AIR QUALITY ALERT

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

The National Weather Service has issued an air quality alert for Aug. 11-12 for multiple northern Michigan counties because of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. —Lansing State Journal, August 10, 2025

We’re in charge of so little. Less than an acre; a cat. Clearing debris from the street drain. The few things we control are so inconsequential, no one cares. Not even us. Take my lungs. Please. Take Canadian wildfire smoke. Their wilderness makes civilization  hard. Even deer here in Michigan wear masks. How do they get them on?  Last week, we found out we were made of plastic. Today particulate matter is coating our lungs with Teflon. Silver Beach is like the bottom of an ashtray half full of gin. Haze, the weather man says, trying to fool the tourists. Maple/bacon smoke rolls in, a plague from the Northwest, but we are so far gone, its smell only makes us hungry.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

THE DAY I FOUND OUT TIMOTHY SNYDER MOVED TO CANADA

by Nan Ottenritter

after “The Day Lady Died,” a lunch poem by Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 pm in Richmond, VA a Monday

several days after Saturday Night Live’s skit

featuring James Austin Johnson 

portraying President Trump airs.

I will watch more TV news tonight.

Yes, perhaps not a great idea.

 

Dinner is served on TV table trays, 

7:00 pm sharp to see if Amna will join Geoff

on the PBS News Hour, and learn about 

what they consider important 

                                     

    I scroll, remote in hand,

to my YouTube library, search TCM for a 

movie I might have saved, and do what I

swear I wouldn’t – start watching recorded 

segments of Rachel and Lawrence and 

Amanpour (I like her the best. What’s not

to like about Walter Issacson interviewing

Ron Chernow about Mark Twain?)

Holy cow! Life in TV-media-land is good

 

so I opt out and switch to another streaming 

service to pick up an interview with one of my

favorite authors on fascism—Timothy Snyder.

The interviewer asks about his living in 

Canada now—what’s it like? The food in my 

stomach curdles 

 

and I learn that his academic inquiry resulted

in a move to Canada. He said the move had nothing 

to do with Trump. But for a moment I paused and 

imagine many, along with me, stopped breathing

Nan Ottenritter has published chapbooks Eleanor, Speak (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and My Year 2023 (2024).  She co-edited Discovery, Recovery: A Journey with Veterans (2023) and has been published in Artemis, Still Points Quarterly, Poetry Society of Virginia Anthologies, Dissent: an anthology to end war and capitalism (2023), and Writing the Land: Virginia (NatureCulture LLC, 2024). Her concern about American democracy has prompted her to read and understand the books of contemporary historians and host informal Citizens' Salons with friends, neighbors, and strangers in informal settings. 

NO JOKES

by Peter Witt

Tee shirt detail

The White House Correspondents' Association announced Saturday that its annual dinner will not feature comedian Amber Ruffin, nearly two months after it announced her as its selection. In fact, this year's show won't have any comedic performances at all. —ABC News, March 30, 2025

There’ll be no humor at this year’s
White House Correspondents Dinner,
no jokes to remind the trumpster that 
sometimes he seems more buffoonish
than presidential, no attempts to rib 
the VP for discovering
that Greenland is f’ing cold, 
 
no jokes about butt letting the editor
of the Atlantic into a war plan call
while he sat astonished in a Safeway
parking lot,
 
no jokes about the hint of musk
in the white house, and efforts
to unplug Tesla sales, and no hint
that the president has spent
more money on golfing weekends
than the dogers have saved
through their court contested dismissals. 
 
There’ll be no jokes about Jan 6th
invaders getting pardons, or 
failed efforts to settle the wars
in Gaza and Ukraine on the promised
first day in office, or how Canada
has scored a hat trick as the
president can’t remember
if today he raised or lowered tariffs.
 
The newspeople will gather, eat
drink their cocktails, eat their shrimp,
talk about who will be banned
from next week’s press conference,
listen while the master of ceremonies
talks longingly about freedom of the press,
as the crowd whispers what the jokes
might have been if their leadership
hadn’t cowed to the jokester in chief
who is still out there somewhere 
on the 18th green.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet, a frequent contributor to The New Verse News and other online poetry web-based publications.

I-89 FROM VERMONT TO CANADA IN WINTER

by Tricia Knoll

The Canadian border is less than an hour north.
Our countries have history. Good neighbors, 
borrow and offer. Fight side by side. 
I get my power through Hydro-Quebec.
Canadians come to shop, ski, hike
icefish, and mountain bike. I drive north
for museums and botanical gardens. Maple sap
runs both ways. Sugar shacks boil
here and there. I love the maple leaf flag 
as much as the blue and yellow of Ukraine. 
We share shock and a blood moon.
So close now
 
to winter’s big thaw. My eyes downcast. 
As if every winter pothole 
might eat me, vomit me out. 
Black slush banks the highway, 
a salt road gleams white. 
Once fleeing to Canada seemed
like an escape-hatch. Love
your neighbor. Don’t beggar them.
Will Canadians forgive? 
The border is less than an hour away.
We are so very close. 

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont near the Canadian border. Her 2024 collection Wild Apples documents her downsizing and move seven years ago from Oregon to Vermont. The taste of maple is sweet; the anger of neighbors is not.

NOT

(The View From Up Here)

by Kyle Gervais

Mike Thompson/Detroit Free Press

after Rebecca Watts’ That

 

not our problem what the man does 
or does not do down there 
it really is 
not we’ve got 
our own 
 
lives to lead our crosses to bear
our own nation each to 
his own I say 
he does not 
own us 
 
yet this transactional monster 
this us against them come 
to break us make 
us his it’s
not just
 
a joke not just a whim not just
one of those things each day
he just does, does 
not ask why 
not why 
 
not why not why not why not why
not why not why not why 
not why not why 
not why not
why not 

Kyle Gervais teaches Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he lives with his husband and two cats. He has poems in Arion, Canadian Literature, Classical Outlook, Eunoia Review, The New Verse News, Litbreak Magazine, PRISM international, and elsewhere

MAGA SAGA... OR PROJECT 2025 CONTRIVED

by Gilbert Allen

Cartoon by Pat Bagley, The Salt Lake Tribune, UT

Fear queers.

Ban trans.

Hire liars.

Bring on Elon!

Pardon felons.

ICE raids

housemaids

nurse aides.

Prez sez

"I buy

Gaza Plaza!

Bombshell hotel!

Max tax

Canuck crooks!

Vex Mex!

They pay

duty booty!

Hate great!

True Blue?
Screw you.

Gilbert Allen has tried to live True Blue in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, since 1977. For more information about him and his work, check out the interview here.

DIVING DUCKS ON NEW YEAR’S DAY

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley 

Art by Doug Pifer for The WV Independent Observer

Lithe buffleheads and mergansers
Newly down from Canada
Tandem dive into the rough blue Potomac
 
Wind whips the sycamores
Causing their spheres of seeds to
Dance as clouds race above
 
Next week Jimmy Carter will lie in state
And then Donald Trump returns
 
Today ducks are diving
Let’s just watch them dive

 
Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a Washington, DC naturalist and award-winning author of eight nature books, including Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons, City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, and Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island. She has had several previous poems published in the The New Verse News and many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice, including four that have won “Moon Prizes.” Her poetry has also been featured on nature-oriented websites.

ONCE AGAIN, SMOKE

by JL Huffman

Once again, smoke from Canadian wildfires envelops many American cities —Medical Xpress, July 3, 2023

JL Huffman is a retired Trauma Surgeon/ICU doctor who has published three poetry books: Almanac: The Four Seasons (2020), Family Treasons (2021), and Voyage: Vista and Verse (2022). Her individual poems have appeared in The Pharos, The Asahi Haikuist Network, Haiku Dialogue, Poetry Pea, Cold Moon Journal, The Pan Haiku Review, Haiku in Action, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and others. Twitter: @JoanHuffmanMD

NORTH AMERICAN MIGRATION

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Canadian wildfire smoke created a hazy red-orange sky over Lake Michigan on June 23 at the Michigan-Huron watershed. Wildfire smoke is causing poor air quality in the Great Lakes this week. —Fox Weather

Just a whiff of Armageddon seems worse
than a year of Covid precautions. Canadian fires.
Some jet stream sending a radar plume of it 
like a purple hot dog cuddled up to the blue bun 
of Lake Michigan. Thinner but more toxic
than mountain fog, smoke blurs horizons
and pulls a gray film over every noun,
smothered in adjectives. Diluted sun thins
the smoke like cream into soup, a color
variation, same raw taste. Ash residue
floats on bird baths. Only the crows sing. 
It’s a song they learned on their migration
from Hell. Not long ago. North of Thunder Bay.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske is a Michigan native. She is a poet, visual artist, and mother of three. Her publications include dozens of print and online journals, five books of poetry, and inclusion in several anthologies. She would never live anywhere else.

KINTSUGI

by Chris Reed

Kintsugi is the Japanese art or repairing broken pottery

with epoxy mixed with gold dust.

Cracks and repairs are not hidden but highlighted,

imperfections, part of an object’s life.

Sickly yellow lights the landscape,

like a room lit by an aging lampshade.

Great smoke plumes from Canadian forests,

blanket eastern farms, cities and shores,

swallow a line of green glittering trees

and a neighbor’s brown house

as if the fires are a mile,

and not a country away.

I taste ash on my tongue,

absorb smoke through sinuses,

and wonder about the birds, recently migrated

north across Lake Erie to nest,

On the deck, potted salmon-edged geraniums,

smaller blooms of pink and white,

and spikes of lavender, sit abjectly

in the aberrant light.

Rosemary and thyme rub against

each other in a blue pot with a gold seam.

My sister, the potter who shaped the planter,

repaired it in seven days,

mixing epoxy and resins with gold dust,

painting seams, fitting pieces together,

then aging the repaired pot in a large dark box. 

The trick, she said, is to know

that it is even more beautiful repaired.

Burnt ash in the air evokes memories

of not so distant atrocities and tragedies,

yet, seems a hairline fracture

in the ongoing dropping of our world.

Pillaging of nature, wars of aggression,

greed-driven power plays,

hate crimes and death-dealing viruses,

crack the thin ceramic of creation.

Lumpy veins of gold witness

our attempted repairs.

Is there room on this spiderweb

for another seam of gold. And how to start?

Epoxies of novenas and pilgrimages

don’t work anymore.

That god has picked up his play things. 

And even if we find the gold dust,

do we have a shoebox large enough?

And will we remember the trick?

Like others who live near or in the New York City area, Chris Reed was not only concerned about the extreme air quality conditions, but eerily reminded of the empty streets during the first year of Covid, and the indelible images of the air over New York after 9/11. Her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, US1 Worksheets, and The New Verse News.

TO GEORGE, THROUGH THE ORANGE PLAINS OF SKY

by John Linstrom

George Winston, a pianist and composer whose unadorned melodies sought to evoke seasonal rhythms of nature and became a signature style of New Age music in the 1980s with popular albums such as Autumn and December, died June 4 in Williamsport, Pa. He was 74. —The Washington Post, June 9, 2023

Today I heard you’d died.
It’s been a strange day.
Wildfire smoke swept from Quebec
down the Atlantic seaboard

and darkened the air of Manhattan
where years ago I saw you play
a benefit concert with my wife
who I was only dating then—

a moon hung above the stage
where you sat and your fingers
stretched over the cold keys
pulling forth arpeggiated chords

from my memory. Your album
December the only thing my mother
could listen to when giving birth.
Today I wonder what labor falls

upon the lands of Canada, the airs

of home, while frightful golden plains
bridge the continent as thick fallen sky,
the smell filtered through spectral masks we

kept too ready, and George, I want to know
what we will do without you, without
your hands and heart, what the land will be

without passing through the mystery of your mind.

John Linstrom’s first book of poetry, To Leave for Our Own Country, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. Linstrom is a writer, a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum in New York City, and the Series Editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Northwest Review, Writers Resist, North American Review, The Christian Century, and Cold Mountain Review. He lives with his wife and baby daughter in Queens.

GRAY HAZE

by Mark Danowsky

Smoke from wildfires in provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada made Philadelphia’s iconic Belmont Plateau skyline nearly invisible on June 7, 2023. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

The classic way to 

explain asthma

Imagine:

breathing through a straw 

Now, picture flipping burgers

on a charcoal grill

Today, that charcoal grill

is the sky

Endless red coals burning 

up in Canada 

No, Canada is the grill

400+ fires burning

Half of them

Out of control

The smoke has traveled

down to The States

Today, Pennsylvania sky

is an unnatural gray 

A gray that embodies

burnt rubber 

Now, imagine

that straw in your mouth

Imagine trying to breathe  

this burnt rubber air

All this gray 

filling your lungs

Cigarette after cigarette 

with no reward 

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of Meatless (Plan B Press) and other short poetry collections. His poems have been curated in many journals including Alba, The New Verse News, anti-heroin chic, Right Hand Pointing, The Broadkill Review, Otoliths, and Gargoyle. 

HAIKU

by Brian Dolan

Photo: Smoke billows upwards from a planned ignition by firefighters who were tackling the Donnie Creek Complex wildfire south of Fort Nelson, British Columbia, on Saturday, June 3. B.C. Wildfire Service 

Brian Dolan is a poet and fiction writer. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Beatnik Cowboy, Plum Tree Tavern, the Bangalore Review, and the Bosphorus Review of Books.

A GOD-GIVEN RIGHT

by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

Giving the middle finger is a “God-given right,” Canadian judge rules. —The Guardian, March 10, 2023

A judge has ruled that if you are Canuck,

God gave to you a fundamental right

Of self-expression: use what rhymes with duck,

Deployed with off. Although it's not polite,

Good manners maketh not the man who gets

Insulted by a neighbour with a grudge

Vindictively repeating epithets

Expressing scorn. According to the judge,

No crime's committed if you flip the bird,

Rebuffing smears. In all his decades while

In court, no feebler case was ever heard:

Good sense, he said, would see the case's file

Hurled out the window——but, in Montreal,

The courthouse has no windows, none at all!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, the Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Daily Mail, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post, and WestWard Quarterly.