METAMORPHOSIS

by Imogen Arate

The White House is campaigning to spin Biden’s support for Israel’s war while actively facilitating the slaughter. —The Intercept, January 17, 2024

Bid farewell in the rearview
the world you invented

A paper house unfurls
oil-slicked plumes 
as flags of surrender 

The chartreuse shutters
you proudly claimed
the victory of your refinement
curl to the lap of an inferno
nursed on sated falsehoods

And the Astroturf spits
its faux blades onto
the white pickets still
defending your illusions 

What aftertaste regurgitates now 
of the celebratory bubblies imbibed 
What terroir offers the graves 
of those you condemned

Limp now into a future that 
your past has trampled 

Let your nostrils collect the iron 
of dried blood drained to solidify 
the quicksand swallowing your flailing 
proclamations of pristine intentions

Imogen Arate is an Asian-American poet in search of hope: that humanity will overcome our self-destructive tendencies to work together against the onslaught of the climate crisis. She's also the Executive Director of Poets and Muses, an award-winning multimedia platform that has featured diverse contemporary poetic voices from around the globe. She believes that we will only be able to value lives equally when we lend our ears and hearts to the life stories of those we don't readily recognize as our kin.

PYROCENE THIS TIME

by Corey Weinstein

 

Nowhere winds bluster cloudless skies

blistering skins of rattle-windowed homes,

The parched air bites through wilted gardens,

Dry lightning judges the boiling world,

Heaven’s fiery tongues crackle the air

that booms the world without drenching grace,

Bestowing 8,000 square mile conflagrations,

Gaia’s retribution for dragging incendiaries

up from her breast with mine and pump,

Ripping off mountain tops, greasing her fissures,

Terra not Firma shakes our foundations.

 

Who is this people, these fire starters

that bespoil their nest and neighbor’s land?

In bands they were heroes of ice time survival

in pleasant harmony with their birthing world,

Now their fires are hidden in machines,

Personal aluminum hundred horse teams.

              Firepower unbound

                              Industrial pyro-pathologies

 Burning day and night

                      Blind to deluge and drought

                 Billions          Coal

     Tons             Gallons               Gas

           Billions     Daily     Billions!    

                Unimaginable bounty

                  Essential inferno.

 

A world melting into a grandchild’s future.

Corey Weinstein is a retired physician whose poetry has been published in Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Forum, and Jewish Currents. He currently attends writing classes at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in San Francisco and hosts their Poetry Circle. Weinstein has also been published in a number of medical/academic publications. He is an advocate for prisoner rights as the founder of California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he plays the clarinet in a local jazz band.

RED FLAG DAY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley




With the first wail of the siren
A seismic gasp
Shudders up and down the streets
Of our little town
Here at the base of the forested mountain
Where all the trees
Are named kindling,
Where all the trees are named tinder,
Where all the trees
Are named fire.
So in the midst of a rampaging pandemic
We must worry now
About this too,
That an errant spark
From an ill-maintained power line
Will ignite a rampaging conflagration
Leaving devastation and death
In its wake.

Access is closed to many of the trails
In the watershed
Until the high winds die down
And temperatures drop.
Not long ago
Access was closed
Due to the coronavirus.
Too many people in the woods?
What a thought!
When we could enter again
A few weeks ago
We headed to a favorite spot
On a wooded lakeside trail
Where we could espy an osprey nest
At the very top of a dead Douglas fir
And see if last year’s inhabitants
Had returned during our pandemical hiatus.
And when we found that the pair
Was back home
Our viral gloom briefly lifted
And our spirits did a little jig or two.

The osprey couple will soon be caring
For hatchlings
Who will raise a right old ruckus
Every waking moment
Demanding food from mom and dad
Until one day
Obeying a mysterious call,
An ancient hearkening,
They will perch on the very edge of the nest
Or on the diving board limb
Extending several feet out
Above the water
And after a great deal of fussing
After a great deal of high-pitched pleading
For further instructions,
They will surrender their anxiety
To the primeval urge
And step off into air.

The winds have died down,
There have been no more sirens,
But the red flag will remain hoisted
Until tonight at 10 PM—
And how many more times this summer and fall
Will the scarlet banner snap in the wind
Before the rains return?
The headlines say that COVID 19
Has killed half a million people worldwide
And is showing no signs
Of abating.
We are all exhausted and demoralized
By the constant threat of plague and inferno
But we manage to muster up a little hope
When we picture those young osprey
Dropping straight down toward the water
Then in a transformative instant
Finding their wings and flaring upwards
Into the shimmering day.


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. He podcasts at: thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

DARK WOOD

by Mark Williams

So there I am in the jury box. Voir dire,
the judge calls it, which means speak the truth,
as in don’t and you’re in big trouble. “Have you had
any past acquaintance with either the prosecutor,
the defense attorney, or the defendant?” His Honor asks me.
I no sooner say, “No,” than the prosecutor says,
“May I approach the bench, your Honor?”
and His Honor wiggles his finger as in yes, and make it snappy,
so the prosecutor stands and approaches His Honor.
With their eyes on me, they exchange a few words
before the prosecutor steps to the box and asks,
“Do you have a beagle named Keeper?” Since I do
have a beagle named Keeper, and I speak the truth,
I say, “Yes.” Then he says, “Do you remember
the time you were walking on the levee,
and Keeper and another beagle picked up a deer scent,
and you and the beagle’s owner spent three hours
searching the woods for your dogs?” And now I realize
the other beagle’s owner is asking me these questions,
and my chances of being squeezed from the box are high.
Sure enough, “You’re excused,” says His Honor.

But in the upcoming case of

                       The Truth
                              v.
       The President of the United States

the majority of Senatorial jurors have demonstrated
they are no more capable of speaking the truth
than Keeper is capable of ignoring a deer scent. Not only that,
the majority of jurors are acquainted with the defendant
in the sense that Barnacle Boy, The Dirty Bubble,
and Man Ray were acquainted with each other
as members of EVIL (Every Villain is Lemons)
in Season 3 of SpongeBob SquarePants.
But with no provisions in place
to squeeze our Lemons from the box,
it is we who are lost within a dark wood,
with no hope, until November,
to get out.

Mark Williams lives Evansville, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, and The American Journal of Poetry. His fiction has appeared in Drunk Monkeys and the anthologies American Fiction and The Boom Project. In response to the current administration, his poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Tuck Magazine, and Writers Resist.

ANTENORA

by Alejandro Escudé

after Dante Alighieri

There is Jared Kushner encased in ice
Packed close to Trump gnawing

On Kushner’s head, the two shades
Wrapped in ice sheets reflecting

A mounting body of dishonesty,
A gold, Cyrillic script disappearing

As it appears, the demons awake
Long as the scroll takes, unwinding

Then winding again while the brute
Chews his son-in-law’s brain casing.

Silent, the pale skull, save for murmurs
Of a backchannel to Satan’s wing.

Beside these, Michael Flynn pecks
The bodies of wicked soldiers offering

Themselves to the stern-faced bird
Whose frozen beak prevents dining.

All this I see, with my poet guide,
Walt Whitman, beside me, the fattening

Of America, its undoing, still circles
Ahead of us, more furies unfurling.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.