Today’s New Verse News: CAROLINA CALLING, AMERICAN DAIRY COWS UNDER ATTACK? & BALLOONS
CAROLINA CALLING
by Earl J Wilcox
Around noon
A balloon
Not from a party
Not from a parade
In full sunlight, it made
Our Carolina palmetto
Shades its eyes,
Smile in surprise:
Chinese February
Fireworks.
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Earl Wilcox lives in upstate South Carolina where the Chinese balloon was visible from his balcony on February 4.
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AMERICAN DAIRY COWS UNDER ATTACK?
by Cecil Morris
Chinese scientists have successfully cloned three “super cows” that can produce an unusually high amount of milk, state media reported, hailing it as a breakthrough for China’s dairy industry to reduce its dependence on imported breeds… They were cloned from highly productive cows from the Holstein Friesian breed, which originated in the Netherlands. The chosen animals are capable of producing 18 tons of milk per year, or 100 tons of milk in their lifetimes. That is nearly 1.7 times the amount of milk an average cow in the United States produced in 2021, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Photo: Workers feed cows at a dairy farm in Handan, Hebei province, China, on November 15, 2021.[Hao Qunying/Costfoto/Future Publishing/Getty Images] —CNN, February 1, 2023
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The headline makes me think of Superman, the Man of Steel, and cows in capes and tights and an enduring fight for truth, justice, and the American way (or better tomorrow). Then, after reading the news of exceptional Holstein Friesian cows cloned, I think of Frankenstein and his monster because, to a suburban boy, Holstein Friesian already sounds like science run amuck. I imagine herds of Chinese cow clones descending like knock-off handbags or phones on American dairies, udders bulging with tons of milk, another disruption, another Chinese plot (just like Tik Tok) to corrupt our country and weaken us and, maybe, the high-flying spy balloon was scoping out farms and dairies and not our strategic fields of nuclear missiles and when I read that our own FDA approves of meat and milk from cloned cows my mind leaps to deep-state conspiracies and wholesomeness and the American way weaponized against our best interests. What if they clone Tom Brady or Peyton Manning next? Will tons of passes saturate our football landscape and forever change the game we love as much as we love guns?
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Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, divides his time between Oregon and California. He has poems in or forthcoming from 3Elements, Cimarron Review, Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Evening Street Review, Hiram Review, Hole in the Head Review, The New Verse News, Scapegoat, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.
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BALLOONS
by William Aarnes
after Ingar Christensen
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blown-up balloons exist and celebrations exists with their popping party balloons, adults as caught up in the popping as their kids and helium-filled balloons exist and the joyful, worried disappointment of their so quickly drifting away from outstretched hands to land somewhere they shouldn’t after they burst and hot-air balloons exist, colorful hot-air balloons for the risky thrill of being above it all, of looking down at the countryside, the treetops, the houses, the cars, the people puny as can be, hot-air balloon rides exist for that glorious, if fleeting feeling that everything’s yours as far as the eye can see weather balloons exist, meteorologists all around the world working together, twice a day releasing balloons, balloons that rise twenty miles high before they burst, their radiosondes parachuting back to earth with all their measurements of how cold and windy it is up above and spy balloons exist, because people don’t get along spy balloons exist, keeping track of whatever nefarious planning and digging and building and moving around must be going on and nation-states exist, nation-states puffed-up and thin-skinned as balloons
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William Aarnes lives in New York. He admires—and thinks everyone should read and reread—Susanna Nied's translation of Ingar Christensen's alphabet.