NEWS FROM ANTARCTICA

by Pepper Trail

The enormous A68a iceberg which broke off from Antarctica in 2017 and has been drifting dangerously close to the island of South Georgia recently is starting to fall apart. New images from the RAF show how fragments of the once largest iceberg in the world are breaking away from the main bulk of the berg... Experts [are] growing concerned about the impact it could have on the island's unique biodiversity. —The Daily Mail (UK), December 24, 2020

From south of our imagination, the news:

There is a wild island of stone, South Georgia

Rough paradise of penguin and seal

And an equal island of ice, coded A68a

Broken from Antarctica, drifting free

 

Northward, the ice turns slow in the gyre

As if the wind and the salt currents

Sensing the land where the horizon bends

Shepherd the ice toward that meeting

Two giants so close-matched, sea-battered

 

On the rocky shore, the day approaches

When penguins and sea-elephants will see

What the albatross and the satellite know

The white wall coming to close off the world

The ice grinding to a halt against the stone

 

Perhaps there will remain a wave-churned strait

A path of escape into the abundant depths

Or perhaps the ice and stone will fuse

And a hundred thousand penguins

Denied the sea, will starve, day by day

 

There is nothing to be done

And even for those of us who know the Ice

Have walked with penguins to the water's edge

This makes no black mark, no blot

In the ledger of our responsibilities

 

Yes, the climate changed and the ice shelf cracked

But the blow I struck, it was the merest touch

The same for you, and for you, in our billions

All, light as feathers tumbling across a beach of bones

Then borne aloft on the eternal wind, and gone

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.

POLITICIANS DISCUSSING GLOBAL WARMING

by Donelle Dreese

                        after Isaac Cordal, Cement Eclipses

The billions beneath have drowned
leaving tiny pink congressional skulls
to emerge as pimples in a water-fat city.

They will not survive. They are swamped
in thawed Arctic Sea ice uttering bloated
bubbles that debate and float away.

They ascend on stacks of money and hover
the Atlantic waves, awaiting the final swoon
praying for a proposal to surface.

The discussion gurgles on and on
through puffed, water-inflated robes.
The last life-preserver goes to the whitest scalp.


Donelle Dreese is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Sophrosyne (Aldrich Press), A Wild Turn (Finishing Line) and Looking for A Sunday Afternoon (Pudding House). She is also the author of a YA vignette novella Dragonflies in the Cowburbs (Anaphora Literary) and the novel Deep River Burning (WiDo Publishing). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines and journals.

AFTER THE BOMBING

by Howie Good

Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Every bush strung
with shreds of bloodstained light,
there’s so much still to suffer,

an Atlantic of emptiness,
greasy & barely moving,
a slow-creeping blue creation,

like the drone of flies
from an adjoining world.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.