The New Verse News

PANDEMIC

2009-11-07T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Jon Wesick

Thanks to the guy
who coughed pork virus
over every commuter in the train car.
Thanks for the fatigue and body aches
for days spend shivering under thick blankets.
Thanks for the depth charges of nausea
and emergency runs to the toilet.

Thanks to the mother
who brought her feverish child to the theater.
Thanks for gallons of mucous, thick, green fondue
for the throat scraped raw and bleeding
by a cough that rattled like hundreds of BBs in a crankcase.
Thanks for the doctor’s bill, and a thousand dollars
of lost wages.

Thanks to you who made this possible.
How can I ever repay you?

Jon Wesick has a Ph.D. in physics, has practiced Buddhism for over twenty years, and has published over a hundred poems in small press journals such as American Tanka, Anthology Magazine, The Blind Man’s Rainbow, Edgz, The Kaleidoscope Review, Limestone Circle, The Magee Park Anthology, The Publication, Pudding, Sacred Journey, San Diego Writer’s Monthly, Slipstream, Tidepools, Vortex of the Macabre, Zillah, and others. His chapbooks have won honorable mentions twice in the San Diego Book Awards.
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FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH . . .

2009-11-06T15:00:00.002+07:00

by George Held

The Today Show reported that big banks like Citi and Goldman Sachs have been shipped private stocks of the H1N1 vaccination while at-risk Americans are still waiting to get their shots.

I wish I could feel the outrage this news
Ought to bring like a punch in the nose,
Eyes watering, blood flowing,
Pain sickening . . .

But I’m just a comatose patient
Lying on a gurney after being battered
By tests and probes and meds; like
A liberal after one year of Obama-lala,

One year of watching the great Oz
Pull the rug out from promises of change
We can believe in, like bringing home
The troops, offering healthcare to all . . .

You know the list, and you know the cast,
Chosen from auditions by Summers,
Geithner, and other Bushites—that’s “shite”
The way the Brits say “shit.”

Hey, that vaccine’s a private matter, as the news
Says, and the US worships private deals
The way it bows down to private property
And its owners, who own the government.

So, know your place, Proles: If you want
A flu shot or treatment for a gun shot,
Get on line at the clinic or the ER,
And don’t mess with The Man

At JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs;
He don’ wanna hear your bellyaches.
Hell, he don’ know you exist . . . so when
Your fever hits 104, take an aspirin

And don’t call anyone for help; your life
Ain’t worth a banker’s fart.

George Held has collected many of his New Verse News poems in The News Today.
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ABOUT THE EKE-ONOMY STOOPID

2009-11-05T18:38:00.004+07:00

Poem by Charles Frederickson; Graphic by Saknarin Chinayote

&Now
Worthless vanity put on hold
Diversified self of worldly goods
Immeasurable bad habits thrown in
Eking out barely living existence

Less is More usually Least
No account checkbook iffy balance
Seesaw fulcrum bottomless darkling holes
Voids taking up valuable space

&Then
Fake marble mortar speckled pestle
Reset after hollow bones pummeled
Infestments swallowed then spit out
American Excess credit limit surpassed

Dimly lit past retrieved from
Abandoned dreams leftover trash discards
Fleshless corpse no longer alive
Greed dead not yet buried

&Again
Future gains outweighed by losses
Groundless accusations Destiny in limbo
No forwarding address SWAK letter
Insufficient postage Return to Sender

Moonless night held by mirror
Long since reflection not shown
Anima caught between jagged cracks
Pitch black nostalgia tackling lunacy

The dynamic duo of always toptimistic upstARTs, Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote edit AvantGardeTimes.com, an eclectic cosmopolitan poeartry quarterly EZine.
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FUN GAMES

2009-11-04T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Andrew Hilbert

"Russia Infuriates Poland With "Simulated' Nuclear Attack"--telegraph.co.uk

russia,
today i guess,
simulated
a nuclear attack
on poland

oh,
it was really
no big deal
you know,
it's for
just in case
we ever want
to bomb the shit
out of you
we know best
how to do it

nothing too much
to worry about

Andrew Hilbert has a degree in History at Cal State Long Beach and lives in Orange County, California.
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A PIECE OF THE WALL

2009-11-03T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Meredith Escudier

Like a chip off the old block,
a splinter from its mother ship,
a shred of exploded concrete
found on the ground.

Stilled in grey dullness,
compact in craggy roughness,
just one of many to crash down
and resound.

Checkpoint Charlie was your gate.
You watched and lay in wait
while desperate souls sought escape
in suitcases, car trunks, hot air balloons…

Some got caught.

But on a festive night in ’89
you cracked up and went flying,
exploding in shards, miscellaneous missiles
shooting off crazy in the cold night air.

Brigit, my Berliner friend,
was there. So was the world,
beholding the unfolding.

So she brought you to me
as a grey chunk of memory,
a nothing, a lackluster thing on my shelf.
Yet 20 years on, the power’s still there
and I startle at this souvenir,
the bitter now dear.

Meredith Escudier’s non-fiction work has appeared in various literary magazines, anthologies, the International Herald Tribune "Meanwhile" column and as an ongoing column in a monthly based in the south of France. She has just started submitting poetry, which is a genre that suits her more and more.
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WHEN FOG INVADES CLEVELAND

2009-11-02T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Mary C. O'Malley

“Consider how the lilies of the field; grow. They do not work.”
Matthew 6: 28

Consider how well fog becomes Cleveland,
how it hides the houses stripped of humans,
haunted buildings without windows, and
ghosts falling through cracks in factory roofs.

Consider fog ghosts when they moan
over diamond ruined dreams while layers of
soft water cloak the lost Irish Banshee who
groans over the trapped souls of Lake Erie.

Consider how in the past; fog hid dead hacks in
our lake- Pinkerton men who searched for stewards
hidden in the night, sailors who failed to heed
the sandbars and sudden winds.

Consider the old orange crib where laborers
underneath suffocated and died
and there, Garret Morgan trying to use his
new gas mask no one believed would work.

Consider how we older ones miss the foghorn
calling sounds of warning blaring through West Park,
Buckeye, and the lake. And oh, to have had
that warning before our corrupt sandbar years of silence.

Fog can
become frost,
become rime
frozen without
upward movement
but a
cold sense
of time

But sometimes
on warm
July nights,
you can
see fireflies
dance twirl
in patches
of low
white mist,
where when
green life
still blesses
the last
of Cleveland’s
frozen lilies.

Mary C. O'Malley has been published in both print and online. Her latest work, published by The International Centre for Women's Playwrights, is a dramatic monologue.
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THOUGHTS FROM A MANHATTAN TRADE-STER

2009-10-31T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Natasha Hunte

Harvard grads pimped houses on the               market
while airlines made jets nobody would        fly
     I need more dough to sleep safe.

All day I eat Cipralex® with no                                   prescription
My doc could acquiesce and rev up my          addiction
     swallowing feels only 50% free.

When my stocks dived, my wife lost her                                             interest
couldn’t stand up to a deep cut in                      pedicures
     love isn’t made free.

When I close my right hand, I want to feel some                                             green
don’t tell me less is more, about Buddha and planting          love
feed that to the Bronx.

Natasha Hunte graduated from the MA Literature program at the University of New Orleans. Her works “Free” and "Buttered Bread" were published in Yemassee, and “Buttered Bread” was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Her essay, "Soccer, Jefferson and the Truth" won first place in the graduate division within the Louisiana Association for College Composition Statewide Writing contest, and her poem “Abandonded Abode” won honourable mention in the graduate division of that category. An American of Caribbean parentage, she currently lives in Switzerland and is a member of Geneva Writer's Group and Zurich Writer's Group.
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AGAINST THE TIDE

2009-10-30T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Earl J. Wilcox

Beach walking today--shifting sands impressionable
     under my feet---I see two women Marines strolling,

holding hands, USMC stamped on black tees taut
     against their chests, a slight breeze ruffling the air.

Following at a short distance, I take fright when a middle
     finger is flashed in their faces by a jeering jogger,

though other beach loungers ignore the pair. The women
     face straight ahead, march like good Marines, smile

at toddlers building castles in the sand where
     grandpas play Corn Hole, grandmas read Romances.

Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.
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AUTUMN TURNS THROUGH STRATIFIED WARS

2009-10-29T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Scot Siegel

A few little leaves alight on the sleeper wind
lemon, iron-orange, vermilion
but there’s no dive-swiping gnat-catching tonight

Some song birds sense the slack-season upon us
stillness readies the river, trees glimmer
and we lean uneasily into the quiet…

Three warblers balance on one blackberry cane
not ordinary warblers, Yellow-Breasted Chats
gone silent in the breeze –

There’s no yellow chip; no whistle, caw, nor rattle
just three imperceptible heartbeats screaming
through silver thorns & bramble –

*

Is their night not unlike our country?
Somewhere, a raptor hovers; drags her talons
over Arab neighborhoods, while we lie awake…

In my wife’s eyes a blue flame flickers
World News, a helicopter turns, delivering
or receiving the dead…

We hardly notice midnight passing over
as we tilt and spin on the dreadful wing of a hawk
who says she loves us?

Crows on our tail, relentless ––
I think I hear one say:
come home…

Scot Siegel is an urban planner and poet from Oregon, where he serves on the board of trustees of the Friends of William Stafford. In celebration of Oregon’s Sesquicentennial, the Oregon State Library and Poetry Northwest recently selected Siegel’s Some Weather as one of Oregon’s Outstanding Poetry Books, one for each year of statehood. Pudding House released his chapbook Untitled Country earlier this year. Siegel’s poetry has received First Prize from the Oregon State Poetry Association and he was a semi-finalist for Nimrod International's Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize in 2008.
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MODERN ART

2009-10-28T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Bradley McIlwain

I see him sitting squat-legged
beside a cup of coins on the
sidewalk
looking up at me with glinting
eyes
in between puffs of a fading
cigarette,
his eyes were a blue glass hung
inside a stone cathedral that cut
you when the light would hit it,
and made you freeze if only for
a moment,
and forget again whatever it was
that you were thinking of.
In some ways he is Piranesi’s
Prison,
his frame a twisted staircase of
winding bone, hollow, ghost in
a machine,
epigraph of agony –
age has withered away the details,
a Godly sculpture crafted of the
finest clay,
this could have been Michelangelo’s
David, once,
one autumn morning before sunrise
sitting in a studio of shit,
his life reduced to a cup of coins.

Bradley McIlwain is a Canadian based writer and poet. His work has appeared in The Copperfield Review, Frostwriting, Rope and Wire, Wanderings Magazine, New Verse News, and others.
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DOCUMENTARY

2009-10-27T15:00:00.000+07:00

by J. R. Solonche

The CEO of Interface,
the world’s biggest maker
of commercial carpet,
has had an epiphany, “a spear
thrust into my chest,” as he
was reading E. O. Wilson
on the extinction of species,
who called it, “the death
of birth,” and now what?
Now this – pull out that spear
which has done its work,
and thrust that spear into
the chest of the next CEO,
and thrust it into the chest
of the CEO after that, and
then into the chest of the next
one and the next one, and
then what? Then this – keep
thrusting that spear, keep
thrusting and thrusting
that epiphanal spear. Name
it “The Death of Birth.”

J.R. Solonche is co-author (with wife Joan Siegel) of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). His poems have appeared in many magazines, journals, and anthologies since the 1970s. He teaches at SUNY Orange in Middletown, New York.
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A-TEN-SHUN!

2009-10-26T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Leah Shelleda

Turn it on turn it on
you’ll see
a million chicks beaks wide open
for crying out loud
a guy says his kid’s been carried off by a silver balloon
says it so he can ride a magic carpet
and the 24-7 follows nothing into the empty sky
this boy didn’t fly too close to the sun no wingmelt
but its still Daedalus and Icarus
scheming to leave the earth to ride
not rise not rise up not hitching genius
to the largest cart that holds the many not like
Prometheus who felt for us stole dad’s fire
got nailed for it
Turn it on
a million chicks beaks wide open
tell us nothing happened

Leah Shelleda is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the College of Marin. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her chapbook, A Flash of Angel, was recently published by Blue Light Press.
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BIRD LADY

2009-10-25T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Michael Lee Johnson

They call her old maid Misty, as in fog, she misses the sun.
She runs a small pet store, more for the injured and lame,
alone and half the light bulbs have burnt out.
In the backroom everything smells of dust and feathers.
The cockatoo is cuddly and named Brenda, but has bad toiletry manners.
The macaw is well hidden, and fetches a high price on the open market, called Ginger.
Misty is surrounded by wired bird cages,
jungle noises in unfamiliar places,
and sleeps on a portable cot.
When parrots or parakeets shout shrills in the night,
her eyes squint and flash out in the dark but no one sees it.
Squinting is a lonely habit.
Misty works alone and is getting old.
On a wall, near her cot, hangs a picture-
but is it Jesus, or St. Jude Thaddaeus
carrying the image of Jesus in his hand or close to his chest,
difficult to tell darkness dimmed at night.
Misty sometimes sleepwalks at night from small room to the other-
she bumps, sometimes trips and falls, her warfarin guarantees bruises.
Misty tosses conjectures: “I’m I odd, old school, or just crazy?”
Her world is eye droppers, bird feeders, poop in cages, porcelain knickknacks.
Love left Misty’s life years ago, when World War II ended and so did her marriage.
As she ages everything is measure in milliliters, everything seems short and small-
medications in small dosages day by day.
Early in morning a young homeless boy knocks on the store front window
desperate for a job, he lies about credentials.
Misty desperate for help asks for no references.
Today is dim, raining outside, and old maid Misty still misses the sun.

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance writer from Itasca, Illinois. His new poetry chapbook with pictures is From Which Place the Morning Rises, and he has a new photo version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom. All of his books are now available on Amazon.com. Michael has been published in over 22 countries. He is also editor/publisher of four poetry sites, all open for submission, which can be found at his Web site.
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BRAIN DRAIN

2009-10-24T15:12:00.001+07:00

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

Too bad Dick Cheney, far from brainy, slithered and dithered for eight long years, and willfully instigated fears. While others fought and died, our “Vice” decried the attack on his watch; was willing to botch the war on Al Quaida. He was the real deciduh , who tried to cover-up in Iraq, flexing his muscles like a super-charged jock. Even tricky Dick, didn’t stick to his schtick, but resigned, kept reality in mind, while Cheney still thinks like a hawk, send in more troops, why bother to talk, just call Obama a name, say Obama’s to blame, call him slow to the task, listen to Cheney, who knows how to answer what he couldn’t ask.

A workshop Leader for The Florida Center for the Book and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Lucille Gang Shulklapper writes fiction and poetry. Her work appears in many publications, as well as in four poetry chapbooks, What You Cannot Have, The Substance of Sunlight, Godd, It’s Not Hollywood, and In The Tunnel. Recently, she has been teaching college preparatory reading at Broward College.
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USING BOTH HANDS NOW, THIS BULB

2009-10-23T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Simon Perchik

Using both hands now, this bulb
flickering the way goldfish
reckless in the inflammable water

--this clouded bulb is dangerous
without a name --I call its light
Old Blue and the Earth just beginning

is cooled by firestones
that would become rainwater
--I call this lamp Smoke

play it safe, a second name
alongside the other :my hands
filled with light

even before there were eyes
before fingers would beg for curvature
and the watchful hand on my forehead

--I close my eyes :a fast
to allow my skull --the change
is so slow --there never was enough room

for the eyes, for the tears
the storm after storm --you dead
are always thirsty and I can't fix

this throwaway bulb, throwaway light
--I just give it two names
and more darkness, wait for you

near these loving candles, loving matches
and the glass cage with still more water
locked in as if one explosion more

would lay open another sun
and this ice into a clear stream
into your brief happiness.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Readers interested in learning more are invited to read Magic, Illusion and Other Realities at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet which site lists a complete bibliography
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BROTHER WAS A PILOT

2009-10-22T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Scott Simpson

In the yard 
that year we played, 
we danced like patriots
 until the afternoon our
 strings and fingers stopped,
 our voices caught, 
we grew ashamed of
 our own steps
 even as we stared.

Brother came home
 with one leg  
missing—a flash in his eye
 like the afterimage of a wing  
clipped.  

New songs descended 
among us, or perhaps they rose
 up from the soil where he planted 
his crutch, 
hymns both eternal and practical 
for each of our waking
 and sleeping moments
 taking up residence on the
 bitter tips 
but never quite leaving 
our tongues:  

               To whom do we owe, 
               this gracious honor of loss?  

               What place is there  
               that grows legs for grounded brothers? 

Scott Simpson is a former high school teacher, college professor, camp director and lay-minister who attempts to live a contemplative lifestyle on a planet that views quietness and stillness as destructive ideas that could potentially undermine the fabric of society. He, indeed, hopes to undermine the fabric of that society with quietness and stillness. Scott lives on a planet called Earth. Scott's poems have appeared in Switched-On Gutenburg, BigCityLit, and New Verse News, and anthologized in In Praise of Pedagogy (2000, Calendar Press). You can listen to some of Scott's music and poetry on MySpace.
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PILES AND PILES OF BLACK FRIENDS

2009-10-21T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Steve Hellyard Swartz

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, refuses to wed interracial couples. "I'm not a racist," Bardwell said. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, I let them use my bathroom..."

Fact is, there's a Black fella in there now
Hey! What you up to, Willis?
Ha, ha, he's okay, just takin' a piss
Gotta be careful around Hispanics
I said - Careful - no need to panic
A-rabs and Jews is like Abel and Cain
But I'll marry the desert thieves, all the same
America went straight to hell thanks to de-segregation
Worst damn abomination on this nice little nation
Liberals like to lisp about piano keys
Your Ebonys, Your Ivories
But lissen up, son, and old Keith'll tell y'all where it's at
White is sharp and Black is flat

Steve Hellyard Swartz, a regular contributor to New Verse News, has piles and piles of poems ready to be published. He has won Honorable Mention in the Allen Ginsberg, Mary C. Mohr, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards. In 2009, poems of his were published in The Paterson Review and The Southern Indiana Review. In 1990, Never Leave Nevada, which he wrote and directed, opened at The U.S. Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. He was recently selected Poet Laureate of Schenectady County in upstate New York.
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GENERALS' TALES

2009-10-20T15:00:00.002+07:00

by Bill Costley

In the off-limits tea-houses
the story-tellers are adding
mythicized names to the tall-tale
of invaders of Afghanistan:

from Sikandar (Alexander) to
Macnaughten, Elphinstone,
Pavlovski, Nawroz, as

McChrystal, their latest addition,
stands at the tail-end of history,
his tall-tale barely beginning.

Bill Costley serves on the Steering Committee of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the National Writers Union.
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NIGHTMARE

2009-10-19T15:00:00.001+07:00

by David Radavich

How can anyone sleep
knowing the poor suffer
like dogs?

Pills, potions, vital surgery
have vanished in bogus
insurance claims

refused yet again by
corporate apparatchiks
who know well
their own precarious hands.

Where will it end?

Schools close like eyelids
of saints twisting
in their final ecstasies.

Politicians are stick
figures for whom applause
greases palms

and limousines grow
long as Pinocchio’s nose.

Truth now is a refugee
homeless yet silent,

not even a tent
but a night of snow
and no blanket.

Someday a society
will emerge we cannot
recognize,

bodies will be
disinterred in unmarked
graves, no one will
admit guilt

and the gods of history
will almost laugh
at those who assume
time will heal
all wounds.

Blue night turns over
with no dawn.

David Radavich's poetry publications include Slain Species (Court Poetry Press, London), By the Way (Buttonwood Press, 1998), and Great Hits (Pudding House Press, 2000), as well as individual poems in anthologies and magazines. 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. His latest book is America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (Plain View Press, 2007).
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HOMELESS IN SAN FRANCISCO

2009-10-17T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Camincha

holding his plastic bag
reaches 15th and Harrison, one
more corner, just like all the
others he’s passed tonight, empty.
His eyes roam the street like an
orphaned child looking for his
mother. He exudes desolation,
loneliness, despair, anguish.

All doors are closed.
No lights at the windows.
No one’s waiting for him.

He stands, feet firmly planted
as if wishing to sprout roots.
Somehow make himself belong
Taking just a little space,
wishes standing at the street
corner, wishes he could sprout
roots. Wishes had a little space
belong to him. A little warm,
safe space waiting for him in
this foreign land. Wishes he
could sprout roots.

His eyes roam the street, an
orphaned child looking for his
mother. He exudes desolation,
loneliness, despair, anguish.

All doors are closed.
No lights at the windows.
No one’s waiting for him.

Camincha is Peruvian. She was selected by KDTV for their segment “One of Ours” to honor her contributions to the Latin American community. Her poems, short stories and literary translations have been published in Lit & E-Zine magazines. She has desktop-published three bilingual chapbooks and her novella, As Time Goes By, was published in ‘05. The San Francisco Bay Guardian, says: “Camincha frames the ordinary in a way that makes it extraordinary, and that is real talent.”
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CHOICES

2009-10-16T15:00:00.000+07:00

by Christie Sargent

The same people
who wouldn't sell
my 16yr old friend
condoms at the supermarket
are the ones I see
standing outside the clinic
with signs that say
"You have other choices"
"Make better decisions"
"Murderer"

Christie Sargent is currently majoring in Comparative Literature at the University of Utah and living in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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LITURGY

2009-10-15T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Rob Lewis

Let the past follow the past. The beautifully faded map
wants to dissolve, to become fragments and leaves
for the wind. Let the wind have them.

We are wanderers again.
There is no place
that must not be freshly seen.

A glossy black beetle lifts its antenna
into the humming air
and waves them at the mountains
which gaze at the sun
which invites all things
to sing their names.

The listening among these,
and the cells rearranging,
that is the trail,
discerning what is real
from what we’ve merely made,
with hominid
humility, blessed

by the trillion voices, finding and
singing them back
to the centers of our prayers.

Rob Lewis is a natural materials painter and plasterer living in the northern Puget Sound city of Bellingham, Washington. His poem "The Painter" received the 1999 International Poetry Award in Atlanta Review.
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Rob Lewis's "Liturgy" is a New Verse News contribution to Blog Action Day, 15 October 2009.

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SONS OF KONG

2009-10-15T03:00:00.001+07:00

by James Penha

as Carteret Atoll disappears

South Pacific ripples used to tickle
with cool fingers
the toes of island children
who’d giggle with paradise
and smile in satisfaction when grown
they harvested their crops and fished the reefs
until tides rose like a slow tsunami,
never receding,
to salt their wells,
blanch canals,
fields and throats,
and tear the white sand beaches
from the atoll’s heart.
Now the hot sea stands panting and licking
at the last refugees
who tread water
as their world sinks
beneath them.

James Penha edits The New Verse News.
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James Penha's "Sons of Kong" is a New Verse News contribution to Blog Action Day, 15 October 2009.

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POLITICAL GHAZAL: THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH

2009-10-14T15:00:00.001+07:00

by Thomas R. Smith

What are we, if not our dream of a better world?
Feudal times have returned to mock us, the names
of the new fiefdoms Halliburton and Exxon.

In the Pacific there's a floating mass of garbage
twice the size of Texas. (Google it.) It's spreading,
the first state of the country of the future.

When did we become a trash island filling
space between oceans? Was it when that foolish
actor's voice filled the space between our ears?

I felt sad hearing about Teddy Kennedy's brain
cancer. In Nineteen-eighty the door was still
open to a higher road we might have taken.

We killed our King and dumped his wealth in the sea.
Our talk became wind keening through the mouth
of a plastic bottle washed up on the beach.

Thomas, you cried listening to Al Gore's concession
speech because it meant that the lovers in the song
really were going to die hiding on the back streets.

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher in western Wisconsin. His most recent books of poetry are Waking Before Dawn (Red Dragonfly Press) and Kinnickinnic (Parallel Press).
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Thomas R. Smith's "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is a New Verse News contribution to Blog Action Day, 15 October 2009.

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POETRY UPDATES

2009-10-13T15:00:00.000+07:00

by David Feela

Version 5.1 used rhyme
and a cadence in metrical time
to lyrically consider the death of a child.

Version 6.8 left the child dead
but revised the last stanza
to prove the mother was unwed.

The release of version 7.6
buried rhymes inside the lines
so the reader could listen, say,
to a torrent of rain against a pane of glass.

The floodwaters rose in 8.7,
the lines expanded to accommodate the flow
and the natural rhythm of speech surfaced,
forcing readers to question if poetry
had reached its last form of expression.

Confessional verse evolved by version 9.2,
where the child narrated her own catastrophe,
then died when the poem was through.

The latest version promises
to fix all the glitches,
to turn the tragedy into love
and leave the reader in stitches.

David Feela is a poet, free-lance writer, writing instructor, and book collector.. His work has appeared in regional and national publications, including the High Country News' "Writers on the Range," Mountain Gazette, and in the newspaper as a "Colorado Voice" for The Denver Post. He is a contributing editor and columnist for Inside/Outside Southwest and for The Four Corners Press. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments (Maverick Press), won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas, is now available.
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