does not mean basketballs or baseballs eccetera.
Even golf balls. She means for once he stood up like a man
to the President and said we do not have enough tests
to see if we have the virus after the President said
we have all the beautiful tests we need. Mom says
just you wait the President will fire Mike Pence
if he keeps being clear since that is the one thing
the President is afraid of even more than the virus.
So always be clear. Also wash your hands. And
Mom says to tell your parents and grandparents
to wash their hands of the President this November.
So that virus doesn't spread too. Thank you.”
Mark Williams lives in the red but otherwise good state of Indiana. His poems and stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Drunk Monkeys, The American Journal of Poetry, and the anthologies American Fiction and The Boom Project. His poems in response to the current administration have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Tuck Magazine, and WritersResist.
I know it's not
what you want,
but I can't live
if I can't get
inside of you.
To be precise,
I'm not really living
at all. I have no cellular
organelles, no DNA.
I can't grow on my own
and require your genetic
instructions to survive.
I can't continue to multiply
and thrive outside of you. Soap
and water are my kryptonite. Is it
selfish of me to want to exist?
I pray you don't really think so.
Even if what I have is not much
of a life. Please consider things
from my perspective. If I could,
I'd organize my fellow contagions.
Get us all together to create
a super Pac. I long to keep
the status quo. Both Biden
and Sanders, they scare me.
They listen to scientists. That
nescient man in the White House
doesn't understand what I'm about.
Which is fine with me. Think of me
as a microscopic, infective agent
just looking to blossom. Be kind,
be compassionate come November.
Let's keep our arrangement of quiet
indifference intact. Let's just leave
well enough alone.
Gil Hoy is a Boston poet, Democratic political activist, and semi-retired trial lawyer. He studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy 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, in TheNewVerse.News, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, MisfitMagazine, The Potomac, The Penmen Review, One Sentence Poems and elsewhere.
Once again three old white
men will mansplain about
child care, abortion rights,
how pregnancy pratfalls
can stall a fine career.
No one questioned their
electability,
told them to lean in, smile
more. Or less. Or back off.
Be more charming. Sound less
smart. Dress up. Dress down.
Pretend their lives were not
history lessons. About
a bazillion women
know more than these guys, laugh
at their careless presumptions,
clueless, charmless speeches,
responsibility
denials. We weep too.
Because change never takes
place. It seems that pinky
promises are made to
be broken. Everyone is
so, so sorry. No one
feels like celebrating.
Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY. Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.
Though the black hour and minute hands
are stuck, motionless,
the second hand keeps circling and circling
the clock on our wall.
It reminds me of the older couple I saw once—
the man standing outside in the flowerbed,
the woman inside—placing their hands on
opposite sides of a large picture window.
I marveled at the way their arms moved together
in a graceful circling.
The second hand chases and
chases itself, as if it believes it
could catch up with itself.
I believed that couple was
slowly waving to each other, or
doing some kind of playful, synchronized
dance of love. Until I realized their hands held stained cloths;
they were merely cleaning the streaked glass.
In fall, we lose an hour, like a key
slid behind a dresser, then,
six months later, like a missing sock found under the bed, we
gain one. Each season we feel ourselves
become younger, then
older, then younger again.
And we can’t help but wonder: how long can the foggy cells inside our body
keep cleaning their tiny windows?
This spring, after resetting our new clock,
you and I lift our hands toward each other,
gently press our palms together,
circle them around and
around, around and
around, keeping the dance going
as we polish the space between us.
Writer/teacher Bill Meissner is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, including a recent poetry collection, The Mapmaker’s Dream (Finishing Line Press). His novel Spirits in the Grass (University of Notre Dame Press) won the Midwest Book Award. He lives with his wife Christine in Minnesota where he resets his clocks two (or more) times per year.
When organizers of the Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day Parade again decided to bar members of the borough’s LGBTQ pride center from participating, Madison L’Insalata decided to take a stand. L’Insalata, this year’s Miss Staten Island, came out as bisexual in the New York Post and the Staten Island Advance on Saturday. She told those newspapers that she planned to wear rainbow clothing while marching in Sunday’s [March 1, 2020] parade to show support for the LGBTQ community. —The Washington Post, March 3, 2020
Pressed on why the Island’s Pride Center was denied permission to march openly, a parade organizer with the fraternal order, Larry Cummings, said: “Here’s the deal, it’s a non-sexual identification parade and that’s that, no, they are not marching. Don’t try to keep asking a million friggin’ questions, OK?” Cummings continued when asked if the Ancient Order of Hibernians would ever allow the Pride Center to march in the future. “The fact of the matter is that’s what it is, OK? And that’s that.” —The Staten Island Advance, February 19, 2020
Silly Rabbit.
They are marching.
They are watching too.
On the street. At home.
In Iraq and Afghanistan.
Look! That one’s wearing
a blue uniform and a fucking badge!
Holy Shit! They’re everywhere!
A Facebook friend posts: Any blue
will do! and I comment: What if
Picasso had had that attitude?
We may be entering another of our
periodic blue periods. I want to scream
across the internet, No! Not any blue will do!
According to the founders, we are
the architects, the artists, of our own
future. (If we have one).
We mustn’t just dip blindly at the blue
palette we’re offered to cover the orange
we’ve been putting up with lately.
Some blues bend toward green, while
others appear blue, but quickly turn
yellow when applied to the canvas.
Artists! Let’s amaze our many critics around the world.
Let’s choose a new revolutionary blue
(or at least a reformist one), a blue
we haven’t dabbled in in decades.
Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In 2018 he received the Lorine Niedecker Prize from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His latesT chapbook is Benediction & Baseball.
In front of the bright lights
You carry a lifetime of learning
Lightly—for you it must be lightly
When you try, you are given nothing
When you succeed, you earn—fear
In the dark silent hours
Your cool hand comforting the feverish child
Your words calming the confused grandfather
What you have to give is taken
What is demanded of you is – more
Visible, invisible, there is no place of safety
To be loved, be silent
To be listened to, be quiet
When you ask, the answer is no
When you do not ask, there is no answer
In front of the lights, in the dark hours
Hold fast to your worth
Someday, rocks will crack
Someday, a wave will rise
Someday. Someday. Someday.
Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.
Boccaccio and his friends
escaped to the hills of Fiesole,
well above miasma of air
of Florence, for even her beauty
could not hold back the plague.
At last, among his friends
breathing the clean air of country living,
these friends staved off
even fear of infection
with stories—
Decameron.
Now, who will gather up little ones
from the close quarters of their cages?
Who will hold them close,
breathe light and love to clear
the air in their tight spaces?
Who will write a Decameron
to stave off
their fears and tears?
Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Her poems have been published in the Ekprhastic Review, Pinesong, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ovunque Siamo, Fourth River, Silver Birch, and many others. She performs personal and folk tales of food, family, and strong women. Her first chapbook is out from Finishing Line Press: Languid Lusciousness with Lemon.
The earth has a new moon—it’s only temporary—roughly
the size of the orange Volkswagen Beetle you tried
to teach me to drive
until we ended up incapacitated
by laughter, backed up down a steep incline,
inching closer and closer to someone’s
front door, the Bronx being a tough place
to learn to shift gears.
The tug of other beings—the sun,
the primary moon—will inevitably pull
this mini-moon from its unstable orbit,
as was with us—flung— far from each other
toward new loves—big skies, mountain peaks—rock walls,
river towns—we drifted a bit over time—and space—
reconnecting again
when the tides went out.
When I picture us now as the Earth’s new moon
I see us at twenty—
that orange bug stocked with Salem Lights
and Diet Coke and our radiant bodies— you
strong enough to rope a calf and shoot a bear
and me—I don’t know what the hell I was good for,
really—but I could run for miles and make you laugh—
whizzing weightless along the trajectory
singing along to that Bruce Hornsby tape
still stuck in the cassette player the song came and went like the time that we spent
looking through the windshield at the whole
swirly blue-green earth before us
as if it was ours—
then showing up
three years later on a screen in a NASA lab
outside Tuscon Arizona—an unexpected flash—just a few pixels,
really, but enough to get the researchers’ hearts
beating a little faster
as we appear again and again—a tiny blip
against a fixed background,
still flying high—
while astronomers
across the world scramble to predict—they have ways
of graphing these things—
the path of our escape.
Susan Barry-Schulz is a Physical Therapist and Tai Chi instructor. Her poetry has appeared in The Five-Two, The Wild Word, Minute Magazine, SWWIM, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Shooter Literary Magazine, Dream Well Publishing’s One Hundred Memories Anthology and most recently in South Florida Poetry Journal. She is a member of the Hudson Valley Writer's Center and lives in a lake neighborhood in Putnam County, NY with her husband and one or more of her 3 adult children. It all depends.
On February 26, 2020 SpaceWeather.com reported on
the near-equilateral triangle that formed briefly
deep in the Big Dipper:
Comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4),
the Owl Nebula (M97),
and the Surfboard Galaxy (M108).
The notice arrived from a cascade of innovation:
anticipated altitudes and azimuths calculated to within milliseconds of arc and time,
light captured with refraction exquisitely minimized and distortion compensated,
image sensed by a carefully calibrated megapixel charge-coupled device,
selected samples convolved, corrected into one, refined, compressed,
fragmented and transmitted from Eichgraben to Aspendell,
assembled, verified, annotated and published
to reach and transfix this subscriber.
Beautiful, no?
Or is it just me?
Myron Pulier is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry of the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School with longstanding involvement in applying technologies to delivering mental health services.
Squatting in the dirt was never anything
but awkward looking, humbling to say
the least for these hefty men, baseball’s
catchers, men strong—stand and squat
stand and squat—and willing enough
to spread their thighs, junk protected
by a cloth or metal cup, shins and ankles
and knees all grinding and grinding as up
and down he goes, bone against bone
taking a foul on his thumb, his shoulder,
crotch clipped by a fast ball often enough
to bring tears to his eyes and ours. What
mad magpie manager steals signs from
the heart of the team, players with such
unassuming names—Posey, Piazza, Yogi,
Molina, Campanella, Fisk, McCarver,
Bench. What hit or run or victory abides
such thievery, such, stealing a sure sign
of gutless guile, forever favoring hall
of shame, the hadesland of thieves.
Earl J. Wilcox lives in a small city in upstate South Carolina, where once the St Louis Cardinals had a farm team, and Sparky Anderson was the manager in 1965.
Unfathomable halo,
obscured by the relentless
blaze of plasma, hydrogen, and helium
Only a perfect eclipse—
miracle of astronomic alignment—
permits us a glimpse
of the pearly glow
flaring out from the black disk
of the superimposed moon
2
Crown of thorns
We take care not to confuse
illness with death,
or melancholy with mourning
Now our sickness and our death
seem inseparable and
we are blind to the distinction
And in these days
depression and grief
run along parallel lines
and converge on the horizon
under a crown of flames
under a crown of glory
3
Crown of flowers
Corona
Shaped like a cup or a trumpet,
the flared center of the common daffodil
amaryllis paperwhite triandrus narcissus
a perennial: it flowers, dies—
but the gardener does not say it dies,
she says it “dies back”
It is time to sort our sickness from our death
Die back and grow again another year
Author’s Note: Some of the language in part 1 is from the Google dictionary entry for “corona.” Howie Good contributed the “crown of …” phrases.
Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound which publishes four journals: Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken, and Unlost. His chapbook Seven Stars is out in April 2020.
I read the news today O Lyle Mays
who died of an unspecified disease
not 70. Somewhere a piano plays,
electric resonance in mystic keys,
no chart imparted to the prima donnas.
It is middle February. Leap year, too.
No telling what an extra day might pack.
No swelling, terrors, cough or turning blue.
At this point there’s no point in turning back.
The third month of a new coronavirus
apparently designed to stay the course.
It’s only February, damn it. Long.
The neighbor’s kid has filed for divorce.
So much to do. So many can go wrong.
One judgment day too many is upon us.
