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“Last week Starbucks made headlines after it was revealed its new CEO, Brian Niccol—who has been described as the “messiah” the ailing coffee company had been searching for—will be commuting to the office via private jet. Niccol, you see, is generously going to abide by the company’s policy of being in the office three days a week. But since he lives in California and the Starbucks HQ is more than 1,000 miles away in Seattle, a corporate jet is really the only way to go.” —Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian, August 27, 2024 |
My firm supports the planet's cause;
It's why we switched to paper straws!
Friends, please reduce your CO2
By changing little things you do—
We really have to make a start,
And everyone must play his part.
We'll solve this climate crisis yet,
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| AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News. |
Philip Kitcher has written too many books about philosophy, a subject which he taught at Columbia for many years. His poems have appeared online in Light, Lighten Up Online, Politics/Letters, Snakeskin, and The Dirigible Balloon; and in print in the Hudson Review.
In those streets
of men and boys,
in that country
for men and boys,
she feels like a person with no face,
her face space covered,
her identity occupied
by a swirling mist of confusion
like nothingness being born.
Sometimes
she wishes for a blank space
that she could fill herself
with a Magritte apple
or even a woman
even herself
un-blanked
and visible.
Now, in those streets
of men and boys,
in that country
for men and boys,
she feels like a person with no voice,
Magritte’s apple is choking her,
muting her
so even in her home she whispers
her songs and curses.
Only in her head does she shout
that something will come of nothing,
that something must come of nothing.
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes.
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Illustration by Alex Kiesling for “What a Heat Wave Does to Your Body,” The New Yorker, August 25, 2023. |
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Is India a Safe Place for Women? Another Brutal Killing Raises the Question. The rape and murder of a trainee doctor at her own hospital has brought up, once again, uncomfortable truths about a country that wants to be a global leader. —The New York Times, August 22, 2024 |
This morning I realized I was feeling something
I hadn’t in a long time,
though the cedar and spruce may not have noticed me,
themselves dancing in the cool late summer breeze,
nor the robins threading the grass with their beaks,
seeking worms, nor the sky the color of humpback
whale milk, or so I’m told, nor the river that listened
to the plucky birds, but the wind, perhaps, intuited,
suddenly glistening as if the air were filled
with thousands of tiny silver glass beads,
and the robins hopped,
and that feeling I barely recognized, hope,
hope rose from the back of my throat
like a love song I wanted to croon to no one in particular,
or to everyone, proclaim that all is not lost,
rain is coming, and more sun, and worms are wiggling
in the ground, some not to be found, living on,
and the lotus continues blooming in our pond,
all is not lost, not lost, not lost,
not even the darkness that holds the stars together
in this glorious poem of a shared cosmos we call home.
in response to Deborah Digges’s “The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart”
Let the wind break through
the walls of our chests
draw out curdled breath anger
from past reckonings.
Let the wind race through the chambers
of our hearts cleanse the pathways
erase the stench of hatred
strip away the detritus of ridicule.
Let the wind eddy through us
through small openings
dissolve the particles of despair
that clog the beating heart.
Sweep them away, sweep
away passivity turgid like
the air after a tropical storm.
Pointless static gone from our brains.
Clear out the darkness in
our house of gall darkness hardened like dried
blood until we are again open-hearted
joyous vessels of infinite worth.
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt’s work has been published in many journals including Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review. Her poetry volumes include We Speak in Tongues; She had this memory (the Edwin Mellen Press), Foraging for Light (Finishing Line Press), and Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows, co-written with Tana Miller (Kelsay Press). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize.
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| ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP, August 16, 2024) — Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A Northern Arizona University professor emeritus who analyzed soil, water and vegetation samples taken along a popular hiking and biking trail in Acid Canyon said Thursday that there were more extreme concentrations of plutonium found there than at other publicly accessible sites he has researched in his decades-long career. |
Northern New Mexico
How many daybreaks
have I risen
to the drum/chant/flute spirit
of high desert’s Jemez,
sacred Indigenous mountains,
dancing my western skyline?
I wanted to escape Manhattan’s
work encampments,
false pinnacles of glass
and steel,
to find here,
at seven thousand feet,
gifts of earth/air/water,
untrammeled
by humanity’s heel.
The breathtaking cleft
that serves as the gateway
into the Jemez—
like a canyon pathway
into the clouds—
lofts me,
calls me
into another world.
Nature’s handiwork in the Jemez
expresses itself
in a thousand volcanos,
asleep for now,
fanning out from Valles Caldera,
planet’s largest,
grandeur that,
across Rio Grande’s valley,
seems all mine.
My hiking ardor leaves
its imprint
in that elk-abounding
encirclement,
a trail of joy,
marking every season.
Yet not without sadness.
I have first to pass
Oppenheimer Alley,
where the brain of man
explodes an idea,
whose remnants scatter
the countryside,
forces unseen
that torment the Jemez
without known end.
Los Alamos’ lights
at night snake downslope,
pointing at me,
atomic city’s
unrepentant reminder
that my escape
was less promise,
than dream.
Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Wingless Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.
