THE WAVE: GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

by Sarah M. Prindle

At Least 10 Killed in Shooting Near L.A. At least 10 others were injured, some of them critically, and the gunman was still at large, the authorities said. The shooting occurred in Monterey Park, Calif., which earlier held festivities on the eve of the Lunar New Year. —The New York Times, January 22, 2023

We never know when the wave
will come crashing down.
There are no tsunami alerts,
we can’t escape to high ground.
The wave could hit any time,
around lunch, in the evening,
on a major holiday.
The wave can strike anywhere,
in a store, in a church,
an elementary school. 
What will be left after
the disastrous swell?
Broken families, broken lives,
shattered bones and lethal wounds.
Fearful survivors, frightened neighbors,
bloodstained floors and bullet holes.
We never know when the wave
will come crashing down

and drown us in our apathy. 

Sarah M. Prindle received an Associates in English from Northampton Community College. She loves reading everything from historical fiction and memoirs to poetry and mysteries. She hopes to someday publish her own novels and poetry collections and has already had her work published in several literary magazines and websites.

A REQUIEM FOR ZOMBIE FIRES DEVOURING THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

by Daniel Brennan

While most wildfires burn out in the open, another form of Arctic fire is more difficult to detect. So-called zombie fires can smoulder in peat beneath the Arctic’s icy surface, throughout the winter months. When spring comes, the fires reignite surface vegetation, emitting carbon dioxide from both the vegetation and the peat, which is a natural carbon dioxide store. A report by climate scientists concluded that the increase in the number of these overwintering wildfires is directly linked to climate change. —World Economic Forum, January 11, 2023. Photo: The Bogus Creek Fire in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a state where the vast majority of carbon emissions from fires come from burning soil.Credit: Matt Snyder/Alaska Division of Forestry, via Associated Press via The New York Times.

We should have guessed by the gray, curled perfume

reaching up from a temporary grave that all good things

stay hungry. A terrible beauty; keeping one eye open

in the coldest sleep, keeping an eye on God himself. 

Blessed be the land that cracks like old skin under 

our sun, the land that shivers off its frost to be eaten

alive by a boiling stomach. Blessed be the earth that

houses the black-nailed hand reaching toward heaven

as the soil softens, as it splits open its breast to reveal

every fiery jewel we thought lost to winter. 

The disbelievers, they will tell you it cannot be this way. 

They will tell you that these new gods, burning just

below the lips, the foils and folds of the mind, should

extinguish in the night as they have for a millennia. 

But the most famished deities find the sky. These,

my sinner’s hands, hands which have held dirt in the shape

of lonely men and men crawling deep back down into

their graveyard dirt, hands which have found every other aspiring 

angel in the dark corridors of night between body high

and exaltation, these hands must clasp in a bent prayer

for someone, for something. Find meaning in the revelations,

the peeling snowfall that has blanketed a red mask of death. 

Find God in the furious inferno creeping up through nutrient-

rich soil, screaming to the heavens, making us believe

in an eternal life, for these flames do not die, only slumber. 

Blessed be this new generation of disciples, apostles, apotheosis 

in freeze-frame. They must learn to worship the earth that

cannot keep its fiery dreams beneath a dark shawl

of rock and root and snow and seed. We inherit the 

land that devours itself, the endless eulogy below our funeral pyre. 

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a resident of New York City, but grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania (ultimately serving as a focused source of ecology-based inspiration). As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Brennan’s work aims to capture both the vastness we feel in the face of our ever-changing planet, while confronting our own bodies and the daunting elements of intimacy we feel every day. His work has appeared in CP Quarterly, Grand Little Things, Feral Poetry, with upcoming work in the Garfield Lake Review. He currently lives in Manhattan, and works full-time in advertising.

BETTER MOMENTS

by Joel Savishinsky

Federal regulators said Wednesday that they will begin penalizing nursing homes that give residents a false label of schizophrenia, a practice that many facilities have used to skirt restrictions on antipsychotic drugs, which can be especially dangerous for older people. —The New York Times, January 18, 2023. Photo: Yvonne Blakeney’s husband, David, a dementia patient, was diagnosed with schizophrenia shortly after arriving at a nursing home. Credit: Sean Rayford for The New York Times.

In my better moments, 
I know my head’s not 
right… but this is wrong.
 
There are dark caves inside my mouth, 
where their blind stupidity
is not my disability, 
spaces that enable me to
hide their pills inside my cheek, 
under my tongue, 
back in the recess behind 
my lower right molar. 
 
I am not dumb. 
I’ve read the text, 
and know the fate 
of those who’d fly 
over the cuckoo’s nest. 
I’ll sit right here and 
won’t take flight, but 
find refuge in a 
remnant of integrity.
 
In my better moments, 
I know my rights.

 
Joel Savishinsky, a retired professor of anthropology and gerontology, is the author of The Ends of Time: Life and Work in a Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s book-of-the-year prize. His collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging, will be published by The Poetry Box in 2023.

CAUGHT IN BETWEEN

by Phyllis Frakt

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has blocked a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in high schools, saying it violates state law and is historically inaccurate. The state education department rejected the program in a letter last week to the College Board, which oversees AP classes. Florida education officials did not specify exactly what content the state found objectionable but said, “As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” …In a statement, the College Board said, “Like all new AP courses, AP African American Studies is undergoing a rigorous, multi-year pilot phase, collecting feedback from teachers, students, scholars and policymakers.”—AP, January 20, 2023. PHOTOS: From left to right: Poet and social activist Langston Hughes, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and novelist Toni Morrison. All three are among the Black luminaries taught as part of a new AP African American Studies course that is being piloted in high schools across the U.S. Getty Images via TIME

I thought I was born at the perfect time

when fear yielded to democracy

and morality’s arc bent toward justice.

Hopeful they seemed, the sweet years between.

           

But now a time of conspiring tyrants

whose denials belie repeated crimes.

Facts scrapped for lies online and prime time.

I curse the reversal of sweet years between.

          

Skeptics deem all a delusion, a dream.

Grand claims of progress dismiss history

of morality deferred, justice rebuffed.

Deceived by smokescreen, those years between.

 

Some drag with doubt, some dare to dream,

I’m with still others, caught in between.

Phyllis Frakt, formerly an academic administrator, has moved from writing memos to writing poems. Her poem “Recoveries” (2022) appeared in Worksheets 67. Her poem “Teach to the Test" appeared in The New Verse News, also in 2022. She lives in New Jersey.

OUR HOUSE INSPECTION

by Joseph Kleponis

Claytoonz by Clay Jones

Our house is set on a foundation
Hundreds of years old. The men who set it,
The foundation and the building, too, were wise.
They saw what had and had not worked elsewhere,
And so, they reinforced the foundation
With a seemingly simple substructure
Of beams that balanced and braced itself
To support the elegant edifice
They had dared to frame. It has weathered storms,
Abuses from within and from without,
But now the climate has begun to change,
We have noticed threats where there had been none—
A minor infestation in the basement—
Will the structure hold, or need amendment?

Joseph Kleponis lives north of Boston, Massachusetts. He’s had poems published in online and print journals nationally and internationally. His book Truth’s Truth was published by Kelsay Books in 2021.

UNIVERSITY WOMAN

by Tamam Kahn 

Female students are stopped by Taliban security at a university in Kabul, on 21 December 2022 (AFP via Middle East Eye)

We the Taliban 

will make you 
go quiet. 
We want 
an empty blackboard.
We the Taliban
are erasing the rights 
of each one 
with breasts 
and a vagina 
and a clitoris.
 
Each girl-student and
female professor 
splashes silenced outrage 
into a ruptured world,
zig-zags suspense 
back and forth 
across her mind,
hides a spaded heart 
raw with hiccups.
Each one cracks open
a brain-leak 
of stories and poems,
stashed backpacks 
of notebooks filled with 
foundational work,
knowledge, science—
 
all soon to be 
academic ditch-litter.

Tamam Kahn is the author two books on women of early Islam. Untold, A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, (Monkfish Books, 2010), and Fatima’s Touch, (Ruhaniat Press, 2016). Both won International Book Awards. Tamam believes that sharing the lives of women, famous or in difficulty, helps bring awareness and change into today’s difficult times. She lives near San Francisco, California.

DELUGE

by Alejandro Escudé

The Los Angeles River flows at a powerful rate as a huge storm brings flooding and landslides to the west coast. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images via The Guardian, January 16, 2023

I listen to Paradise Lost

in my car as the rain pours

at night, picturing the first 

couple as they huddle among 

the grasses and fruits.

From my car window, as if 

up toward heaven, I see an

uphill rain-slick boulevard, 

passenger planes landing 

at LAX, like blurry UFO’s.

The sound is exhilarating,

an aquatic thrashing, my car

sloshing over corner oceans,

the wipers struggling to sweep

a sinless version of the city.

I roll the window down

just as Satan calls out his 

fellow seraphim, like a zillion

tuna schooling out of a 

darkened precipice. 

Even if it’s atmospheric, 

and a river, it’s still rain, 

the wind wind, the forecast?

Our fallen state, our bodies

water-logged, the reflection 

of all the lights at night

splitting heaven and hell

into equal refractions.

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.

AMISH HISTORY LESSON

by James Schwartz

What are you studying?

My Amish father peers at my homework,

History—Martin Luther King Jr.

“We are to be separate from the World,”

Dad explains our Michigan segregation, 

Why no Amish men marched with King,

15 years before my birth, 

150 miles away in Detroit, 

Down Woodward Avenue, 

“Walk to Freedom.”

But we did not walk, never hearing, 

His psalm of brotherhood. 

James Schwartz is a poet & author of various poetry collections including The Literary Party: Growing Up Gay and Amish in America (Kindle, 2011), Punatic (Writing Knights Press, 2019) & most recently Motor City Mix, Sunset in Rome (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He resides in Detroit, Michigan.

THE TURNING CIRCLE OF A BUCKET WHEEL EXCAVATOR

by Frank Joussen

Tweet via “Thousands hit German streets to protest coal mine expansion” in TRTWorld, January 14, 2022

keep it in the ground a famous activist from Sweden

says about Luetzerath’s now world infamous coal

while this monster of a word this monster of a machine

the gigantic bucket wheel excavator

is rearing its dragon head

over the edge of its devilishly long and deep pit

the monster’s casting a lasting shadow

over the children of the end game for the climate

who are risking life and limb

not to mention imminent law enforcement

in a useless attempt to stop the co2 madness

of a so-called green government

of course, they could leave

the coal in the ground

but the bucket wheel excavator

would have to go to another place

and can you imagine the costs

of turning this beast of a vehicle around?

In a matter of days this past week, more than 1,000 police officers cleared out the hundreds of climate activists who had sworn to protect the small village, once home to 90 people but no church, which was scheduled to be razed as part of a sprawling open-pit coal mine in western Germany. —The New York Times, January 15, 2023. Photo: A bucket-wheel excavator mines for coal at the Garzweiler coal mine near Luetzerath on November 2, 2022. CREDIT: Michael Probst / AP via The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: The New Verse News published Frank Joussen’s “No Last Homely House in Luetzerath” on November 4, 2021. 

Frank Joussen is a German teacher and writer, peace and one world activist. His publications include two selections of his poetry. He has co-edited two international anthologies of poetry/fiction in India and one of short stories in Germany. His poems and short stories have also been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies in India, Australia, G.B., the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Romania, Malta, the U.S.A., Canada, China, Thailand and Japan; some of them have been translated into German, Romanian, Hindi and Chinese.

TOURING THE GALAXIES WITH JEFF BECK

by Mary K O’Melveny

A Fender Stratocaster

rides like a space ship

follow those sounds 

around the room

up up up  past the ceiling 

over the roof

way past tree lines

above ragged craggy peaks

beats blues  bolero  buzz

crying to the moon

everything reverberates

as we rise like astronauts

soaring past everyone

Les Paul  Hendrix  Clapton  

as we fly high  higher

wah wah wah wah

 

chords climb  croon  caress

slide  sweep sing sigh 

slow  slip  soar 

rumble  race  rave

we follow the stars 

as they glow silver gold

platinum  plutonium  

pandemonium

we jump through nebulas  

stratospheres

galaxies  bend  shapeshift

 everything we ever knew

lies behind us

as we watch light bend

wah wah wah wah

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 most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. 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.

43: ODE TO THE ORIGINAL HOONIGAN

by Jennifer Elise Wang

in Memory of Ken Block

 
I could smell the burning rubber
When I watched videos of you
Racing through the streets of San Fran
As if it’s the Daytona International Speedway
(Except you turn in all sorts of ways, not just left).
You could hit the dirt too,
And I think I still have sand in my hair
From when I watched you in Austin
Racing guys like yourself,
Former boarders and bikers
Who found a new thrill behind the wheel.
We joked, “With age, comes the cage,”
But you never restricted yourself.
Like the engines of your Fords, Subarus, and Audis,
You pushed your own body to the limits
On concrete, dirt, water, and snow.
Now, I think if there is a Heaven,
The angels would have a hard time
Keeping you in one spot.

Jennifer Elise Wang (she/they) is a non-binary femme in STEM from Dallas, Texas. When she's not doing neuroscience research, she enjoys writing, dancing, and learning how to skateboard and snowboard.  She has been published in The New Verse News, FERAL, Exist Otherwise, and ev0ke.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

by Peter R. Selover

Has a new address

it is any

gas station

that is open

24 hours a day

that has a kind-hearted

manager who at 3 in the morning

is happy to let the children

of homeless families

who sleep

in their cars

every night

use the bathrooms

Editor's Note: San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness organizes homeless people and front line service providers to create permanent solutions to homelessness, while working to protect the human rights of those forced to remain on the streets.

Peter R. Selover is a percussionist and writer, from Cleveland, Ohio. He has been involved in progressive politics since 1972, when as an 11-year-old he spent most of the year stuffing envelopes for Senator McGovern's presidential campaign. 

ON THE CLOCK

by Diana Morley

The world’s torrid future is etched in the crippled kidneys of Nepali workers. Kidney disease has become epidemic among Nepali migrant laborers working in the extreme heat of the Persian Gulf, presaging the world's climate change future. Photo: Sak Bahadur Chhantyal, 48, was working on a construction site in Oman for six years before he was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. He has been on dialysis at the National Kidney Center in Kathmandu for almost two years. (Sagar Chhetri) —The Washington Post, January 6, 2023

Surely it’s time.

Time to say

we’re fueling 

our pot 

heating on

high

now scalding 

our insides 

after shriveling 

our skin 

raising black spots

burned not tanned

where we sit

not 

stirred— 

to get up

in uproar

to say 

our kidneys 

now cooking

like 

beans.

Diana Morley has published poems online and in journals as well as two books of poetry and a photographic/poetic documentary of Oregon’s 2020 wildfire and renewal. She writes and resides in North Carolina.