WHITE MEN WRITING RACE

by Robert Carr?

Image source: WiffleGIF

A liberal is someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.  �James Baldwin

There is a wise white woman
in my life, counting dead black people.
They break her pulse, her heart.
That's real. She etches names

into a journal, copper markers
in her garden. She says, "Feel
like maybe it's someone else's
story, and I should stick to dandelions."

Blow ball fruits blown into air,
an untenable lawn. High flying
single seeds. Everything about this
poem tells me, Get out of the way.
?

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, a chapbook published in 2016 by Indolent Books. His poetry has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, TheNewVerse.News, Radius Literary Magazine, Pretty Owl Poetry, The Good Men Project and other publications. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden, Massachusetts and serves as  an associate poetry editor for Indolent Books


Editor's Note: This poem is reprinted from an earlier edition of TheNewVerse.News .

NUCLEAR NURSERY RHYME

by Jerome Betts

A Reddit user used Photoshop to imagine what President Trump and Kim Jon Un would look like if they swapped hair. Via The Daily Mail.

One brought new missiles out to play
To which another said �No, K!�
So Rocket Man and Donald J.
Between them risked a world flamb�.

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, and edits the quarterly Lighten Up Online. His verse has appeared in a wide variety of British magazines and anthologies as well as UK, European, and North American web venues such as Amsterdam Quarterly, Angle, Light, The Asses of Parnassus, TheNewVerse.News,  Parody, Per Contra, The Rotary Dial, and Snakeskin.

FOR THE ROHINGYA

by Charise M. Hoge




There are some
who must turn fire
into a tidal wave,
become a waterfall
mountain cascade.
But they are not liquid
made. Sinewy and limbed,
in limbo a long walk
from any land with their name,
where any can say �mine�.
Mine becomes the casualty
of forwardness, of egress.
Damages damming arrival
of a people��unchampioned,
already damned.

Charise M. Hoge, MA, MSW, is a dance/movement therapist, performing artist, and writer. She is co-author of the book A Portable Identity: A Woman�s Guide to Maintaining a Sense of Self While Moving Overseas, and her poetry chapbook Striking Light from Ashes was published July 2017 by Finishing Line Press.

FOR ROSH HASHANAH

by Alan Walowitz

       

Victor (Zeke) Zonana (1924-2016)

Now onto this New Year, bad as it promises to be�
there�s rumor You, too, have given up,
filled with Your own brand of regret:
seeing us squander our gifts�
wasting our will as if it were a game,
failing to care for our own,
or honor this place we like to call home.
So now You�re headed out-of-town,
like some will-o�-the-wisp
to locate some new folks, perhaps, and begin
In the beginning, all over again.

But if I�m wrong and it be Thy will
and You�re listening still,
dear God, what the hell,
let us be inscribed again, then sealed.

Though please feel free to pass on him
we�ve loved so well
who takes his place one final time
and happily chants the ancient prayers
for those of us so far removed, we don�t remember how.
But unlike You, our renegade and sometimes vengeful God,
this old man�s not rash nor filled with rage.
But of his own considered will he, too, wants out.
Let it be recorded here, as in Aleppo once,
a temperate man took his life in his hands,
then gently chose�of his own free will�to let it go.


Alan Walowitz has been published in various places on the web and off. He�s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY and St. John�s University in his native borough of Queens, NY. Alan�s chapbook Exactly Like Love was published by Osedax Press in 2016 and is now in its second printing.

THE VALUES

by Jon Taylor




Ecocide,
genocide, slavery
and war are the four horsemen
of American greatness.

America didn�t invent
these riders of the apocalypse
but has embraced them wholeheartedly
from her first day to her latest.

Ask the felled forests
or the disappeared tribes
or those paraded in the markets
or the lands invaded.

America rose
and became great
and exceptional and indispensable
and will founder on the same steeds.

Jon Taylor is the author of Berry Picker�s Blues, a volume of Michigan/Northwoods/Upper Peninsula poems. He can be reached at taylor.jon440(at)gmail.com.

A SACRED RITE: WHEN ATHLETES KNEEL

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

                                it could have been genuflections in a church
                                but there was no stained glass    no pews
                                yet they knelt in a presence greater themselves
                                a silence    a sanctuary    on a field  
                               now a battle wages using words that pelt like stones
                                that cannot comprehend
this sacred moment   this most protected of all rights
                                to dissent     to kneel    to stand    to risk it all

Sister Lou Ella Hickman has been an all-level teacher and a librarian. Presently she is a freelance writer and a spiritual director. Her poems and articles have been widely published in numerous magazines. One of her poems was published in the anthology After Shocks: Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo. Her first book of poetry she: robed and wordless, published by Press 53, was released in the fall of 2015.

HURRICANE SEASON

by Jan Steckel 

Poster by Rusty Ford

The mercury was in triple digits, the moon
ocherous with smoke, cities submerged.
An orange gibbon necklaced in skulls
drop kicked brown-skinned Americans
over borders, polkaed over illegal bodies.

We sandbagged against the Klan,
stored water for dousing crosses,
hoarded fuel to flee Brown Shirts.
Cyclones whirled clockwise
south of the equator,
widdershins in the North.

We covered windows with plywood.
Black Bloc buffeted the downtown.
We all renewed our passports.
Churches built secret shelters
for the undocumented.
It was too late to evacuate the States.

We sheltered in place,
hunkered and braced for
depressions and disturbances.
A brassy trumpet�s wall rumbled up.
The Daily Stormer surged.
The Republic came tumbling down.

Jan Steckel was a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician who took care of Spanish-speaking children until chronic pain persuaded her to change professions to writer, poet and medical editor. She is an activist for bisexual and disability rights who lives in Oakland, California. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work won the Goodreads Newsletter Poetry Contest, a Zeiser Grant for Women Artists, the Jewel by the Bay Poetry Competition, Triplopia�s Best of the Best competition, and three Pushcart nominations.