ON REJECTING THE PARIS CLIMATE ACCORD

by David Radavich

Photo by Ivan Vargas at Gizmodo.

Ashes gather
at the bottom
of the fire
we have made.

It is a weekday
night like any other,
an announcement
of denial,
a death of desire.

Somehow our soil
and vegetation
must survive
without us.

Somehow we
want to die alone
and small.

We fly toward
this conflagration
like widows,
like moths.


David Radavich's recent poetry collections are America Bound: An Epic for Our Time (2007), Canonicals: Love's Hours (2009), and Middle-East Mezze (2011).   His plays have been performed across the U.S., including six Off-Off-Broadway, and in Europe.  His latest books are The Countries We Live In (2014) and a co-edited volume called Magic Again: Selected Poems on Thomas Wolfe (2016).  He has served as president of The Thomas Wolfe Society, Charlotte Writers' Club, and North Carolina Poetry Society.

WISDOM TAKES A HOLIDAY

On T***p’s Withdrawal from the Climate Agreement

by Jon Wesick

Lincoln plants cotton on the White House lawn.
Rachel Carson sprays Agent Orange.
Martin Luther King hoists the confederate flag.
Gandhi stops at a steakhouse
on his way to the shooting range.

Crick and Watson blow their Nobel Prize money
on swizzle sticks and lotto tickets.
Jacques Cousteau moves to Arizona.
Einstein downs a six-pack of PBR
before getting behind the wheel of his GTO.
Jonas Salk shares dirty needles in Haitian crack houses.

Picasso enters his finger-painting period.
Mozart releases his 99 Bottles of Beer Symphony.
e.e. cummings WRITES IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
Julia Child dazzles guests with beef jerky à l’orange.
Dave Brubeck and McCoy Tyner embark
on their International Chopsticks Tour.

Stephen Hawking competes
in the Ultimate Fighting Challenge.
Bobby Fischer takes up checkers.
Elon Musk trades space flight and electric cars
for Pez dispensers. Warren Buffet
wires money to an exiled Nigerian prince.
Jean Paul Sartre guest stars
on Jackass.

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels.

ANTHROPOCENE STOMP

by Peleg Held

Hail the ant mill's circling spinners
we cry from our chests at the screenlight fire.
March to the end in pomp and shivers.
Round round rosey sings the choir
as the bell-penny promise of the mule-skinner
piles the pocket posies higher.

"Hail the ant mill's circling spinners!
Aquifers! Drink 'em drier!
Well to whistle!" chant the buyers.
We dance in thrall as the air goes thinner,
our lashlines labeled stress and sliver,
a tightening backwards down the gyre
to the holding center—paid entire—

all the ant mill's circling spinners
marching to the end in pomp and shivers.

Peleg Held lives in Portland, Maine with his partner and his dog Emitt. There is also the semi-feral cat, Smudge. And a kid or two. pelegheld(at)gmail.com.

CLIMATE

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

At last and quite suddenly autumn has arrived. From one day to the next foliage of the many deciduous trees hereabouts has turned from various shades of green to bright yellows, oranges, and reds. Temperatures have dropped so quickly our bodies are having trouble adjusting to the cold that is not truly cold by an reasonable standards but cold for here in our Mediterranean climate, especially in the nighttime when we pile on the layers for our after-dinner walks under the bright brittle stars. Long-awaited rains have come to town, not in ample amounts so far but delivering enough water to refresh the dry throats of the streams we visit several times a week. After a long hot season of silence they murmur contentedly and sound quite pleased with themselves. Today as we hiked around the lake we saw a few orange-bellied newts venturing from their hideouts and sashaying across the duff, full of hope no doubt like the rest of us that there will be a rainy rainy season to keep their skins moist while they forage the forest floor for bits of lichen and mushroom. Meteorologists are predicting a big one, a whiz-bang El Niño year with deluge after deluge, bound to shift our attentions from the summer of unprecedented heat we have just endured to the possibility that those quietly contented creeks will turn raucous and ornery, overflowing their banks as they are wont to do in monsoon years. But just now we can do little besides wait with a certain amount of excitement about the possible end of our drought and some trepidation that we could be leaping out of the frying pan into the flood. So sweatering up we walk the neighborhoods and the woods collecting big leaf maple and liquid amber and sycamore leaves to place in a bowl on the coffee table as we did with our children when they were small. And with my hands full of colors and my heart full of children and my head full of weather I think about the worsening climate crisis that threatens to do us in and I wonder about the sapience and sanity of those of our species who seem willing to risk the future of our young and of all our fellow beings rather than kick their addiction to dead dinosaurs.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesday and others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.