SPILLED WATERCOLORS

by Diane Elayne Dees

Tweeted by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir from the International Space Station.

From space, the aqua, cream, azure, and cerulean
appear as if blended by a master painter
with an eye for serenity and expansion. I imagine
a second painting, this one bright, yet soft,
with puffs of spoonbill pink and splashes
of sea turtle green streaked across a peaceful
background of bunting indigo. From space,
the Louisiana delta is an impressionist’s dream
of water and feathers and the reflections
of a stippled sky. Up close, the picture tears
at the edges as the coastline rapidly recedes.
The Rusty Blackbird, black bear and Great Blue
fade behind a foreground of erosion and loss.
From space, the watercolors spill a dream-like
beauty onto a canvas teeming with life,
while the landscape shifts precariously,
altering the perspective forever.

Diane Elayne Dees has two chapbooks forthcoming. Her microchap Beach Days is available for download and folding from Origami Poems Project. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

THE ANTARCTICA BEAUTY PAGEANT

by Christopher Woods

Temperature in Antarctica soars to near 70 degrees, appearing to topple continental record set days earlier. —Headline in The Washington Post, February 14, 2020


Has fewer contestants this year.
Girls from every continent once competed
Before the heat became too intense.
No more bikini strut, wet tee shirt parade.
Now just a few stagger about in a white furnace
Where the fevered winds that killed the penguins
Blow incessantly across the bones of elephant seals.

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published the novel The Dream Patch, the prose collection Under A Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His photographs can be seen in his gallery. His photography prompt book for writers From Vision To Text is forthcoming from Propertius Press.

JULIANA V. UNITED STATES

by Pepper Trail

Twenty-one children brought a lawsuit arguing that the government needs to act on climate change. A federal court dismissed it. —The Atlantic, January 22, 2020. Photo: Kelsey Juliana, a lead plaintiff in the case arguing that the federal government must act on climate change, outside the Supreme Court. (KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS)

Plaintiffs cannot identify any injury to a concrete and particularized legally protected interest because their grievance is universally shared and generalized.  —U.S. Department of Justice

Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation – U.S. District Court Judge Josephine L. Staton, in dissent


The problem, dear children, is—
            causing universal disaster is not against the law

The government, indeed, has made a strong case to the contrary—
            that it is our most characteristic activity

Every tree that grows, bird that flies, fish that swims
Every drop of rain, every acre of ground, every river flowing—
            come on, you know this–is for us

And so we cut and cleared, emptied the sky and sea
Harvested the rain, plowed and burned, dammed and drained –
            the technical term is Stewardship—everything
         
All the while thinking … well, there must be more        
            somewhere

Dear children, the court admits some sympathy for your situation—
            you chose a most unfortunate time to be born

But that does not change the facts of the case
Destroying the planet has always been a basic human right—
            a precedent this court must respect

Therefore, we hereby declare and affirm that we—
            in conjunction with all judicial and political authorities worldwide—
            deny your misguided attempt to save the world

Case dismissed


Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

SOUNDINGS

by Ann E. Wallace

In Australia, the magpie 

pipers have sounded the alarm. 

Strange singing sirens lure 

us to belated attention,

whistling their learned panic 

cry as we lean in and stare.

How clever they are, these 

crows turned mocking jays,

turned canaries in the fires.

We pull out our phones, press

record and listen in awe 

at beaked imitation of man

made warning calls. Months, 

years after the flares and shouts 

of scientists, of firefighters,

went unseen, unheard, 

the birds learned too 

late to speak our language. 

As the heat swells, billows

to flame, and sucks each breath 

dry, hot angry licks sneer 

and force us to the water’s edge. 

And the rescue boats come 

too late, too few to heed 

the magpies’ urgent call. 

Ann E. Wallace has a new poetry collection, Counting by Sevens, available from Main Street Rag, featuring work about the realities and joys of life in contemporary America, motherhood, and illness. Recently published pieces in journals such as Mom Egg Review, Wordgathering, Snapdragon, Riggwelter, and Rogue Agent, can be found on her website. Twitter @annwlace409.

LISTLESS

by Tricia Knoll

I’ve grown weary of best of
recipes with wine
or cookie doughs
which candidate raised the most
murder mysteries
and top discoveries
must-see
movies
raw hip-hop
and alternative songs
records for longest feather
boa
lies we stopped counting
we endured
the year of fire
flood
wind
tornadoes
and can’t we just move
on
knowing what needs
to be done
and do it.

Tricia Knoll has seen dozens of media lists of "best of" in the news. The flashes of what famous people died in 2019 (without including the names of all the victims of bombings and war) and is suspicious there are also lists of the year of the most people who died by gun violence, etc. 

RAPE OF THE FLOCK

by Janice D. Soderling

President Donald Trump has taken historically unprecedented action to roll back a slew of environmental regulations that protect air, water, land and public health from climate change and fossil fuel pollution. The administration has targeted about 85 environmental rules, according to Harvard Law School’s rollback tracker. … However, the consequences of eliminating these regulations include more premature deaths from pollutants and higher levels of climate change-inducing greenhouse gas emissions, according to research from the NYU Law School. —CNBC, December 24, 2019. Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone.

Higgledy piggledy,
Donald J. T***p
raped Mother Nature
in meadows and parks

till she lay dead with dead
bees and dead sheeple, dead
biodiversity,
dead oligarchs.


Janice D. Soderling is a poet, writer and translator with three poetry chapbooks and another forthcoming in February. All of them include poems that first were published at TheNewVerse.News.

WISH-WASH

by Charlotte Innes

The city’s all a-wash with rain,
wish-wash the water goes,
down gutters, litter-clogged, down drains
and pipes—and, there they blow,
the coffee lids, a sock, a cane,
some cartons, butts, a picture frame
bobbing atop the flow.

Post-drought, the rain’s a candy store
(including crap), the drub
of drops on my umbrella or
green shoots of grass that mob
an arid patch or crack. But water’s
driven baby seals ashore
(the warming-ocean “blob”),

and heat and rain together rob
our coastal townships more
and more, as seaside cliff-tops drop
away. Some call it “war,”
as if some ancient pagan god
like Zeus, enraged by hubris, were lobbing
bolts of shock and awe,

to lift the ocean up nine feet,
(the forecast), flood our Basin,
disappear our beaches, shear
the edges off our nation.
Predictive climate maps delete
whole countries, tracking Earth’s defeat,
shutting down salvation.

But gentle rain tonight prolongs
my day, and keeps at bay
the Marshall Islands, Venice, their long
drowning—despair at how to stay
alert to horror, play and song,
to rain and grass, to wrongs and wrong,
to more than I can say.

Charlotte Innes is the author of Descanso Drive (Kelsay Books, 2017), a first book of poems, and two chapbooks, Licking the Serpent (2011) and Reading Ruskin in Los Angeles (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Tampa Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Rattle. She has written on literary topics for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation and other publications.  

TO MY GRANDSONS IN THE FUTURE

by Cathryn Shea

You benefit today from your innocent
enthusiasm for worms, grasshoppers,
and anthills. You study foxtails
and poppies, wade in the Yuba River.

When you read this in high school,
my hope is that you are in a public one.
Well-funded, or at least with an adequate budget
for the arts. I hope your summer is still
not breaking heat records
and in winter the Yuba does not flood
causing mudslides.

I hope you do not suffer premature neck strain
from bending over your cell phones.
If you have cell phones or know of cell phones.
Perhaps you wear a device attached to your eyes.
Perhaps you wear an embedded chip.

Does anyone mention climate change anywhere?
(That was a euphemism anyway.)
Is capitalism still running rampant?
Does your vocabulary even include such words?
Have robots taken over the classroom?

I ask you too many questions
and I apologize. By the way,
did you know apologia is the root
of apologize? Such a beautiful word

of remorse. I can’t imagine your vernacular.
I digress. (Oh, I can just hear you chiding.
Grandma uses too many strange words.)

I do hope there is still a Nature you can escape to.
Where the din of machinery can’t be heard.
Where artificial radiance
does not vie with the night sky.

Cathryn Shea is the author of four chapbooks including Backpack Full of Leaves (Cyberwit, 2019) and Secrets Hidden in a Pear Tree (dancing girl press, 2019). Her first full-length poetry collection Genealogy Lesson for the Laity is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in September 2020. Cathryn’s poetry appears in New Orleans Review, Tar River Poetry, Typehouse, and elsewhere. See @cathy_shea on Twitter.

THE BRING OF DISASTER

by Mark Williams

O Heavenly Father,

It’s me again Austin Baggerly. I cant talk long tonight.
Mom says to say my prayers and get to sleep pronto
cause Dad got me home late. Home to my house
where he used to live but now is just Mom and me
and my box turtle Bradley. But you know that.
Pastor Crandall says you know everything there is.
He says You are Omniportant. Everyother Sunday Dad
takes me to praise You at Sudden Glory Fellowship.
Pastor Crandall says You made our President President.
Pastor Crandall says our President is The Chosen One.
Mom says that The Chosen One destroyed her marriage
and that if you chose him then you must want
to take everyone to the bring of disaster.
Why do You want to bring us there? For instants why
did You choose someone who does not care
if the world gets too hot for us to live? Where will we go?
And why did You pick someone who lets fires
burn up all the trees and forest animals
that You made in the Beginning? Plus why
is it OK to let people buy guns to shoot me in school?
Mom says the President wants to build a wall
to keep out poor people so they can stay poor
in there poor countrys? Why would You God
want to keep people poor in poor countrys
when You cared for the birds in the air
before the President let them burn up in the forests?
Maybe You chose someone to bring us to disaster
so that next time when it is our turn to choose
we will choose someone who stops us
before going all the way in to it. But in my pinion
You are cutting it awful close. Dear God,
when I turn ten will all this make sense? I hope so.
Sometimes I wish I could pull in my head like Bradley.

                                                            Amen

Mark Williams lives in Evansville, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. His poems in response to the current administration have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, and Tuck Magazine. This is his fourth appearance in TheNewVerse.News.

WHEN WE ARE THANKFUL

by Tricia Knoll

“‘Sleepwalking toward climate catastrophe:’ World must slash emissions immediately, UN report says.” —USA TODAY, November 26, 2019. Photo: Lightning is seen over the Atlantic Ocean on Sept. 4 as Hurricane Dorian approaches Carolina Beach, N.C. (Elijah Nouvelage/For The Washington Post)

We know there is only today
and that yesterday failed
to stop the planet’s demise.

That egos balloon up huge
and denying. Storms twirl
on gusts and blusters.

Whoever named the Black
Friday meant those days
after the forgetting,

the pivoting on spindles
as if the sunrise will always
bring on the chitter of chickadees.

When we are thankful,
we own the worry,
plumb the despair and feel

that today we are breathing.
That today we are breathing
and for this gentle gratitude.

Tricia Knoll acknowledges the irony of the bleak U.N. climate change report coming out during the Thanksgiving week in the United States. With forecasts of a polar bomb on the way, she buckles her boots. She is an eco-poet who lives in Vermont.

IN THE NEW CLIMATE

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

This is what it looks like when national parks are sacrificed for a #borderwall. Footage at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument via Kevin Dahl, NPCA Arizona Senior Program Manager pic.twitter.com/VE9UKziPzl

— National Parks Conservation Association (@NPCA) October 4, 2019

no need to migrate, so geese fly laps around the county
lake to lake at dawn, louder than garbage trucks.

A friend makes a demon cozy, so she doesn’t always have to face it.
She can know where it is even if she doesn’t know what it is

unlike mosquitos with valises full of Eastern equine encephalitis
come to visit. Swatting lunchmates, even on the face, becomes socially acceptable.

A friend draws stories with her own language of shapes not everyone can read.
That’s okay. Lilacs do not bloom this year; there is a mid-April blizzard.

Fawns come to the door wanting the cat to play.  Children holding hands
walk across a lake of grass. Yard lights never let the trees sleep, not deeply.

A friend grieves deeply and with laughter, at once. She raises monarchs
and tonight the government will poison them as well as mosquitos.

On her balcony flickers and doves fight squirrels and raccoons for seeds
and a little honey.  Tomorrow the butterfly rain.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske most recent book is Art Speaks with painter Mary Hatch. She tries to live outside as much as possible while owning a house.

THIS IS THE SEASON

by Damian Balassone

Photo of Greta Thunberg from i-D Vice.

for Greta

This is the season
where the chief commits treason
and the riddler hides behind his rhyme.
This is the year
where the king instills fear
and the atheist prays behind drawn blinds.

This is the show
where nobody knows
if the story is fake or is real.
We’re told this is war
but no one’s quite sure
if they’re meant to crush snakes or bite heels.

This is the night
where the girl of the light
summons the stars and the spheres.
She looks to the skies
with furious eyes
and glimpses the moon through her tears.


Damian Balassone is an Australian poet whose work has appeared in over 100 publications, most notably in The New York Times.  He is the author of three volumes of poetry, including the forthcoming Strange Game in a Strange Land.

RED JELLYFISH

by Orel Protopopescu

Credit: necn

Let the jellyfish come,
bloated, like warming seas,
tying their tentacles
around the rudders of ships,
until even the willfully blind
will see smoke rising
from the scorched lungs
of the Earth.

Let the jellyfish come,
waving thin, pale arms,
peeling off the blinders
of indifference and despair,
awakening hosts of children,
stirring the birds
we shed like old moons
as we burn away skies.

Let the jellyfish come
with a sting for every sin,  
marking crime scenes
with their toxic,
bloody flowers,
flashing red alarms
through the acid oceans
we set on simmer.

   

Orel Protopopescu won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010 and a commendation in the Second Light Live competition, 2016. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, and paper-based reviews and anthologies. Her book of translations (with Siyu Liu), A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China, was honored by the NYPL. Other publications: a book for teachers of poetry, prize-winning picture books, a bilingual poetry app for children and a chapbook, What Remains. She is currently completing work on a biography of the legendary ballerina, Tanaquil Le Clercq. 

SCURRYING

by Carl Mayfield 

A man is a child
at both ends of life

and much of the time
between dawn and dusk,

touching his toes
to illustrate how the head

can drop out of sight
and still send thoughts

scurrying in every direction
to bounce off other heads

not all there but alive
in a juice neither visible

nor mute, allowing the new arrival
to pick up a language

to discover how far away
words can be from what matters

while noticing how few travelers
sense there is but one tribe

gathered under a toxic sky
which kills everyone, though

not all look up in time to see
their assassin—themselves—

winking back. A pail should be issued
at birth, to play in the sand at first,

then later to bail water out of the desert
as the second childhood shows up,

a little too late to be enjoyed
but with no less power to stun

as it performs the dead man's float.

Carl Mayfield lives and writes at the extreme northern edge of the Chihuahua Desert. His two most recent chapbooks are High Desert Cameos and Gather Round All Ye Wild Children of the Defrocked Atom.

AN OKWARD SITUATION

by Julie Steiner

Video published on Aug 19, 2019

Since "jökull" means "ice sheet," not "rock,"
we're re-christening Okjökull "Ok."
By the time we re-brand
balmy Iceland as "Land,"
will we stop calling climate change "schlock"?

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego. Besides the TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, Rattle, Light, and the Asses of Parnassus.

(RED) HEAT / HOT / HAT (RED)

by Ron Riekki

“By 2050, the Northeast can expect approximately 650 more deaths each year because of extreme heat, the [National Climate] Assessment found.” —“Dangerous heat wave brings misery to 195 million from New Mexico to Maine,” CNN, July 19, 2019

for Robert Francis, Mark Strand, Hayden Carruth, and Reiko Redmonde

Heat and the colors of heat, like coal-mine hells,
and it gets so hot that the moon looks burnt
and the horizon itself is now a broiler pan
and my girlfriend in Lille says, “The fan broke.”
What about the AC?  “What AC?  We don’t have AC.”
And she tells me a neighbor died.  I say, “How old?
as if that’s an acceptable excuse, as if degrees
represent years.  And I remember a line from
Shakespeare: “the very birds are mute.”  And
I remember a line from a newspaper article today:
“June of this year was the hottest June on record

for the world.”  Temperatures climb and I think
of the moment in Free Solo where the guy fell
and we gasped until the parachute opened up
and we aren’t the ones gasping now, but we're
the ones falling.  And when I broke my ankle
in the military, one of the corpsmen said,
“Put heat on it” and there was another
corpsman there and he said, “No, put ice
on it.”  And they argued about it while I looked
down at the purple and brown and orange
under my skin, wondering if I’d ever walk again.

Ron Riekki's latest book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.  On August 25, he appears at Revolution Books in Berkeley with Berkeley Poet Laureate Rafael Jesus Gonzalez and Sacramento Poet Laureate Julia Connor.

WITH EARTH OUR FLESH, WATER OUR BLOOD

by Darrell Petska

Extinction Rebellion is an international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience in an attempt to halt mass extinction and mimimise the risk of social collapse.

 "It's the least I can do." Into my ears,
starving bees hived. Deep in my lungs
nested gun-shy doves.

In droves came reeling beetles and butterflies,
evicted toads and frogs—these to my heart's
several chambers, while in the burrowed
turnings of my gut, bait-sick
gophers and ground hogs found refuge.

"It's the least I can do." Lodgeless muskrats
and beavers sheltered in the round
huts of my armpits, harried owls and hawks
took to my shoulders, even swooning
flowers and trees I drew to my nostrils.

I took all in, as many as I could, and still
others pressed near, threatened and sore,
until at last I cried "I've done all I can!"

Oh, but then my grandchildren came running:
"Grandpapa, Grandpapa, save us!"
Into my arms my loved ones curled,
soft and vulnerable, and I realized
much more I yet could do.

My feet stepped forth, driven by the lives
within and about me, all earth becoming
my flesh and its waters my blood.
No fears of failure could enter my mind
when life, lived large or small, is all we have.

At the core of Extinction Rebellion’s philosophy is nonviolent civil disobedience. "We promote civil disobedience and rebellion because we think it is necessary—we are asking people to find their courage and to collectively do what is necessary to bring about change."


Darrell Petska, a Wisconsin poet, sees hope in concerted action for a livable planet. His five grandchildren make that effort ever-more urgent.

FIDDLING AND BURNING

by Judy Kronenfeld

Because we are old, and will be,
conveniently, dead

Because no parent or grandparent
can bear to think of it

Because the elephant’s in the room,
but we are blind, and cannot
agree

And the will needed is like the will
of a mobilized ant colony
with group mind

Because the everyday is still
preoccupying, comforting, beautiful,
and Noah needs help cutting out snowflakes
for the kindergarten bulletin board
with its autumn leaves, spring rain, summer
daisies, and Sophia needs to find her cleats
for soccer practice

Because the expansion of the universe
is speeding up into ever more dizzying infinities,
exponential zeroes of space-time
empty of us, or almost anything, and emptying

And what’s a billion hardly forever years
of seasons, anyway—wet and dry, hot and cold, grief
and peace—before we brown, boil, burn,
and are swallowed by the sun,
and who says we, relatively new kid on the block,
at only 200,000 orbits around that star,
will still be here when the oceans begin
to evaporate?

Because our planet is already haunting us
like a memorial portrait, as we write
our lost-cause civilizations off.
It turns inside my mind,
courtesy Google Earth, day and night:
with its perfect halo
of atmosphere, its cool webbing
of gossamer or clotted clouds, and the stilled golden
explosions of New York, Los Angeles,
Shanghai, Mumbai, Moscow, Istanbul,
Rome, Paris, London.

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of four full-length collections and two chapbooks of poetry, including Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Connotation Press, DMQ Review, Ghost Town, Miramar, Natural Bridge, One (Jacar Press), Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals, and in more than twenty anthologies.

FAT BLACK BEES

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

A common bumble bee found in the Appalachians. Photo: Kelly Graninger/USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab via Popular Science.

A May morning
More like January.
I sit on the bench in front of the house
Brooding about the unseasonable weather
And looming climate catastrophe,
Wondering what it will mean
For our children and grandchildren,
For the children and grandchildren
Of all humanity.
Wondering if we will be able
To overcome the depredations
Of the mad, greedy bastards
Pumping ppms into the atmosphere
Day and night without pause,
With lethal, sociopathic glee,
Setting loose the wild dogs
Of hurricane and tornado, flood and fire
In order to stuff their greasy pockets
With mere money,
Not much good when everyone’s gone.
Too late is almost here.
Will we beat the carbon clock
Or will we all be Ishis,
The last of our tribes?
And what about these fat black bees
I’m watching right now as they traffic
In the rosemary and jasmine
By the front porch steps?
Will they be able to adapt
To some fierce, inhospitable new normal?
Or will they follow countless other species
Out the door?
I dream of a fine May morning
A hundred or a thousand years from now
When our descendants
Will be lazing
In hammocks and lawn chairs
Appreciating the thrum and buzz
Of apian activity
As the heirs of these earnest little toilers
Arrive at the job site—
Blossoming rosemary bushes and jasmine vines—
Wide awake, scrubbed and shiny,
Ready for work.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California.

WHEN I AM THE DAY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley




If I were ever to be a day
I would be pleased and proud
To be like this one
Modestly performing its tasks
With competence and confidence
And economy of effort
Quietly and carefully arranging above us
The great clouds bulging
With this afternoon’s rain
Spreading pale gray light
Among the hillsides, the woods
The neighborhoods and parks
And playing fields
Toting armloads of song birds
From tree to tree to tree
Mingling with flowers and bushes
With forgotten grasses in roadside ditches
And vacant lots
Conducting the cantankeous oratorio
Of a chaos of crows
Occupying the bare branches
Of the neighbor’s walnut tree.
And when I am the day
No mauling of the climate
No wars or drone strikes
Or collateral damage
No indecency in high places
No exploitation or economic collapse
No children starved or abused or neglected
No drama, no flash-and-dazzle
Or whoop-dee-doo
A plain, ordinary day of abundant courtesy
And generosity
And a night flooded with stars
To still the noise
And remind the crowd at the top of the food chain
Whence they have come
And where they are bound.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California.