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Wednesday, November 03, 2021

THE BIRD IN A BUSH

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons


A gardener who trimmed a 10ft hedge into a hand flipping the middle finger has been warned he faces police action if he doesn’t chop it down. —The Independent (UK), October 19, 2021


Throughout the lore of English countryside,
Home topiary's an art that has been prized—
Except by one whose eyes were mortified
By what a green-thumbed gardener devised
In Warwickshire: a middle-finger shrub
Raised 10 feet high to flip the bird, in jest,
Directly opposite a village pub
In Warton. For two decades, it impressed.
Now someone wants to kill the goose that laid
A golden egg—more tourists at the inn—
By chopping down the shrub. So calls were made
Upon the gardener. But he won't bin
Street art he's groomed for decades as a joke—
His bush still flips the bird at prudish folk!


Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, The Satirist, The Washington Post, and WestWard Quarterly.

Tuesday, November 02, 2021

ANGEL

by Alejandro Escudé


Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022. Above: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas (three panels), 30 7/8 × 45 3/4 in. (78.4 × 116.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary 80.32. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York


In the flag painting the flag
goes and is going into the flag
and it takes us with it
the flag that is into the flag 
beyond what we do when
we surf the net, as a nation
we’re a flag entering another flag
and a flag after that one. 
Jasper Johns knows this, 
or does he? You mustn’t ask
him you know. The interpretation
lags behind the artwork always
like a little girl struggling to keep up
with her father who is walking
too fast for her keep up 
but is she really unable to keep up?
The truth is leaving us, and you,
and taking a train to a new epoch
where a train will travel into
another train and another train
after that toward a sunset
that sets within a sunset and 
(you guessed it) another sunset
after that—because it was
Warhol who engineered the first
internet, an ad box for Brillo
that became box after box
after box. So Johns does too
with his flag and other things,
which is what a country is
…things.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

Monday, November 01, 2021

PANDEMIC ON MY MIND

by George Salamon




In my head nobody
knows anybody else,
men and women come
and go from long ago
and far away, but don't
say where they're going.

George Salamon had his two jabs and the booster shot in St. Louis MO where people ask each other which high school they attended, pandemic or no pandemic. He does not know if that is a good or bad thing.

Sunday, October 31, 2021

THIRST

by Katherine West


Via The Daily Caller


And so there came upon me a time of great thirst.  Dust and hatred rose from desert roads, and monsoon puddles turned white, the evergreens unchanged as totems made of stone.  Oh!  How I thirsted for the softness of peace, of leaves and seasons, for yellow, the true color of death. 

For death there must be water, so we drove along the Mimbres River to Lake Robert, my neck soon sore from looking up at the tones of lemon, tangerine, rust, gold--all moving as if paint could not stop once it reached the canvas, but continued to mix and blend and breathe unbiased beauty.

In between were ragged signs bleached by the sun:  Don't Blame Me I Voted for Trump  or simply: Fuck Biden, right next to: We Love Cyclists, with seats in the shade for the tired traveler. 

The lake was a sequin-beaded dress from the 1920's that the wind exploded into diamond bits that blinded us where we sat beneath the willows that could not cease their orange song for every ear. 

There we died.  We drank color and light until we too exploded--then coalesced on the walk back, talking with Lalo the fisherman about the 90 year old woman with terminal cancer who caught the biggest catfish he'd ever seen, right there where he was fishing today, and he'd shown her the place, his secret spot that he showed to no one, and she'd whooped so loud people could hear her all the way across the lake, and she died that winter, where no one could swim due to all the hooks left in the sand, left in the mind, and we forgot to bring food so we ate the peace of apolitical ospreys fishing with Lalo in the morning as if the RVers with their Don't Tread on Me flags didn't exist, only their grandchildren, lying on their bellies in the sand, hanging over the bank, scooping up the craw fish the grebes eat, while we swallowed gallons of yellow death, and yet were empty, empty, empty, and light as leaves. 


Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word FiestaThe New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel, When Night Comes, A Christmas Carol Revisited came out in 2020, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing for whom she also teaches Creative Writing workshops.  The sequel to When Night Comes will also be released by BRP in 2021. It is called Slave, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist. 

Saturday, October 30, 2021

DUPLEX: INHERITANCE

by Danielle Lemay


Studies in roundworms by biologists at the University of Iowa suggest that a mother’s response to stress can influence her children and her grandchildren, through heritable epigenetic changes. Their research, reported in Molecular Cell, demonstrated that roundworm mothers subjected to heat stress passed—under certain conditions—the legacy of that stress exposure not only to their offspring but, if the period of stress to which the mother was exposed was long enough, even to their offspring’s children. —Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, October 14, 2021


Study Suggests Maternal Stress Inherited
like passing down green eyes or curly hair.
 
          It’s not like passing down green eyes or hair;
          the scientists conducted studies with worms.
 
Scientists studied heat stress in worms,
so what does it matter to human mothers?
 
          Does it matter to human mothers
          that they will now be blamed for stress?
 
We know the moms will now be blamed for stress;
Of course. News stories manipulate us.
 
          Of course, news stories manipulate us.
          We learn from the world, starting with mom.
 
Perhaps we should calm the world, starting with mom.
Studies suggest maternal stress is inherited.


Author’s Note: I came across this story about heritable stress at the end of the work day, while I was quite stressed, and it made me think how I’ve probably passed stress to my children and how my mom was stressed and her mother before her, a whole lineage of stressed mothers, probably for as long as there have been Homo sapiens, or even worms. With each generation sharing stress with the next, like lines from one couplet to another in a duplex, I obviously had to write a duplex.


Danielle Lemay is a scientist and poet. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net in 2021 and has appeared or is forthcoming in California Quarterly, The Blue Mountain Review, ONE ART, Limp Wrist Magazine, Lavender Review, and elsewhere.

Friday, October 29, 2021

COUNTING BONES

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S.


Eddie Canales, director of South Texas Human Rights Center. Photograph: Gabriela Campos via The Guardian.


for john meza and eduardo canales


how many graves received them 
that is 
what was left of their bodies… 
for two days 
you will sift the soil 
with your hands and small trowels  
letting the earth 
fall away 
from the whiteness of bone 
i cannot fathom how you . . . 
(my heart aches with this almost thought) 
how will you touch the small remnants of lives 
and still breathe… 
how…
only by kneeling 
                                     

Author’s Note: John Meza is one of the volunteers working with Eddie Conales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center. With members of the Texas State University Forensic Pathology Department, they exhume bodies in graves in San Ygnacio, Texas to help identify missing migrants.

 
Sister Lou Ella has a master’s in theology from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio and is a former teacher and librarian. She is a certified spiritual director as well as a poet and writer.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as America, First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and The New Verse News as well as in four anthologies: The Night’s Magician: Poems about the Moon, edited by Philip Kolin and Sue Brannan Walker, Down to the Dark River edited by Philip Kolin, Secrets edited by Sue Brannan Walker and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.  She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017 and in 2020. Her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless was published in 2015 (Press 53.) On May 11, 2021, five poems from her book which had been set to music by James Lee III were performed by the opera star Susanna Phillips, star clarinetist Anthony McGill, pianist Mayra Huang at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The group of songs is entitled “Chavah’s Daughters Speak.” 

Thursday, October 28, 2021

LIPSTICK

by Mary K O’Melveny


Col. Wang Yaping is a pilot in the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force. She is a space veteran, now making her second trip into orbit. She is set in the coming weeks to be the first Chinese woman to walk in space as China’s space station glides around Earth at 17,100 miles per hour. And yet, as she began a six-month mission last week at the core of China’s ambitious space program, official and news media attention fixated as much on the comparative physiology of men and women, menstruation cycles, and the 5-year-old daughter she has left behind, as they did on her accomplishments. (No one asked about the children of her two male colleagues.) Shortly before the launch, Pang Zhihao, an official with the China National Space Administration, let it be known that a cargo capsule had supplied the orbiting space station with sanitary napkins and cosmetics. “Female astronauts may be in better condition after putting on makeup,” he said in remarks shown on CCTV, the state television network. Photo: Col. Wang Yaping, center, with Col. Ye Guangfu, left, and Maj. Gen. Zhai Zhigang at a pre-launch ceremony on Oct. 15 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China. Credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images —The New York Times, October 23, 2021


If one puts lipstick on an astronaut,
can she still blaze through arid
atmospheres, dangle wildly from a line 
that tethers her to the mothership 
even as she kicks up her heels 
and pirouettes out into star space?
 
It seems makeup is a juggernaut 
that enhances our reality. Some added
emphasis, a glowing image to re-define
a star-struck traveler, to make her trip
seem normal, like any mom who feels
a need to exit might arguably face.
 
There is nothing to be feared. We ought
to be glad some girl wearing a padded
suit has figured out she can still shine, 
even if she must give her family the slip.
Perhaps pancake isn’t so perfidious, but conceals
a dream or two that she might still embrace.


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. Her latest poetry collection Dispatches From The Memory Care Museum has just been published by Kelsay Books.  

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

ANTHROPOCENE ANXIETY

by Steven Croft


Illustration from The Guardian, October 23, 2021


As the beehive of news stories grew,
scientists reporting back from Greenland's
shrinking ice sheet, coral reefs in Australia, the Florida Keys,
the feedback loops of forests lost and wildfire,
a beehive building like the global sauna our
drowsy governments offer an impossible treaty to slake,
suddenly a question rose before me:
why are we losing our grip on our world's biggest problem?
Because it is too far gone to hold?
Because floodwater and crabgrass want our cities?
Miners complain about the earth's heat
as they dig lower for coal to send to the surface.
Metaphor become metamorphosis.

Today, I can't look at a dome of beautiful October sky
without my mind's eye seeing a blue-lit jail
for a fevered planet, without my mind's ear hearing
buffalo herds of wind speaking in tongues
of shrieks across this doomed green land.


Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

TOUGH LOVE

by Katie Kemple



Illustration by Chelsea Charles for The Washington Post


Product of flesh, moldable 

robot, we blank out

your name, hide your limbs 

in a cross, until your head 

can’t hold itself up anymore. 

You fucked-up. That’s why 

we come for you at 3am, 

tell you to get dressed, 

handcuff your spoiled wrists, 

escort you to our car. 

Your parents watch. 

They hired us. In America, 

our tax dollars fund it.

Through the rear-view

mirror, I see you trying 

to memorize the route. 

Don’t bother. The place 

we’re going, you won’t 

get out. We strip you naked, 

yell: “cough!” You do it. 

We probe the secrets 

of your body. No drugs 

in your cavities. Prepare to rot, 

bitch. Now get going, 

I say: “git!” Your walls 

are concrete. The women 

have pressed the white sheets 

of the last girl. The one 

who turned herself into 

a scarecrow. Yours now, 

sleep. Rest your eyelid 

on the stain of her 

slutty-blue mascara. 



Author's Note: This poem is in response to Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker article “The Shadow Penal System For Struggling Kids” (October 18) and Paris Hilton’s Washington Post op-ed “America’s ‘troubled teen industry’ needs reform so kids can avoid the abuse I endured” (October 18). Both articles detail toxic, cult-like organizations that trap unsuspecting youth into a shadow penal system. Once surrendered by their parents, it’s nearly impossible for victims to escape. These companies come for children at night, subject them to strip searches, and inflict psychologically damaging treatments under the guise of "tough love". There are no laws to protect minors in the custody of these groups. In fact, they receive state and federal funds for their services. 



Katie Kemple (she/her) is a poet, parent, and consultant  in San Diego, CA. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Atlanta Review, Longleaf Review, Matter, Lunch Ticket (Amuse-Bouche), and Anti-Heroin Chic.

Monday, October 25, 2021

LIZZO

by Judy Juanita




I am 100% behind you baby girl
Behind your superb black ass
Behind your exponential black ass
Behind all the big black women
We who are BeyBey
We who are BeyBey's kids
We who raised BeyBey
Who raised BeyBey's babies and babydaddies
We behind you Lizzo

Show that ass
Put that ass on the Lakers scoreboard
For the world to see
Your big fat cocoa ass
As important for the world to see as 
Emmett Till's bludgeoned face
"Let them see what they did to my boy
Let the world see what they did to my boy"

Let us worship Lizzo
That's right—Bow down
Before her big black ass 
Before her big black booty
Not injected into her backside by a Dominican doctor
Not leaking formaldehyde into her veins clotting her heart
Killing one more big fat implacable life
Fuck Brazilian butt lifts
Fuck the strip clubs that hire the women
Who pay with their very life for butts
That sit high on their hips
21st century Venus Hottentots
Fuck the only way these women will earn $2,000 a night $3,000 a night $4,000 a night
Instead of working at  Walmart
(Yeah yeah yeah do the math $15@ hr. times 30 hrs a week so they don't have to give them health benefits. That's $450 a week, $1800 a month, the living wage that Biden is fighting for? Get real. You'd hop on a plane to the Dominican Republic, leak silicone all over the seats armrests tray tables too for a big black ass a big black ass)

Lizzo's black ass is worth gold
Diamonds and Gucci
In the belly of the beast 
Same place where
Lizzo's Army yeah
A black only army for the descendants of Buffalo Soldiers and Tuskegee Airmen 
A big black beautiful army whose big black unbleached asshole emits the noxious gases called life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Same place where corner stores have filled those asses for decades with hostess twinkies butterfingers koolaid fruit loops sodas hogmaw and chitlins hot links potato salad macaroni and cheese sweet potato pie (BeyBey's son the athlete/personal trainer says with disgust, Ma, this is carbo overload, but eats at the christmas table because he too worships Lizzo once a year)

We love you Lizzo
Our anti-Lady Godiva
Our anti-Kardashian
Our anti-American

Miss America?
You're the missing America
The antidote to self-loathing
You had to be huge
In our face
All over the place
You are the dream deferred no more
You cannot be invisible
You will not live underground
Not one more day

Lizzo our Lizzo
Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo Lizzo
You is You is You is
America the beautiful.


Judy Juanita's book of poetry Manhattan my ass, you're in Oakland won the 2021 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her short story collection The High Price of Freeways won the Tartt Fiction Award and will be published by the University of West Alabama's Livingston Press in 2022. Het debut novel Virgin Soul was published by Viking in 2014. 

Sunday, October 24, 2021

THOSE THE EARTH TAKES IN SECRET

by Bradley McIlwain


Outdoorsy. Beautiful. Outspoken for justice. Full of humor. “Being outdoors and enjoying nature gave her that feeling of empowerment of being free,” a line from her obituary read. The 23-year-old woman was reported missing by her family after she failed to return home. Weeks later, her remains were discovered in a field in Wyoming. This wasn’t Gabrielle Petito, who disappeared a month ago and has over 20 million search results associated with her name on Google. The 23 year old was Jade Wagon, a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe who went missing from her home on the Wind River Reservation in January 2020. Her death was ruled accidental due to hypothermia and drug intoxication, but her mother, Nicole Wagon, believes that her daughter was a victim of violence. Jade Wagon has 3,610 search results mentioning her name on Google. While developments on Petito’s case have made national news and retained engagement for weeks running, her story is one of tens of thousands of Americans that experience interpersonal violence every year. For many like the Wagons, the tide of activism in Petito’s case reaffirmed what was missing for women of color in similar circumstances. The vast majority do not receive widespread media coverage, let alone sizable social media investigation. Feminist journalist Gwen Ifill originally coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” in 2004, highlighting media’s tendency to favor sensationalized coverage toward white female victims of violence whilst neglecting stories of women of color, who face violence at a disproportionately higher rate, according to the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. —Kyran Berlin, Golden Gate Express, October 15, 2021


Cloudy skies.
The world shadows
Itself from prying eyes.

A shudder 
cracks the night
like a hammer
Shattering ice.

We fall through.
Our souls know
No use.

Water safeguards 
Our secrets, washes 
Away 
old bones.
We don’t see
The murder of crows
Until Valhalla is near.

After the battle
Valkyries peck 
At the armour 
we don’t need.

What’s dead
We leave behind:
Our blood on the blade.

The earth takes
Our stories, scattered
And scavenged 
under the trees.

Who will see?
Is there anyone left
Who will speak for me?


Bradley McIlwain is a Canadian writer and poet, whose works have appeared in The New Verse News, The Origami Poems Project, Platform Magazine, and others. He is the author of Elementals: Poems (IOWI, 2015).

Saturday, October 23, 2021

SQUATTER

by Chad Parenteau





“DONALD TRUMP, UNPROMPTED, TELLS GOP DONORS HE DOESN’T LIKE HAVING WOMEN PEE ON HIM: ‘I’m not into golden showers,’ the former president blurted out to the crowd.” —Vanity Fair, October 15, 2021


First lady of her kind
stares down her man’s
new list of never woulds,
 
knows that he thinks
someone’s been lady
too long, far enough.
 
Opportunity fades.
No children are left
to shield his storm.
 
For now, she waits
by bully’s pulpit
for highest calling.
 
Standing on bed,
uncaring hands braced
on shatterproof ceiling,
 
she’ll stand over him,
open gates to nearest
heaven he can claim.


Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His work has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, Ibbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He is a contributor to Headline Poetry & Press and serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His latest collection The Collapsed Bookshelf was nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award.

Friday, October 22, 2021

ETHIOPIAN DÉJÀ VU

by Phyllis Wax


Despite mass starvation occurring in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray, senior international aid officials are tiptoeing around declaring a famine nearly a year after the civil war erupted. Photo: This is one of the malnourished children being treated at Ayder Hospital this week —BBC, October 16, 2021


We’ve seen them before,                             
living skeletons,
bones like knobby sticks,
 
carrying children too weak
to brush flies
from their faces,
 
so hungry
they’ve been eating
leaves.
 
A hooded figure
strides among them,
his sharp scythe ready.
 
Trucks with life-
saving food and medicine
have been blocked.
 
Our feet seem stuck            
in concrete. 


Social issues are a major focus of Milwaukee poet Phyllis Wax. Her work has appeared on The New Verse News in the past, as well as in numerous other journals and anthologies, both online and in print.

Thursday, October 21, 2021

WHAT IT TAKES TO LIVE HERE

by Joseph Hope


Gunmen have killed at least 30 people in northwest Nigeria in the latest round of violence in which hundreds have been killed so far this year and thousands more displaced. —The Washington Post, October 18, 2021. Photo: Some members of the Nigerian Armed Forces Sniper Unit. Stefan Heunis/AFP via Getty Images via The Conversation, October 18, 2021


What it takes to live here.
                 Numb. Wait for the news:
unknown gun men killed an 
             unknown number of people, 
go to bed and hope there is 
             tomorrow, of course there is 
always tomorrow 
                       and aways bad news, 
a man named Naira 
                       fell from it high horse 
and broke more than a neck. 
                         The president said shoot 
the protesters, No, 
                      the Army chief did, No, 
an unknown fraternity bigger 
than the government gave the command, 
we don't know who fired 
                                 but we know who died. 

Pretend. Pretend you're happy 
and unhurt, riddled with holes and alive. 

Try to live on unpaid  
                               salaries for months 
and save enough to buy a house 
                          from unpaid pensions. 
Understand to plan your future  
                           on nothing but prayer, a lot of it 
that the church overflows and spill
into the street                         like chemical waste. 
                  Understand ghost walking, 
understand the rhythm of bullets, 
                          understand the many ways you could 
die gradually until blood              looks like red paint, 
                  until bodies piled like groundnut 
pyramid appear 
              as a necessity.
                       It would take more than 
the blood of children drooling from the altar 
                       of terrorism to 
inflate your already               deflated emotion. 
The superpower           of being a Nigerian 
is that you can              make comic of death, 
dance in anger,             and swallow grief 
like your daily                  vitamin supplement.


Joseph Hope is a student of Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto, Nigeria. He is currently studying applied chemistry. His works are forthcoming or already published in Reckoning Press, Evening Street Press, Zoetic Press, The New Verse News, Praxis Magazine, AfroPoetry, Gemini Spice Magazine, Spillwords, SprinNG, Writers Space Africa, Nthanda Magazine, 5th Chinua Achebe Anthology, Ariel Chart, Best "New" African Poets 2019 Anthology, and more. He's a reader for Reckoning Press. He was a fellow in the 2021 SprinNG Writing Fellowship. He tweets @ItzJoe9 & IG: _hope_joseph