NVN Saturday: Apocalypse Now?

“Close to the Abyss” by Marybeth Rua-Larsen and “How to Survive an Election” by Steve Zeitlin

CLOSE TO THE ABYSS

by Marybeth Rua-Larsen

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News

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We’ve never lived so close to the abyss—
a felon in the White House—yet you, my knight,
ride in. I wouldn’t think to call it bliss
 
with tensions at a high-pitched, python hiss
in news reports: so many crimes. Indict!
We’ve never lived so close to the abyss,
 
and you distract me as we reminisce
about our kids, the work we love, hold tight
to us, and still, I couldn’t call it bliss
 
when daughters, sons, so young, are stuck with this:
his lies, the vitriol he spews, the spite.
We’ve never lived so close to the abyss.
 
You vow we’ll move to Portugal, dismiss
the obstacles of language, passports, flight,
the cost. Is now the time to call it bliss?
 
A lunatic— his head ballooned with hubris—
rouses me to stand, to choose to fight.
We’ve never lived so close to the abyss,
but I have you. I will. I’ll call it bliss.

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Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the South Coast of Massachusetts and works in her hometown library as Head of the Reference department. Her poems have appeared in Lily Poetry Review, Magma, Orbis, Crannóg, Eclectica Magazine and American Arts Quarterly, among others. She won the 2017 Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland, and was accepted into Marge Piercy’s Summer Poetry Intensive in Wellfleet. She is a member of the Powow River poets, and her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.

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HOW TO SURVIVE AN ELECTION

by Steve Zeitlin

Smokejumper

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My cousin Rod McIver—smoke jumper—
parachuted into Missouri wildfires
became famous for escaping the great Montana blaze
by igniting a flickering ring of fire round himself,
hunkering down so the 
sea of flames—
passed over and around
 
teaching us—when the infernos of the body politic
hurl down upon your fragile soul
light a passionate, fiery circle 
round yourself, your family, friends
 
let the fires of this wicked world
pass over and around

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AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

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Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore, New York City’s Center for Urban Folk Culture, and co-founder of the Brevitas poetry collective. He the author of a volume of poetry, I Hear American Singing in the Rain, and twelve books on America’s folk culture. In 2016, he published a collection of essays, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness with Cornell University Press. In 2022, he published JEWels: Teasing Out the Poetry in Jewish Humor and Storytelling (JPS/U. of Nebraska Press).