SPECIFIC AND CREDIBLE, BUT UNCONFIRMED

a differentiation primer
by Ed Werstein

I.

Specific:             
                           World Trade Center Tower #1
                           United Airlines Flight 93
                           6,236 American soldiers have died in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Not Specific:     
                           Targets could include bridges, tunnels and public buildings.
                           Attack methods could include planes, automobiles, trucks or cargo vans.
                           Our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are paying off.
II.

Credible:          
                           Religious zeal leads to hatred, violence and war.
There are differences in beliefs and desires among human beings.
                           Humans will resist being attacked and having their countries invaded.

Not Credible:    
                           Your god is the one true god.
Everyone wants to live like an American.
                           Our soldiers will be welcomed and cheered wherever they go.
III.

Confirmed:        
                           Religious fervor
                           Patriotic fever
                           War

Unconfirmed:         
                           A god that cares
                           Hope for America
                           A chance for peace


Ed Werstein, Milwaukee, spent 22 years in manufacturing and union activity. He now works as an employment counselor helping job seekers. His sympathies lie with the poor and working people of the world. He advocates for peace and against corporate power. He is a proud member of the Hartford Avenue Poets. His poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Blue Collar Review, Mobius Magazine and a few other publications.
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11 SEP 2011

by Bill Costley

September 11, 2011 by Carlos Latuff

Like chloroform-soaked sponges
gravestones silence questioning;
grief extends from year to year,
decade to decade,  necessarily.

The perpetrators are long dead.
but the exploiters remain alive
with ever-expanding strategy.
Nobody wants this to end.


Bill Costley has served on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers Union. He lives in Santa Clara, CA. The latest volume ( Number Eleven)  of Costley's  New Verse News epic The Chen@id can be accessed by clicking here.
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TENTH ANNIVERSARY

by David Radavich

Photo credit: New York Skyline

Can we choose
not to remember?

Push rewind
and pretend our world
has not been tilted?

History has a way
of driving forward whether
we’re driving
or just passengers,

a road stony
and crumbling

sometimes
smooth as oil

just laid down
in the sand.

I’m not going back
to towers

and lifting
bodies back up

to their windows.

That blue sky
can never

be unclouded.


David Radavich's new book of poems Middle-East Mezze (Plain View Press, 2011) focuses on Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt. Previous poetry publications include Canonicals: Love's Hours (Finishing Line, 2009),  America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (Plain View Press, 2007), Slain Species (Court Poetry Press, London), By the Way (Buttonwood Press, 1998), and Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2000). His plays have been performed across the U.S. and abroad, including five Off-Off-Broadway productions. He also enjoys writing essays on poetry, drama, and contemporary issues.
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INCONCEIVABLE

 by James Penha

Photo source: NYRemezcla.comhttp://ny.remezcla.com/2011/latin/memory-remains-911-artifacts-at-hangar-17-exhibit-new-york-international-center-for-photography/ -- “An exhibit by Catalan photographer Francesc Torres will be kicking off this year’s Catalan Days Festival. '9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17' will be part of a larger exhibit at the International Center for Photography titled 'Remembering 9/11.' The exhibit, on view through January 8, 2012, explores how New Yorkers of all walks of life, from firefighters to regular citizens, have responded to the infamous events of 2001."

  
an address undelivered--and unimagined--by the President of the United States on September 11, 2001:

Attacked, appalled, humbled, 
ready to respond with all the power
of our principles
and destiny
to make manifest
a better world than that
smoldering here today.

We shall not memorialize our innocents with death
against innocence. Oh
have no doubt we shall pursue
forever
criminals who plan
and execute
mass murders,

but not
with endless war
that feeds hate
and sees our own souls
splayed
and bankrupt.

Against yesterday’s wrongs
our rights
stand unshaken still
and tall
as towers.

Things will never
be the same.


James Penha edits The New Verse News.
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EXPLAINING AWAY A SEPTEMBER DAY

by F. Rutledge Hammes

“City worker takes it in.” Photo by Ryan Brenizer from Osama is Dead; Photos from a historic party at Ground Zero.

The day they killed Bin Laden,
I had to answer for it.
My sixth graders came to class,
alive with all the borrowed excitement of their parents.
It was clear, by their looks of blind enthusiasm,
that they were certain something extraordinary had happened,
though they couldn’t – for the life of them – say what.
They couldn’t have been two-years-old
when the Towers came down.
Too young, by my count, to see history
as something you live through.
But old enough to consider the concept.

They had questions, and lots of them.
                 Why is everyone so happy? a girl asked.
                 My dad was dancing, said her friend. What’s the big deal?
                 Wait, I don’t have a TV, added another.
                 What happened? Is Osama still president?
It would’ve been good of me to start from the beginning,
start with the day the worst of mankind quaked
the blue mornings of New York         like a Golgotha evening.
I could’ve described the thin white jet streams
that crossed the towers like a Crucifix
or the fireman the president tucked under his arm
and bullhorned his promises of vengeance across lower Manhattan.

There were warnings in the wind, for months to come.
I could’ve said that.
I could’ve told them we made mistakes
in the sixties, in Southeast Asia,
and yet still found reasons to forget the wisdom of our fathers
and venture off rashly into another war.
I could’ve taught them to hear the wind themselves,
explained it’s the whisper-thin moments that forecast the most.
I could’ve described how everything was draped in patriotic bunting,
as if solidarity, in any respect, was ever that easy.
I could’ve told them, once the battalions shipped out,
the truly devoted church-folk of this country
started to see a wide range of miracles,
                 from the apostle Paul eating a sandwich at the altar
                 to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trotting past their window.
I could’ve told them that,
when a parade of caskets came marching home,
even God’s chosen stopped negotiating with the dead.

It would’ve been easy to share a few positives,
tell them stories of Rick Rescorla and Flight 93,
how the best of humanity saw the face of evil that day
and spit in its eye.
Teachers live for chances like these,
for those rare gems of history
that allow us to impart a little wisdom,
a little insight into our station in the world.
But I had seen what no man should ever have to see,
                 a mother burying her child,
                 a girl staring up at her lost balloon,
                 a soldier glazed over in a thousand-mile stare,
and to that day, my ears were still ringing
                with voices on the line,
                             with the calls they made just to say,
                                          We’re storming the cockpit. This is goodbye.
And so, I just sat there,
listening,
counting the times I’ve found myself
returning to those wingless angels
                  who leapt out – hand-in-hand – into the eternities of sky.
It’s still a struggle to escape my sense of that day,
the feeling I got that something vital (in all of us)
had been lost along the avenues of steel and glass and bone,
where colonies of wide-eyed pedestrians
pleaded with the heavens for a saving grace.

To a student, there’s nothing more terrifying
than what a teacher cannot bring himself to say.
But some things in this world cannot be explained.
So, after a while, I just shrugged,
smiled a little what-do-I-know smile
then offered a hapless,
                 Let’s just say it’s a good day
                           to be alive.


In 2004, F. Rutledge Hammes earned his Master of Fine Arts from Old Dominion University, where he worked closely with several National Book Award winners, NEA and Guggenheim fellows as well as New York Times Bestsellers, including Janet Peery, Sheri Reynolds, Bob Shacochis, Dorothy Allison and Bret Lott. He is a contributing writer in the recently published book, Postwar Literature 1945-1970, which is now one of Amazon’s top selling resource books. Over twenty of his short stories, essays, articles and poems have been published in various journals across the country. Hammes won the Cypress Dome Fiction Award, six Addy Awards and was a finalist for both the Montage Poetry Award and the Paul Laurence Dunbar Award for Poetry. Also, he was recently named the best up-and-coming writer in Charleston by the city paper. Hames serves on the oversight board for the Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts and is presently a writer-in-residence and award-winning writing teacher at the Charleston County School of the Arts.
_____________________________________________________

SEPTEMBER 11TH

by Lynnie Gobeille

Francesc Torres, Folded Steel Column, 2009. © Francesc Torres
Memory Remains: Artifacts at Hangar 17 by Francesc Torres is presented at New York’s International Center of Photography in association with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as part of Remembering 9/11 an exhibition on view September 9, 2011–January 8, 2012.

September 11th
2011.
10
Years
Ago
The
Towers
Fell

And
Thousands
Died.
The
World
As
I
Knew
It
Changed
Forever.
The
World
As
Our
Children
Viewed
It
Fell.
10
Years
Ago
Today
Hundreds
Of
People
Boarded
Jet
Planes
On
The
Way
To
Work
Or
To
Visit
On
Family
Vacations
Or
To
Simply
Escape
Life
For
A
Time.
They
Never
Made
It
Back
Home.
My
First
Spoken
Words
Today
Were
To
My
Cat
“God, this is good coffee.”
And
The
Coffee
I
Am
Blessed
To
Be
Sipping
Is
Hot
And
Served
In
A
Clean
White
Mug
Of
My
Own
Choosing.
Let freedom ring
Let the peace flag fly
Let God, in all his infinite wisdom,
Love us deeply.
Let our planet keep spinning.
Let us seek a means to honor each other.
Today
Is
September
11th
2011.

Lynnie Gobeille has  published in The Sow's Ear Review, Crone’s Nest, The Avatar, The Prairie Home Companion, This I Believe (NPR), The New Verse News, The Providence Journal (Poetic License) and The Naugatuck River Review. Editor of the Providence Journal Poetry Corner (South County Edition ), her essays can be heard on NPR public radio. She is the co-founder of The Origami Poems Project, a state wide “free poetry event” based in Rhode Island . Her “micro chapbooks” can be found on their website: www.origamipoems.com .
_____________________________________________________

OVER OUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW

by Howie Good

Based on sentences in the online edition of The New York Times, August 9, 2011:

The flames get worse.
There’s these silver pieces
just floating in the air

and dust and broken glass.

It’s kind of beautiful in a way.
I start crying.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love in a Time of Paranoia from Diamond Point Press, Inspired Remnants from Red Ceilings Press and The Penalty for Trying from Ten Pages Press.
_____________________________________________________

CHILDREN SINGING

by Wendy Thornton

AP Photo from The Daily Mail.

My son calls from Ground Zero
from the place the buildings fell
the hole that stole his innocence,
the place that bored into his soul
and stayed festering, though he
                      never  talked about it.

They never talked about it,
none of the children who graduated
from that moment of despair.
And yet he was there, celebrating,
singing with the crowd
“Na na na na, Na na na na
Hey hey hey, Goodbye.”

Oh, don’t show me the body –
Don’t gouge my eyes
With the empty sockets
Of a dead man.

We celebrate the darkness –
stand on the corner and sing
to the darkness.

Don’t ask any questions.
Should I care that my child looks cold
celebrating the death of any man?
Yes, I worry for the sanctity of his soul.
But that’s the price you pay
when you blow 3,000 people away.

Still, wouldn’t it be better to let him lie?
Wouldn’t it be better to forget his name,
let his face disappear into history,
never speak of him again until the last tear runs dry?
Come on, kids, “Kiss him Goodbye!”


Lyrics from: Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye
Songwriters: Paul Leka; Gary Decarlo; Dale Frashuer


Wendy Thornton has published in The Literary Review, Poetry Quarterly, MacGuffin, Main Street Rag, Riverteeth and others.  She has been an Editors’ pick 3 times in two years on Salon.com, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She is President of the Writers Alliance of Gainesville, in Gainesville, FL.
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PASSING SUMMER THOUGHT ON THE STATE OF THE STATE

by Scot Siegel


wow! that big white butterfly
must be colorblind

it keeps alighting
on the sickly rockrose

and those little blossoms
of spent oregano--

if only congress, with its odd
hawks and dumb doves,

would be so magnanimous,
it might make honey

for the rest of us.


Scot Siegel lives in Oregon.
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FANCY TEOMANCY

 Poem by Charles Frederickson; Graphic by Saknarin Chinayote 

  

How’s Wonderland Alice looking glass
Myopic blurry retina lost focus
Distorted reflection bent on destruction
Shattered image jagged edgy slivers

Mad Hatters stirring withes brew
Shriveled teabags steeped in vitriol
Nothing’s the Earl Gray matter-of-fact
Concocted Lipton panaceas fraudulently exposed

Uninvited party crashers overflowing brim
Simmering bubbles burst pointless boil
Perfect temperature labeled several Fahrenheit
Degrees hotter than just right

Misread fortune uncivil wrongs retold
Upended saucer no flight zone
Residue swirled overhead clockwise thrice
Spilt eke-onomic downturn clogs drain

Momentum adapts as fast as
Everything else stays the same
Light up your tunnel vision
Things don’t change we do

Liberty’s torch song diminished afterglow
Bright shining example snuffed out
In Gold Wet Rust corrosion
Disillusioned genie tarnished lamp victim

No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote together comprise PoeArtry. Flutter Press has just published Charles’ new chapbook fanTHAIsies.
___________________________________________

AMERICA RESPONDS TO THE CRISIS

by Jon Wesick

 Not FDR but Herbert Hoover not the Marshall Plan but the Great Leap Forward not a doctor but an eviction not a bandage but another wound not Thomas Edison but Charles Ponzi not Henry Ford but Bernie Madoff not Apple but Enron not Lincoln but Torquemada not Jefferson but Joe McCarthy not Churchill but Milosevic not Hannah Arendt but Adolf Eichmann not Mandela but Mobutu Sese Seko not Mother Theresa but Gordon Gekko not Mahatma Gandhi but Indira Gandhi not the Bill of Rights but the Alien and Sedition Acts not Habeas Corpus but the Nuremburg Defense not the First Amendment but the Salem Witch Trials not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington but Wag the Dog  not Citizen Kane but Happy Gilmore not Hemmingway but JT Leroy not A Brief History of Time but The Secret not oxygen but phlogiston not biology but phrenology not Galileo but Ptolemy not Einstein but Lysenko not tortillas but cornbread not Louis Pasteur but Typhoid Mary not penicillin but thalidomide not Jonas Salk but iron lungs not 60 Minutes but Access Hollywood not Edward R, Murrow but Perez Hilton not Miranda but Dred Scott not Frederick Douglas but Jefferson Davis not MLK but Father Coughlin not Dublin but Belfast not Rome but Carthage not Paris but Mogadishu not Spartacus but Crassus not a republic but an empire not Patton but Montgomery not Grant but McClellan not D-Day but Diem Bien Phu not Appomattox but the Maginot Line not the Interstate but the Trail of Tears

NotFDRbutHerbertHoovernottheMarshallPlanbuttheGreatLeapForward
notadoctorbutanevictionnotabandagebutanotherwoundnotThomasEdison
butCharlesPonzinotHenryFord butBernieMadoffnotApplebutEnronnot
LincolnbutTorquemadanotJeffersonbut

Host of the Gelato Poetry Series, instigator of the San Diego Poetry Un-Slam, and an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual, Jon Wesick has published over two hundred poems in journals such as the The New Verse News, New Orphic Review, Pearl, Pudding, and Slipstream. He has also published forty short stories. Jon has a Ph.D. in physics and is a longtime student of Buddhism and the martial arts. One of his poems won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest.
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DISPARITY

by Bill Costley


When you think of it
(if you do think of it),
money's relative:
small amts. of money
prime the dry sump
of crushing poverty;
obscene money builds
enormous balances.
Redress the disparity.


Bill Costley has served on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers Union. He lives in Santa Clara, CA.
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NIGER, NYGER, NYJER

by Susan Gabrielle


This year marks the driest period in the Eastern Horn of Africa region since 1995, with the lowest level of rainfall in more than 50 years and more than 10 million people in some way affected by the growing crisis. As a result, food security -- the access to and availability of food, as well as its utilization -- has deteriorated for most households in all arid and semi-arid regions in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia as well as other countries in the region.   --AlertNet


Guizotia abyssinica
nyjer seed, blackseed, inga seed
harvested from the Highlands
their taut darkness
like the skin of your children
drawn tight over melon-shaped bellies


your monthly ration in the camp
15 kg of wheat
a bit of cooking oil
pushing, jostled, begging
the baby’s head
lolling from side-to-side
five hungry mouths by your side
water?  sorry, not today


at the feeder the golden green finches
perform acrobatics
feast on your country’s seed,
your country’s need
20 pounds for 20 dollars
on sale at Walmart


after dining
they bathe in the
luxurious waters
of the backyard fountain
purchased at the garden center


Susan Gabrielle is an adjunct writing instructor at a university, and obtained her MFA from University of San Francisco.  She has had work published in the The Christian Science Monitor, TheBatShat, and local publications.  Susan is currently at work on a poetry chapbook, War Games.
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BOOK REVIEW ON THE DARK SIDE

by James Cronin


Secretive, self-chosen black-lit shadow
of a dim leader, you found all so easy
to control, angling them to each mistake;
puppet-like they jerked to your furtive shake.
And who knows what hid behind your grumpy
glare, sneering lips, and alabaster brow,
as you exposed all of us to spying
and countless souls to torture and dying.

What evil did you, an officious man
do, when bypassing your jerry-rigged heart,
you embraced the dark side in politics?
An unjust war and more were in the mix,
but now that you’re paid to tell all (in part),
you’ll  slyly blame the puppets for your plan.
Sneaky might throws right not even a crust
as it hides black lies in history’s dust.


James Cronin is enjoying the view of folly from retirement, after a four decade career in the law. 
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