TIDY UP

by Peter A. Witt

Nobody can predict how the 48 teams will do at the FIFA World Cup this summer, but if you wanted to gamble on Japan being the tidiest team, you’d surely clean up at the bookies. Thanks to a societal expectation of all Japanese people, you’d never know they were there. —CNN, June 14, 2026

The final whistle echoes across the Dallas pitch,
and the stadium slowly drains,
leaving behind the usual modern tax of celebration:
a landscape of crushed plastic, discarded cups,
and the torn remnants of a stadium afternoon.
Most of us walk away,
assuming the mess belongs to the stadium,
or the city, or anyone but ourselves.

But then, the blue jerseys of the Japanese faithful emerge,
not moving toward the exits,
but walking down the rows.
They carry large, simple trash bags,
bending to collect the garbage left by strangers.
There are no television cameras forcing their hand,
no rewards promised at the gates.

They call it tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu, 
"the bird that flies away leaves the water unstirred."

It is a quiet philosophy woven into the fabric of a childhood,
where classrooms are swept by the students who occupy them,
and responsibility is not a chore,
but a form of respect for the space we share.

It makes you stop and look at the row you just vacated.
Why must we always leave a scar on the places we visit?
Why do we treat the shared world as a landfill managed by someone else?

Imagine a culture where accountability isn't outsourced,
where we take pride not just in the win,
but in the condition of the ground beneath our feet.
To leave a place cleaner than we found it
not for the praise, but simply because we were there.

Peter A. Witt by chance lives in Texas and is a recovering university professor who lost his adjectives in the doldrums of academic writing. Poetry has helped him recover his ability to see and describe the inner and outer world he inhabits. His work has been twice nominated for the Best of the Net award and has appeared in a variety of online and print publications. He also writes family history.  His book about his aunt was published by the Texas A&M University Press (Edith's War: Writings of a Red Cross Worker and Lifelong Champion of Social Justice). He is also an avid birder and wildlife photographer.

SURGEONS OF THE INSECT WORLD

by Martin Elster

Ants in Florida perform life-saving surgery on their peers, scientists have discovered. They are only the second animal in the world known to do this — along with humans.  —Live Science, July 2, 2024. Image by Bart Zjilstra.

The femur of an ant sustains a wound?
No fear! Her friends come round to amputate it.
The injured ant is brave. (They don’t sedate it.)
Her tight-knit colony is super-tuned
to spot all troubles, never apathetic
to nest-mates. Every helper is a hero.
Each one of them, despite receiving zero
training, is a natural-born medic.
They diagnose, see if the wound’s infected
or sterile, and then treat accordingly
(like surgeons you or I might go to see).
Damaged or not, no member is neglected.
They work for forty minutes on her leg
to lop it off. At first, they lick and lick
the wound so clean, no germ will make her sick.
Mouths moving up her limb, she doesn’t beg
her mates to stop. Stoic, calm, collected,
she sits there while the surgeons work intently,
gnawing at her shoulder — far from gently.
With five remaining legs, feeling respected,
she walks off as if nothing is amiss
with feelings of contentment — or even bliss. 
With Primal Instinct as their sole director,

she’s confident her kinfolks will protect her.

The winner of the 2022 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, Martin Elster comes from Hartford, CT, where he studied percussion and composition at the Hartt School of Music and performed with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Martin, whose poetry has been strongly influenced by his musical sensibilities, has written two books, the latest of which is Celestial Euphony (Plum White Press, 2019).

AVERSION TRAINING

by Robin S. Axworthy

Photo credit: Bette Ferber via The New York Times.

I have grown used to the moisture of my own breath 

on night walks, the mask, the sound of my own breathing 

pushed up past my ears.  Used to my own company at home, 

with only husband and sometimes daughter.  Used to any other

contacts as just the glass and scratch of microphone, letters 

appearing and sorting into sense on a screen. Used to touch

as poison to be scraped clean with alcohol and friction.

Accustomed now to nearness an electric buzz of warning

away from flesh, ears so used to staccato whine they have forgotten 

rippling waterfall of open mouth, mouth forgotten how breath 

feels naked and dry, thin in the bare air, my hands so used to solitude 

they’ve forgotten how to find their way to warmth.  

Robin S. Axworthy has been published in various anthologies including, most recently, Dark Ink: An Anthology Inspired by Horror (Moon Tide Press) and Is It Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? Women Over Forty Write on Aging (Beautiful Cadaver Project). Her chapbook Crabgrass World was published in March 2020 by Moon Tide Press. 

CLEANING THE WHITE HOUSE

by Cathleen Calbert

Chaos presidency, sighed MSNBC.
I thought of bombs blasting, black holes, and tornadoes,
how no kid wants a home that’s unsafe and crazy
with a mom screaming and a dad who ups and goes.
My husband and I don’t have children, just trauma
from fucked up childhoods, I suppose, along with doubt
about those who thrive on narcissistic drama
as does the USA’s own proud tangerine lout,
so we rail along with our small screens, piss and moan
our way to a messy sleep, and don’t even kiss
on the lips as often as lovers ought but drone
on and on about this political abyss.
It’s hard to believe we’re the adults in the room.
But we are, dear. Time’s up, timed out, time for a broom.


Cathleen Calbert’s writing has appeared The Nation, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of four books of poems: Lessons in Space, Bad Judgment, Sleeping with a Famous Poet, and The Afflicted Girls. Her awards include the 92nd Street Y Discovery Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Sheila Motton Book Prize.

EXHALATION

by Pepper Trail

"The T***p administration has hailed its overhaul of federal pollution restrictions on coal-burning power plants as creating new jobs, eliminating burdensome government regulations and ending what President T***p has long described as a 'war on coal.' The administration’s own analysis, however, revealed on Tuesday that the new rules could also lead to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 from an increase in the extremely fine particulate matter that is linked to heart and lung disease, up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days. "—The New York Times, August 21, 2018

Edenton, North Carolina


Mother, your breath shallow and slow, almost gone
Barely moving the sheet on your hospice bed

You are reluctant, now, to inhale
To bring in the world, its noise and its pain

So much easier to breathe out, to gentle
And at the end of that emptying, to stop

But the stubborn body kicks, the heart turns over
Begins again, will not yet let you go

Mother, it’s all right.  You are strong
Nothing, in the end, will stop your dying


Ashland, Oregon


The world, the west, is on fire
Vancouver to Yosemite, all tinder, alight

Halfway between, we must breathe
What air there is, what we are given

When we speak, smoke is what we say
And so we have stopped speaking

The mountains are gone, the valley
Through the windows, everything

The smoke is where we live now
What we breathe in, and then out


Washington, DC


He does not mind the world, the President
Thoughtless, he inhales its floods and its flames

Exhales this atmosphere in which we live
Gives us, this week, the “Affordable Clean Energy Plan”

Not Affordable, or Clean, or Energy, or a Plan
Simply another act in a lifelong history of harm

Power plants, cars, planes, you all and me
Together, we contribute: 408 parts per million

We are told there is nothing to be done
We are told there is no choice.  Just breathe

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. In his spare time, he leads natural history tours around the world.