EXTREME WEATHER REPORTS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

by Melissa Balmain

“Shouldn’t we name extreme weather events after those contributing most to them? … Last hurricane season, a regular reader… suggested that hurricanes should not be named after random humans, but corporate brand names—specifically those [polluters] that have contributed most to the intensification of extreme weather.”
—Erik Assadourian and Esther Phillips, on Medium

Hurricane Exxon—from Maine down to Mass.—
appears, as we feared, to be hitting the gas.

Macroburst Google is knocking down birches
and churches as rescues lag far behind searches.

Bomb-cyclone Bezos refuses to stop
until it has flattened each mom and each pop.

Superstorm Congress? Crews strive to repair
the damage it’s done with its surging hot air.

And everywhere, Trumpulus clouds keep on raining
fresh plagues on the heads of whoever’s remaining.

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, North America's longest-running journal of comic verse. Her latest book of poetry is Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books).

THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK

by Hallie Dolin

Last Tuesday the pointer moved one second closer 

to destruction. It's eighty-nine seconds to midnight.

Around the world, our weapons wait for our command:

all vigilant, sitting patiently through midnight. 

We hear reports of ever-growing plagues passed on,

although information blackout's our new midnight. 

No one draws wheat from chaff, facts from alternative,

or musters effort like we used to do. Midnight 

and its stifling, sleepless depths—no rest for us—

is a bruise seeping blood, this black and blue midnight.

We snipe over who deserves to rain their revenge 

on whom, whose forfeit lives should dim out to midnight,

but we've missed the point. Your fate is mine, my blood is

your bloodstain. It's eighty-nine seconds to midnight. 

Hallie Dolin is a pathology resident in Cleveland, Ohio and has been writing for fun for nearly three decades. Her work has previously been published in The Case Reserve Review and the now-defunct Flashes in the Dark. When she isn't trying to discover novel cures for frightening microbes, she spends her time working on an actual novel. She also enjoys knitting, playing the guitar, and spending time with her cat. 

FAYE’S INAUGURATION

by Anayo Dioha

Just over two weeks ago, Bassirou Diomaye Faye was a little-known opposition leader languishing in jail, detained without trial on charges including inciting insurrection, who had never held elected office. One week ago, he defeated the governing party's candidate, Amadou Ba, in the country's presidential election, winning 54% in the first round. On Tuesday, the 44-year-old has been sworn in as the fifth president of Senegal, becoming Africa's youngest elected head of state. In a region where a large majority of the population are under 30, his victory offers hope to those young people frustrated by a lack of economic opportunities, with old elites seemingly clinging to power. —BBC, April 2, 2024

Rotten roots from decades past

Sinking deeper. Branches

Decaying, falling apart

Into their rancorous unrest

From this foisted tree of shrouded

Democracy.

Evergreen leaves pruned, trampled

Black, mutilated barks

Of overburdened trunk and branches

Bearing colonial scars and fresh bruises.

The rape, the loot; plagues and

Persecutions–the tale of many

Dark cities.

But look! A spark ignites in Dakar!

An ecdysis seems in progress.

This bloom just may smile

At the sky; it could be left to bask

In the sun.

But how will it fare around the pack

Of predators gathered at the lounge—

The inauguration lounge?

 

Anayo Dioha is a Nigerian and has been previously published in The New Verse News.

AFTER THE FLAMES, FLOOD

by Dick Altman

I’ve learned that no matter what

your faith—we on the high desert

plains – aloud or to ourselves—

pray for rain—and lots of it

Two-months of unquenchable

wildfires left us parched

for water—anything to restart

the charred landscape

 

Fill our depleted reservoirs—

revive our withered crops—

awaken our weakened pinion

and aspen—I pray—and while

at it—I add—our yellow cow-pen

daisies—red-orange mallow—

purple Russian sage—to round

out the bouquet we call—

with now-and-then fondness—

our “desert bloom”

 

A deluge ensues—not our usual—

if one can use that word—monsoon—

what we half-jokingly call our rainy

season—but rain of epic power—

rain that washes away people—

houses—cars—roads—and not

least—in the grand scheme—ash

 

I scoop up a handful—light—

innocent—a mere handful

in an ocean of ash layered over

a charred seabed—until hurricane-

like floods set it in motion—

sweeping it into ponds—river—

community water systems—

killing stream life—sickening

people – disrupting life already

disrupted by epochal fires

What next—I can only ask—

half expecting to hear a cloud-

enshrouded voice intone—

without a trace of a smile—

“Locusts”

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.

POEM IN AUGUST

by Julian O. Long

“August Painting” by Ivan Kolisnyk

First day of my eighty fourth

year to heaven, I got up

turned off the O2 machine, hung

its canula over the arm of the walker

beside my bed, intimate with

these acts as I am with my hand

on my thigh the last thing before

throwing off the covers,

                                       intimate too

with comorbidities (only recently

learned that word) my troubled heart

remembered from recent echoes, aftermaths

of strokes that stopped parts of my brain

and legs (maybe other things

as well—hard to tell with all

the medicines.

                        Still, one more stick

and I’m boosted, at least in a qualified

sense; I’ll continue intimacy

with covid fully vaccinated, as I

was those childhood summers with series

of asthma shots, but this birthday

I am choosing as well to quarantine

myself—better that than bronchial

spasms, since this virus kills.

Writ large does the covid pandemic shed

light on die ups such as the great

reptilian? Chances are it will run

its course and become endemic among us

like the flu. But what if it doesn’t?

And what if unlike plagues of past ages

this is the one big one? Will it

usher in new times of dearth,

strife, and loss driven by vicious

death-demanding ideologies?

Will we humans learn care for one

another in such new times, or will we

follow the worst among us and in

ourselves? Chances are we’ll do

the latter.

                        Cogito ergo sum,

unassailable formulation, works

both ways, Latin doesn’t care

it’s the perfect sum of being, balking

at prospect of its own quitclaim

consciousness cannot fail to name

itself, but no heuristic can

afford me knowledge of my death;

I am intimate with that absence.

Conversely, no perception affords

me knowledge of another’s. In these

times it’s a forced option to choose

intimacy as well

                           —with that absence.

Julian O. Long’s poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Texas, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. His chapbook High Wire Man is number twenty-two in the Trilobite Poetry series published by the University of North Texas Libraries. A collection of his poems, Reading Evening Prayer in an Empty Church, appeared from Backroom Window Press in 2018. Other online publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, The Raw Art Review, and Litbreak Magazine.  Long has taught school at the University of North Texas, North Carolina State University, and Saint Louis University. He is now retired and lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE

by John Hodgen

Were we not paying attention, attention-deficited even then,
even before the term was wheeled in on some gurney
with a wobbly wheel? Brooklyn Hospital, so overrun,
where Fauci was born, where Whitman volunteered,
his beard as face mask, tending Union soldiers,
bringing peaches, poems, writing letters for them,
urging them to believe that a woman back home
would still marry them when they came home,
marching Johnnies through the rye,
missing a leg or an arm or an eye?

And Keats, quarantined in the harbor in Naples,
not nearly the quaranta giorni, the full forty days,
on the Maria Crowther, six weeks out from Gravesend,
typhus all around, bobbing like rhythm, like synaesthesia
in the bay. Keats, mortality weighing “heavily” on him,
“like unwilling sleep,” Keats half alive,
“half in love with easeful Death.”

Did we not see it, fully take it in,
poets and plagues interwoven, the world caving in,
the burst of tubercular blood in Keats’s handkerchief,
Whitman’s soldiers (“warriors,” T***p says) who survived,
stood, hobbled and grim, and married just as he told them
they would, writing back years later to tell Old Walt,
fierce believer in grasses, sheaves and hymns,
that they had named their children after him.

Or is it simply that we have lived too long
to have seen it again?

And who moves quickly now, masked, from bed to bed,
giving succor, solace, taking selfies with the nearly dead
to share with the families prevented from being there,
with Poe’s masquers, red death, double ventilated with dread?
What nurses, doctors, poets glide among us again,
like shepherds, pastorals, like trashbagged antibodies,
nearly invisible, shining with novel, singular grace?

John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His fourth book of poetry Heaven & Earth Holding Company is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and his first book In My Father's House has been reprinted from Lynx House/University of Washington Press. Hodgen’s fifth book The Lord of Everywhere is just out, also from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.

2018 LAMENT

by Kathryn Almy

Spring is running 20 days early.

It’s exactly what we expect, but it’s not good.

—The Washington Post, February 27, 2018

Please deliver us from this winter of discontent, with its frigid
squint and brimstone breath. Don’t blame February, there is no
cruelest month, only this year’s hateful season with its germ
swarms and ineffective flu shot, its too-big coat and small, grabby
hands. We did not vote for these mad swings of frost and thaw,
this bomb-cyclone of caprice. Enough with the floods and plagues
and frozen buds, the constant sneers and taunts—If you don’t like
18 degrees, how about 45? Too muddy? OK, it’s 12. Loser.

We’re so tired—more tired than from the long cold blizzards
of our youth, more anxious than in those strange warm spells
that make us worry for the north. Reduced to wishing for
a singular ordeal: If it must be bitter, could the skies at least
be clear? If there must be an early melt, could we save the rain
for later? We believe we could accept some simple difficulty—
summer’s scorch, early fall—but won’t agree which hardships
we can weather. We’d promise to repent, but who are we
kidding? Don’t let it get worse. Better yet, just make it spring.


Kathryn Almy is a Michigan writer whose work has appeared in various print and on-line publications, including The 3288 Review, City of the Big Shoulders: A Chicago Poetry Anthology, and Great Lakes Review's narrative map, and is forthcoming from The Offbeat and Star 82 Review.

EBOLA

by Michael Shorb

The deadly Ebola virus that’s killed more than 600 people so far in West Africa may have been smoldering there for years and has almost certainly sickened people who thought they had something else, researchers say. --NBC News, July 20, 2014

From Pointe-Noire to Mombasa
the AIDS Highway
runs through villages
hunched in smoky blue-gum
cooking fires, veers north
into unbroken rain forest
tracts, peels east at Kisangani,
where ageless women walk
its red clay shoulders.

Goes into Uganda, past
immense and turgid
Lake Victoria, past
the Isle of Plagues
where infected monkeys
shriek and gibber bearing
inner leaf storms
of microbial marauders.

Toward Mt. Elgon's
mantle of blue hills
laced with fever trees
and floods of native corn
where warning calls
of Colubus monkeys
explode from the green
crowns of podocarpus trees.

Elephant herds thundered
on this mountain once
scraped Kitum Cave with
salt-hungry
           thrusting tusks
now their
         withered gray skins
are left for roaches
now burnt huts and
blackened rubble bear
broken
Coca Cola bottle
testimony
  of human scale.

Look, you can't kill
all this life without resistance
somewhere along lines
                    of DNA and RNA leading
back in time,

back to our own
brooding progenitors
coming to in Eden,
new in the forest,
learning the art
of trapping fire
just getting their
brain cells wet.

You nailed the biggest
ones with ease
the huge in their lumbering grace
elephant clans
              thirsty water buffaloes
              bitten by fruit bats
no match for jeeps
night vision scopes automatic
rifles, even galaxies
of primal forest
are going under as
populations spawn.

Now villages in Zaire, Guinea, Sri Lanka
boil over into bloody death
first shotgun blasts
to the pineal
eyes running red
as unseen predator armies
                         open maws
sharks in feeding frenzy
multiply fission-like inside
besieged cities
               of liver lung and heart.

Man is meat to this thing
fluid a highway
AIDS a warning shot against the enemy
of human reproduction.

Somewhere earth fights back
will not go down without
clawing the faces of its destroyer.

It waits.

Inert mobility endowed with talent
for change,
         
           easy traveler, breath propelled
villagers afraid Ebola escapes from Grave

dance of microscopic sticks:
Ebola, little sisters of extermination
fire in the cells.


Michael Shorb was published in more than 100 poetry magazines and anthologies including Michigan Quarterly, The Sun, and The Kyoto Journal.  He was nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Award and won a Merit Award for the Franklin Christoph Poetry Contest. Michael succumbed to Gist, a rare form of cancer in August 2012. His book of poetry Whale Walker's Morning was published posthumously in Winter 2013, by Shabda Press.


Editor's note: Michael Shorb wrote this poem when the virus was running amuck in East Africa several years ago; his wife Judith Grogan-Shorb updated it for The New Verse News.