LIGHTS OUT

by Alejandro Escudé

In 2014, Los Angeles cut its annual carbon emissions by 43% and saved $9 million in energy costs by replacing the bulbs in more than half of the city's street lamps with light-emitting diodes. That year, the Nobel Prize in physics went to three scientists whose work made those LEDs possible. "As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources," the Nobel committee explained when it announced the award.... But that's not how Ruskin Hartley sees it. "The drive for efficient fixtures has come at the expense of a rapid increase in light pollution," he said. Hartley would know. He's the executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association, or IDA, and he's one of a growing number of people who say the dark sky is an undervalued and underappreciated natural resource. Its loss has detrimental consequences for wildlife and human health…. "We've taken a lot of the energy savings and just lit additional places," Hartley said. It's a classic example of the Jevons paradox, in which efficiency gains (such as better automobile gas mileage) are countered by an increase in consumption (people driving more often). —Phys.org, September 23, 2022. Photo Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

There is nowhere on the Earth left for the human being.

We’re too blue and too bright, we (how to put this?)

destroy the night. It comes to me now, the cruise ship

I was on, northern Mediterranean, lightning-streaks

across the dining room windows as we ate, Titanic scene,

the ship listing to and fro. I went out to see it, to take in 

the storm and the ship’s lights were laying like a mermaid’s

gauzy hair across the tossing waves. I’d be shamed

by many others simply for recounting this trip, mocked

for excursions, games, scheduled meals. I’d think 

of Odysseus in Sicily, duping the Cyclops, hiding his 

men beneath the curly warmth of sheep. Sometimes, 

I also want to hide that way from the weaponizing shame

humanity turns against itself—more lethal than nuclear

weapons, toxic as a leaky oil tanker. We recognize

the firelight and so does the snake, the shoreline plover, 

but we choose the incandescence of daylight at night.

I have been in the center of my worldly city, lost in

absolute darkness, unable to walk my dog, a block

away the foraging lights of shark-like airliners taking

off into the gridded coordinates of the briny sky.

Shall I leap back into my Neanderthal skin yet eschew

the Sahara rat for the naked leaf? Shall I bore into

the ground, further and further, as the rich climb 

diamond-encrusted staircases into Olympus-sized

homes? My children are not guilty of the bright light!

My planet is not above me, and it isn’t below me,

and it’s certainly not flat. I eat LED light bulbs for 

a midnight snack, looking out over the shellshocked 

tapestry, basking in the sky glow, so I may light

the places within me that don’t need to be seen.

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.

IN MEMORY OF ALBERT WOODFOX

by Mary K O'Melveny

Albert Woodfox, who is thought to have been held in solitary confinement longer than any individual in US history, having survived 43 years in a 6ft x 9ft cell in one of America’s most brutal prisons, has died aged 75. Woodfox’s death was made public on [August 4]… Woodfox was a member of the so-called “Angola Three”—prisoners who were wrongfully convicted of the 1972 murder of a prison guard, Brent Miller, in Louisiana state penitentiary. The prison was built on the site of a former slave plantation and was commonly known as Angola, after the country from which most of the plantation’s enslaved people had been transported. —The Guardian, August 4, 2022. Photo: Albert Woodfox after his release from prison in 2016. —Credit Brian Tarnowski, The New York Times, August 5, 2022

Some say we are alone throughout our life.

Others say loneliness is just a state of mind.

One’s search for inner peace is filled with strife

on our best days. Imagine doing it alone, confined

for forty-three years in a closet-sized prison cell

where one must confront inner demons, serious

fears, failures of will, spirit. He traveled through hell,

emerged home, freed by wisdom. Like Odysseus.

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 most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. 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.

A STRENGTH & BEAUTY RARE

by Dick Altman

Flying jewels I thought they were

as a child.  To entice one onto

a finger, to bring it up to the nose,

as the black-bordered tangerine

wings slowly opened and closed—

could a little boy be any more

smitten?

                        *

Thirty-five years later, on a lake

in upstate New York, I rediscover

Monarchs—beguiling not of fragile

sweetness, but ferocity almost beyond

the syntax of belief.  I’m transfixed

at how they tilt against late summer’s

gusting head winds.  As if they had

no choice.  As if wings were oars—

as if boats launched from shore

into raging tidal seas—as they press

forward, only to be repulsed—again

and again.  As they fight, tirelessly,

to stay aloft above the aqueous grave

awaiting any that falter.  Fight as if

drowning in air, frantic to surface

in northern Mexico’s Mil Cumbres hills. 

Frantic to give birth, after voyaging

twenty-five hundred hectoring miles,

until they all but drop.

                        *

The vision of embattled, desperate

fleets returns, when I drive into

the Cumbres, dumbstruck by forests

black and orange, pulsing, folding,

unfolding, eager after winter to create

a new generation. One destined

to traverse, like their forbears, lake’s

grueling flyways north to Canada.

                          *

I pee as a kid on a log bordering

our cabin’s path to the water.  What

of my essences lures Monarchs

to the spot in droves, I’ll never know. 

Part of me evolves into part of them.

An entwining of winged and bipedal,

one bound to earth, the other to air—

a lifetime ago, and I behold it yet

with a child’s wonder un-frayed.

                            *      

Days of Monarchs’ madness pass.

The lake’s autumnal transit

a fragment of memory.  Gales black

and orange out-fought, out-flew

the winds.  When Milkweed,

their caterpillars’ favorite food,

their only food, succumbs to man’s

punishment of earth, winged courage

proves no match.  But when

imagination wanders back to those

bejeweled days on the water, I conjure

soaring, gliding gems of fortitude. 

Pray for the day skies confetti again

with their dancing fury. Odysseus

takes twenty years to sail home.

Monarchs, but a few months.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where,at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.

ONE MORE

by Ann Malaspina

Graphic by Imad Abu Shtayyah.

Off the island of Kos
you crawl through the sea
coughing salt
flailing arms—
while all around,
fishermen scoop babies,
haul grown men,
rescue women
from sunken boats
and slippery rocks
all day and night
for weeks
and months
until there is no
room on the beach
for even one more.

Still you splash to shore,
eyes stinging, skin raw
from terror nights and hunger days,
from lost husband,
lost roof,
lost country.
You swallow sea.
You fight the wind.
It is no use.
It is all there is.
It is.

When suddenly a wave
lifts you high and clean--
the same wave
that drove Odysseus
so far away
and home again.
Frothy warm and curled
like your mother's arms,
the wave lifts you,
carries you,
tumbles you
onto earthly sand
of despair and hope,
breathless,
breathing,
alive,
and the people make room.


A poet and a children's author living in New Jersey, Ann Malaspina has published two poems at TheNewVerse.News.