NO SEATS AND ONE TOILET

by Susan Cossette

Challenger Deep, Hades Zone—

There are better maps of the moon and Mars.

 

Humans like superlatives—

Highest, lowest, longest.

Hubris.

 

We sit cross legged, barefoot—

watching for golden pocketwatches,

chipped china and worn shoes, 

footprints sunk in silent ocean sand.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

POET LAUREATE ADA LIMON CREATES A POEM TO BE ENGRAVED ON A SPACESHIP

Others invited to include our own names on a chip

by Alice Campbell Romano

https://europa.nasa.gov/message-in-a-bottle/sign-on/

Years ago I bought you a star.
The framed certificate turns up 
now and then
when I sift a desk, weed a bookshelf.
An undistinguished star 
somewhere 
with your name.
You would better have appreciated
my renaming Mars for you, 
red combatant. 

Earth registers stars 
from Earth’s point of view,
assigns coordinates,
sells naming rights.
Maybe only Earth has this compulsion
to brand the infinite.

Our ambition sends craft 
to search out life
on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
We shall leave Earth’s mark— 
in—be astonished—

a poem 
about Earth. Poets ache.

I am tempted without reason
to piggyback, to add me, 
on a microchip
to Europa. 

You didn’t care when I bought you
a star. I will escape for a billion miles,
to the edge of the infinite, in my 
name alone. 

Alice Campbell Romano lived a dozen years in Italy where she adapted Italian movie scripts into English, married a dashing Italian movie-maker, made children, and moved with the family to the U.S., where they built, she wrote, and the children grew. Her poems have appeared in—among other venues—Prometheus Dreaming, Persimmon Tree, Pink Panther Magazine, Orchards Poetry, New Croton Review; Beyond Words, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Quartet Journal, Instant Noodles Devil's Press, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press. In January, she was awarded HONORABLE MENTION in The Comstock Review's 2022 Chapbook contest, "...not an award that we give every year, but an honor set aside for a few manuscripts." Alice swooned. 

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.

SEQUEL

by Susan Barry-Schulz

          

 

we’ve started

already

 

marring Mars

with our glittering

litter

 

dotted earth debris

in the form

of blended aluminized

specialty fabrics

 

first wind-blown

across a dusty landscape

 

now lodged

in the rugged rocks

of an ancient river delta

on another planet

 

how capable

how culpable

Susan Barry-Schulz grew up just outside of Buffalo, New York. She is a licensed physical therapist living with chronic illness and an advocate for mental health and reducing stigma in IBD. Her work has appeared in The New Verse News, SWWIM, Barrelhouse online, Nightingale & Sparrow, Shooter Literary Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, The Wild Word, Bending Genres, Feral, Quartet, Wordgathering, Gyroscope Review, Harpy Hybrid Review, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere.

LIFE ON MARS

by John Whitney Steele

NASA’s Retiring Top Scientist Says We Can Terraform Mars and Maybe Venus, Too —The New York Times, January 2, 2022

Imagine the red planet with an atmosphere,

replete with plants and animals. It isn’t hard to do. 

A couple billion years ago Mars lost its air,

its water too, and so it is no longer blue.

But should we choose to live there, we could change it,

claims NASA’s top scientist. All we’d have to do

is terraform the planet—that goes for Venus too.

Put up a magnetic shield, block the sun, retain

more heat, and watch Mars turn from red to blue.

The solar system’s ours. Imagine life on Mars 

while back on planet Earth we churn out CO2.

John Whitney Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University. His chapbook The Stones Keep Watch was published by Kelsay Books in 2021. His full length collection Shiva’s Dance will be released in 2022. Born in Toronto and raised among the pines and granite cliffs of Foot’s Bay, Ontario, John lives in Boulder, Colorado where he encounters his muse wandering in the mountains.

GODDESS OF THE UNDERWORLD

by Martin Elster 

A newfound species of millipede (Eumillipes Persephone) has more legs than any other creature on the planet—a mind-boggling 1,300 of them. The leggy critters live deep below Earth's surface and are the only known millipedes to live up to their name. Image credit: Paul E. Marek, Bruno A. Buzatto, William A. Shear, Jackson C. Means, Dennis G. Black, Mark S. Harvey, Juanita Rodriguez, Scientific Reports via LiveScience, December 16, 2021.

We look for life on Mars, yet deep below

our feet she’d crept unseen, a creature blessed

with far more legs than any life we know:

thirteen hundred plus! With a great zest

for fungi, she was the world’s cellar-dweller,

ginormously antennaed, lacking eyes—

a tendril. Her recycling skills were stellar

(although she wasn’t looking for a prize!). 

Earth’s only millipede uniquely “milli,”

she was the slenderest and longest weed  

that we had ever hauled up willy-nilly.

We’ve christened her “Persephone.” Indeed,

although she led a life of utter gloom,

our little cousin helped the flowers bloom.

  

Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra (now retired). He finds contentment in long woodland walks and writing poetry, often alluding to the creatures and plants he encounters. A full-length collection, Celestial Euphony, was published by Plum White Press in 2019.

ON MARS WE'RE BRIEFLY FLYING

by Chris Vola

 

The winds declined to rip

the helicopter to pieces,

its carbon-fiber blades

spinning furiously,

defiantly, churning

for a few seconds

in the flushed sky,

even though sooner or later,

like all expensive toys,

its sunken parts would be left

to fill with dust,

even though a storm

would eventually

take an antenna,

the circuitry would garble,

landing gear would be

plucked like scabs.

Still, NASA applauded.

Elon Musk re-tweeted.

Someone proclaimed

“a red-letter day on the Red Planet!”

From 178 million miles away,

another data burst confirmed

that the helicopter

had touched softly

back down on the rutted 

ground, where only rovers

dared to tread.

The waiting was finally over

for the engineers,

who, giddy from their screens,

began to believe the future

could be tolerable.

They immediately forgot 

the gorgeous sunlight that

filtered through the oaks

outside the command center,

or the clogged freeways 

where blood & plastic 

spilled like SpaceX

propulsion fluid across

our still-living desert.

The Earth's concerns

had become irrelevant  

to them, like a neighborhood

with unknown sirens & sickness,

or the bus-stop profile 

of a sleeping family.

The Earth itself, unmoved

by progress

on another sphere,

would only turn

& brace its stem

against its own putrid winds.

Most of us would continue

to stay in the homes

we’d been staying in 

& busy ourselves

with the swipe-&-click

routines that could never

really sustain us,

pretending not to hear

the whirring in our heads,

or see the ugly

bubble cockpit

of a much different chopper,

one fueled by muzzle-flash,

& boredom,

& lungs twisted

full of loss,

its impact heavier

than a verdict,

emptier than the spacesuits

we’d never wear 

while prancing

in the Martian gravity,

awaiting Elon’s rise

from cryogenic slumber

to save us

on the third day.

We'd long

given up wondering

why it came

for us this way or

if we might escape

it, its appetite whetted,

its wide blades

ready to grind us into

the only dust

we’d ever know. 

Chris Vola is the author of six books, most recently I is for Illuminati: An A-Z Guide to Our Paranoid Times (William Morrow, 2020). His recent poems appear or are forthcoming in New Pop Lit, The Collidescope, The Main Street Rag, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Horror Sleaze Trash. He lives in New York. 

CRACKING THE CODE

by Dick Westheimer

This annotated image was taken by a parachute-up-look camera aboard the protective back shell of NASA's Perseverance rover during its descent toward Mars' Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. Using binary code, two messages have been encoded in the neutral white and international-orange parachute gores (the sections that make up the canopy's hemispherical shape). The inner portion spells out "DARE MIGHTY THINGS," with each word located on its own ring of gores. The outer band of the canopy provides GPS coordinates for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the rover was built and the project is managed. —NASA, February 25, 2021


Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. —Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life," April 10, 1899

The drogue deployed in a blue black sky
pulled nine Gs as it slowed the rover’s descent 
a rosette of white and red, it opened wide—
revealed to an observant few, a code

that drove the NASA team, words that T.R. wrote
of a strenuous life, of toil and hardship
of failure and strife: these are not a footnote
but the stuff of creation, of life’s drift

from the gray twilight to glorious triumphs.
There is no “easy peace,” just all the mighty things
from day to day, from here to enough
of how we end and how we begin, like

dying well
washing the dead
tending the sick
writing the one poem
writing the other
giving birth
being born
sitting silently, leaned against a tree
sitting silently 
listening
hearing
passing by a panhandler
sitting by a panhandler
depressed, getting up in the morning 
sleep deprived, suckling a baby
wiping shit from the butt of an aged parent
knowing from the taste of soil if it’s sweet
forgiving a friend
learning birdsongs.


Dick Westheimer writes poetry to makes sense of the world—which is made easier by the company of his wife of 40 years, and the plot of land they’ve worked together for all of those years. His poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, For a Better World, and Riparian.

SOME DAY, PERHAPS...

IT WILL HELP TO REMEMBER THESE TROUBLES AS WELL.*

by Bonnie Naradzay

*Aeneas to his men, after theirs is the only ship

  to survive a violent storm at sea near Carthage.

         

Friends, a study of The Black Death states the plague 

may have come from outer space. The Mars Rover 

landed in a dried up lake. Perseverance is transporting 

images home from the red planet. On earth, we learn 

that magnetic north and south may be flipping sides, 

an ominous event, according to weakening attractions 

and ancient iron shards stuck pointing the wrong way. 

In Galveston, medical workers asked for a refrigerated 

truck to store the dead bodies. Thousands of turtles 

stunned by the cold have gone to a convention center 

in the backs of station wagons. Ted Cruz got on the plane

in jeans but went the wrong way, or the optics were wrong.

Sweet Thames, and Virgil, flow gently while I end my song.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry workshops at a day shelter for homeless people and at a retirement center, both in Washington DC.  Recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), Kenyon Review Online, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, EPOCH, Northern Virginia Review, Anglican Theological Review, Seminary Ridge Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

WHAT IS HERE

by Mary K O'Melveny

Perseverance

has landed today

on Mars.

Curiosity will have company.

Everyone is eager for news:

Red cinnamon rocks.

Long dead grey lakes.

Dust filled grooves.

Caves chiseled into canyons

like a Henry Moore garden.

Layers of mystery

embedded in swirls of rock

marbled as a fine steak.

We are always looking

for something

to make sense of.

Something that explains

our odd and quirky selves,

the reasons we love and lose,

fight over nothing sensible,

torture and torment.

We are always looking

for history,

for memory,

for stories,

for permanence,

for renewal.

The deeper we dig,

the less happy we are.

So we fly off

to other realms

hoping to learn more

from long dead planets.

Hoping there is something

new under the sun.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

WAITING FOR THE ELECTION TO BE OVER WITH

by Penelope Scambly Schott

“Frost on the grass,” photograph by Vladimir Axenov.

The man is asleep,

his arm flung back

toward the headboard of their bed.

He snores lightly.

The dog curls warm and small

at the foot of the quilt.

The dog’s ribs move up

and down under fur.

The woman is awake.

She slips out

from under the quilt

and walks to the window.

She pushes back

the white curtain.

Orion is rising over the shed,

his sword tickling

the top branches

of the neighbor’s cottonwood.

The man is still sleeping.

The woman stands at the window.

She knows Mars has moved west

past where she can see it

from this side of the house.

Winter is approaching.

The man’s hair gleams white

in starlight.

The dog’s fur gleams white.

Frost glazes the lawn.

The woman is ready

to step through the glass

in her long white nightgown.

She would lie on her back

in the white frost,

lie there a long time

under stars,

the flesh of her shoulders,

her buttocks,

the heels of her bare feet

feeling the spin of her planet.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

DEMOCRACY AS A WAY OF LIFE

by George Salamon

"We need to save democracy from capitalism, and save capitalism from itself." —Kevin J. Delaney, “American Workers Deserve to Live With Dignity,” The New York Times, July 5, 2020


Let us pretend this leopard can
Change its spots, let us dream
The impossible dream once more.
Not this old boy, who's not ready
For one more plunge into an
Unfulfillable dream to overturn
The one created by our Indian-
Killing, slave-owning heroes by
Our greed-consumed wheelers
And dealers and salesmen from
The Frontier to Silicon Valley, a
Dream without roots in democracy
But in the cult of Mammon and Mars,
Talking the big lie, the bigger promise,
But walking in the bloody footsteps of
Absurdities and atrocities committed
Against the humanism no magician or
Leader can inject into the heart of our
Homegrown capitalism.
We can "save" democracy in America
By making it our way of life, democracy
With its own culture grown from the
Essential democratic truths about the
Values of human life, beginning with the
Long march of democracy, sustained by
The new American Dream, through the
"Unprecedented waves and storms" our
Poet of democracy predicted and, with
Grit, patience and luck reach that "city
Upon a hill" as it morphs from myth into
A place of democratic life.


George Salamon, inspired by Whitman, in St. Louis, MO.

IN SEARCH OF ALIEN CIVILISATIONS

by Martha Landman

According to a new study in The Astrophysical Journal, scientists at the University of Nottingham estimate that there is a minimum of 36 communicating intelligent alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. —CBS News, June 18, 2020

sitting on the veranda the other night
enjoying a hashish pipe
I got dreamy
and disappeared into the Milky Way
passing Venus and Mars
I didn’t stop this time
because they had a domestic quarrel   again
                                      palm to palm
my sky map forged me ahead      to Orion
who offered beer and cigarettes, chips and cheese
Conselice was staying the night
his nephew E.T. played with his Rubik’s Cube
                     trying to solve the Drake equation
we sat on a mega rock   Orion and I had a long chat
                                           between wake and sleep
about alien galaxies meandering around
when his laser phone detonated three loud shrills
it was Peter Backus wanting us to know
“we live in a very quiet neighbourhood”
Orion’s eyes were large      I tried to pacify him
quoting Rumi: “Love is the breath of the cosmos”
he took out his horoscope and zoomed in
                                      on other galaxies
stars were born as we looked at them
alien galaxies were signed in different languages
in front of No 23 a sign on a large wooden gate
said in Hebrew:  תישאר בחוץ לעזאזל – “stay the heck out” -
this is holy land      we assumed
         we needed an exit strategy
we weren’t going to make a covenant with hypocrisy
or with gypsies on walking sticks    their blood green
so we flowed down lava tubes through pigeon holes
                                into a glorious dystopia

Martha Landman writes in Adelaide, South Australia and has previously contributed to TheNewVerse.News.  Her chapbook Between Us was published by Ginninderra Press in November 2019.

TWO QUATRAINS

I’ll Take a Shot at It
by Rick Mullin

“For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon — We did that 50 years ago,” Trump said on Twitter. “They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!” —The Washington Post, June 7, 2019

The president speaks of supply chain enhancements:
When Exxon connects all the parts,
We won’t know precisely just where the moon ends
And where the new Mars venture starts.


Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Lullaby and Wheel.


A Marriage Made In Hog Heaven
by George Salamon

"Once a book-selling giant, Barnes & Noble sold to hedge fund.” —Crain’s New York, June 7, 2019

You want my books,
I like your money,
This looks like a transaction
Breeding mutual satisfaction.

George Salamon used to buy lots of books at Barnes & Noble, but has never been inside a hedge fund.

MARS

by David Feela

isn’t ours

but what if

as our InSight

touched down, 

shaking pink dust 

off its gadgets

a robot camera

whirred and clicked

to photograph 

the horrified face

of a dodo—

the same bird 

we never suspected

could survive 

an interplanetary

migratory escape  

from a feckless 

flightless human race.

David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A Collection of his essays, How Delicate These Arches, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press will release his new chapbook, Little Acres, in April 2019.

TARGETS

by Tricia Knoll

Weathered growth rings in a horizontal cross section cut through a tree felled around AD 1111 used for the western building complex at Aztec Ruins National Monument, San Juan County, New Mexico, USA. Source: commons.wikimedia.org . Photographer:  Michael Gäbler.

Soft or hard: like ice cream?
The you-can’t-imagine bull’s-eyes
on the chest of the emergency
room doctor, but someone did.
The deepest Mars crater yawns
wide open for a rocky landing.
Today’s news has turkeys
playing soccer, fenced orphanages
for orangutans. What if instead
of seeing targets and borders
in every mapped topography
we visualize growth rings,
slow but steady widening
of enduring trees as they bow
under winter’s weight
or resprout from the fire?
For seeds of wildflowers.
Gratitude for mandala graces.


Author's note: Written in response to Monday's shooting at Mercy Hospital in Chicago.

Tricia Knoll was born in a Chicago hospital. She has a daily gratitude practice, trying to find that day's hint of beauty in the midst of news of wanton shootings, vicious pronouncements from the administration—a hint of something soothing somewhere. 

THE SPACE ROADSTER

by Martin Elster

Even Elon Musk, engineer of the circus show, was surprised that his audacious stunt worked. “Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth,” he tweeted. His plan is for the $100,000 Tesla Roadster—with the message “Don’t panic!” stamped on the dashboard and David Bowie playing on the speakers—to cruise through high-energy radiation belts that circuit Earth towards deep space. —The Guardian, February 7, 2018

Elon, you’ve lost one of your cherry cars.
We doubt you miss it, though, for Starman steers it,
piercing the emptiness en route to Mars
and the ring of rocks beyond. What flyer fears it,

the absolute of space? Not this fake pilot!
Its gaze is black as the gaps between the stars,
and yet the worlds and suns seem to beguile it.
Who would have thought that dummies in red cars

could zip into earth orbit and keep going?
They flabbergasted us, your booster rockets
which settled like a pair of sparrows (owing
to bang-up engineering). In your pockets

were all the funds you needed for a test
that bested your most hopeful expectations.
Now car and mannequin are on a quest
to beat our wildest visualizations

as earth recedes with all its blues and whites
as Mars grows closer with its browns and coppers
as space becomes spectacular with lights
as we audacious apes become star-hoppers.


Martin Elster is a composer and serves as percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poetry has appeared in Astropoetica, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Chimaera, and The Road Not Taken, among others, and in anthologies such as Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 and 2015 Rhysling Anthologies, New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, and Poems for a Liminal Age.

BRIEFLY BOWIE

by Guillermo Filice Castro

Last
night
I was
Bowie

briefly

gliding
from
empty
office
to
empty
office

asking
each
time

where’s
the dance?

only to continue
bowie-ing
my way
through
transparent
walls

in a pearl
grey suit
that
was

more
Cohen
than
Bowie

more

femme
than
butch

never
finding
anybody

much less the dance

my eyes
under a wide-
brimmed
hat

stage-worn
& hushed

as Mars


Guillermo Filice Castro is the author of Agua, Fuego (Finishing Line Press, 2015). He’s a recipient of an Emerge-Surface-Be fellowship from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. A native of Argentina, he now resides in New York City.

THE ALIGNMENT

by David Chorlton

The view of the five classical planets -- Mercury to Saturn -- improves over the next week or two as Mercury climbs higher and grows brighter. Image by Roen Kelly. — Astronomy, Jan. 25, 2016. 

The view from the window early
is of a street before awakening
where a single porch light glows
beneath five planets aligned
in the pre-dawn universe.
                       The tabloids
have yet to strip naked
and campaigns for public office
are on hold while Jupiter
assumes its ancient role
as god of thunder,
                       withholding
its power in deference
to the moment’s calm. Stock markets
are yet to make a first transaction,
waiting for a signal from Mercury,
god of finance
                       and of tricks,
glowing seductively
next to Venus, who’s worried
about Saturn always trying
to invoke some revelry
                       but who, in his role
promoting freedom, can’t help
feeling glum about the way
speech has been confused
with wealth. The sky
                       is a deceptive calm
today, considering the constant proximity
of Mars, the god of war
who never rests.


David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications on- and off-line, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His most recent book A Field Guide to Fire was his contribution to the Fires of Change exhibition shown in Flagstaff and Tucson in Arizona.

NO WAY BACK

by David Chorlton

Image source: Mars One

            "To me, when someone asks, 'why would you want to go?'

            all I can think of is, why wouldn't you want to go?" she added.

                                    -Leila Zucker, one of the 100 Mars One finalists

                                    selected to train for a mission to Mars

A room is waiting

in a place where the wind

has nothing to hold on to,

where it’s colder than Fargo

at Christmas and the atmosphere

is so thin there’s never any rain,

just an occasional shower of snowflakes

that turn into illusions

before they can touch ground.

It has a bunk that rocks on thunder,

windows so small they reveal

only specks of the surroundings,

and furnishings in a gray

that chills the eye. This

                                      could be home

for anyone seeking answers

to questions a monk once asked

in his medieval cell. Voices

marinated in persuasion

offer invitations to be a part

of history . . . to inspire people

around the world and make

isolation as attractive

as embarking on a tour with all

meals provided, time to relax

and read, play games, write, paint

 work out in the gym, watch TV,

use the Internet, contact friends at home

as life becomes more and more

like fingering a tiny device with a screen

to busy your hands while sitting

on a bus you can never get off.

Who has what it takes

                                never to return?

Who will seek claustrophobia

in the midst of boundless

space? Who has what it takes . . .

Who believes our future

cannot be confined

we must explore and look up
court death by radiation

                                        or life

so deep in boredom

the only consolation

is that . . . . the future

belongs to those who believe

in the beauty of their dreams

                                              even

if the dreams come quietly

and turn into a nightmare

at the moment

of the ultimate goodbye,

in realizing a particular tree is the last

you’ll ever see; the mailman

won’t stop at your house again;

you’ll never hold money, hear

sparrows, go out

to a restaurant meal. Rivers

will finally have flowed off the edge

of the Earth, we’ll be back

to the first of all questions: where

are we from? As if the answer

could be found by going

where nobody belongs.


David Chorlton came to Arizona in 1978 after living in England and Austria. He has spent more than three decades stretched between cultures and writing poetry, the pick of which has just appeared as his Selected Poems, from FutureCycle Press.