MOUNTAINS OF AMBIGUITY

by Dick Altman

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP, August 16, 2024) — Watchdogs are raising new concerns about legacy contamination in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a renewed effort to manufacture key components for nuclear weapons. A Northern Arizona University professor emeritus who analyzed soil, water and vegetation samples taken along a popular hiking and biking trail in Acid Canyon said Thursday that there were more extreme concentrations of plutonium found there than at other publicly accessible sites he has researched in his decades-long career.

Northern New Mexico

How many daybreaks

have I risen

to the drum/chant/flute spirit

of high desert’s Jemez,

sacred Indigenous mountains,

dancing my western skyline?

 

I wanted to escape Manhattan’s

work encampments, 

false pinnacles of glass

and steel,

to find here, 

at seven thousand feet,

gifts of earth/air/water,

untrammeled 

by humanity’s heel. 

 

The breathtaking cleft

that serves as the gateway

into the Jemez—

like a canyon pathway 

into the clouds—

lofts me,

calls me 

into another world.

 

Nature’s handiwork in the Jemez

expresses itself 

in a thousand volcanos,

asleep for now,

fanning out from Valles Caldera,

planet’s largest,

grandeur that, 

across Rio Grande’s valley,

seems all mine.

My hiking ardor leaves

its imprint 

in that elk-abounding

encirclement, 

a trail of joy,

marking every season.

 

Yet not without sadness.

I have first to pass 

Oppenheimer Alley,

where the brain of man

explodes an idea,

whose remnants scatter

the countryside,

forces unseen

that torment the Jemez

without known end.

 

Los Alamos’ lights

at night snake downslope,

pointing at me,

atomic city’s

unrepentant reminder

that my escape

was less promise,

than dream.

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, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Wingless Dreamer, Blueline, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored some 250 poems, published on four continents.

OF BAFFLES AND BUOYS

by Ruth Nicholson

Adrees Latif

/

Reuters

Texas Department of Public Safety troopers ride past buoys while patrolling the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass on July 29, 2023. —Texas Public Radio, August 3, 2023

Our bird feeder is a seed-rich cylinder
with holes, perches, and a baffle 
for deterring squirrels.  Baffle—like
a wire cage—sometimes traps
a hungry sparrow, leaves it hanging
upside down, tiny toes entangled.
Left alone too long, the bird dies.

We rescued one such bird today,
while TV news announced a migrant
drowned in Rio Grande, thwarted by
new floating buoys—like a necklace
of enormous beads that rotate.
Beneath the buoys, nets that snare.

Attempts to climb over, go under, swim
to the riverbank—meant to fail.
Migrant netted, left for dead.
Not a baffle to ignore.  Pay attention,
Texas and the rest of us; God’s eye
is on the sparrow.

Ruth Nicholson is a retired library assistant and avid student of nature, especially birds and wildflowers. She writes from South Carolina, where she now has more poet-friends discovered through Zoom during the pandemic. Her poems have appeared in Illuminations, Passages North, Emrys Journal, Jasper, and Fall Lines, among others, and she has work in the forthcoming edition of Kakalak. 

CRUELTY

by Frederick Wilbur

Birds rest on concertina wire along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass , Texas, Thursday, July 6, 2023, that has been recently bulldozed. (AP Photo/Eric Gay) Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s escalating measures to stop migrants along the U.S. border with Mexico came under a burst of new criticism Tuesday after a state trooper said migrants were left bloodied from razor-wire barriers and that orders were given to deny people water in sweltering heat. —AP, July 19, 2023

Along the helix

of razor wire 

meant to keep

refugees stranded,

there are delicate spiders

spinning webs

that rainbow

in the early sun,

their snares

of a different will.

 

Frederick Wilbur’s collections of poetry are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out and Conjugation of Perhaps.  His work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Dalhousie Review, Green Mountains Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The New Verse News, and Shenandoah among others. He is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.

SEASONS OF FORGIVENESS II

by Dick Altman

Climate change is reshaping the American economy. New Mexico is leaning on ecotourism and sustainable industries to see it through, but extreme weather keeps getting in the way. —The New York Times, December 10, 2022

Northern New Mexico

Your sky’s downcast—clouds testy/twitchy
as broncos—stampedes ashen/rusty as tea—
Your breath a wave of gray—mauling—
across Rio Grande’s valley from me—
shores of the Jemez Mountains—
horizon’s serpentine spine—wind’s
womb – hissing/growling—eager
to gust me off my feet—Westerlies—yours—
slam body – flash into face walls of dust –
dirt road’s heavings—worn/restless—
as if to warn—Indian/Anglo alike—
you mean to hang—come winter—
all of us out to dry—we of high desert
who worship you—you without yielding
a glisten of grief—
 
You make no attempt to hide from me
your anger—La Nina’s avenging
herself—from the far Pacific—on land
history’s riven—dancing on the blade                           
of survival—denying us your blood—
that flourishes mind/body/flower—
Snow’s florets—like white roses—
bloom at the highest heights—hardly
enough—come spring—to succor
lowlands of range/field/pasture—
Vaults of roots lie in hollow dark—
I listen to them whisper/beg for sky’s
sweet sweat to envelope thread/throat—
vast schemes of arterial/arboreal twining—
desperate for clouds’ benediction—
 
Will you conjure the Rio Grande                      
into Old West’s version of Big Muddy—
the Santa Fe River into a drought-
starved trail of sand—acequias—
irrigation ditches—lifelines centuries old—
into runnels of emptiness—Or will you
relent/unfurl—after all—a semblance
of season’s radiance—moon seeing—
as in mirror—its face reflected back
to itself—Some glimmer that La Nina
will yet mercy us—that mountains—
pearlescent—emerge before my eyes—
to melt into rages of ebb and flow—
riverine bounty—yours—pouring
into mouths of petal/leaf/needle/heart
 
 
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.

DROUGHT’S HIGH DESERT HOWL OF THE WOLF

by Dick Altman

“Megadrought in the American south-west: a climate disaster unseen in 1,200 years.” -The Guardian,  September 12, 2022

D-r-o-u-g-h-t
Whenever I see the word—
I want to dismantle it                                
D—the letter—is easy—
delete and destroy
the most unforgiving letter—to me—
letter O—like a wolf’s maw—
whose mandible blades the heart—
as I watch high desert’s drought
wolf whatever’s in reach
of its insatiable jaws… 
                       
            Golden seas of shimmering
cow-pen daisies
Billowing swarms of insects
that sustain night hawk and bat
Purple Russian Sage beloved
of bees
Acequias—historic hand-dug
streams—feeding pasture
and crop
Rio Grande turned
into a waterless highway
of sand
Weakened pine—long needle
and short—decimated
by bark beetle
Every dead tree a depleted
trove of oxygen
                         
If drought were a song—I’d hear  
a one-note elegy of unyielding spareness—
a flameless fire unfurling in three-quarter
time—a waterless flood whose silent
music swallows all it touches—insistent
waltz whose slow cadences fool hope—
clouds swollen with broken melodies—
cisterns hollow with minor-key emptiness—
Aspen’s metallic yellow of fall chorusing
a month too soon
 
Call me a fool to plant a small forest
of trees—when I build here at seven-
thousand feet in Indian Country—half
of these children—if I may call them that—
fail to survive—no defense against a force
ghostly—merciless in its fury to gorge
on blood from leaf/petal/earth—flame
never seen—flood never felt—rapacious
lupine shadow hidden in the dark of light

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.

THINKING OF UKRAINE / LIVING IN INDIAN COUNTRY

by Dick Altman

in New Mexico

Smoke and fire, Ukraine’s signature  in the morning

paper, tells the physical story. Lines of people leading

to nowhere.  Second day headline to yesterday’s photo

of a pregnant woman on stretcher in front of a bombed

hospital: Mother-to-be dies.  The configuration of living,

dying, dead looms out of history’s mists, as I look

across pueblos of Rio Grande’s valley.  The great pall

of misery that binds Ukraine and Indian Country.

Treaties broken. Tectonics of people, like moving

land masses, shifting, transforming the human

landscape.  People driven like herded cattle, to slaughter. 

America’s East cleansing the Native heartland. Manifest

destiny’s tsunami sweeping Indians aside, all the way

to the Pacific.  Cultures’ flesh and bone left to decompose

on prairie, high desert plains, lowlands.  Dig up

the nameless graves, if you can find them.  The soil doesn’t

distinguish between Indian and Ukrainian. Worms eat

to the same bone.  Digital worms in one monumental hack

could disarm America’s defenses.  Shut down the grid. 

Prevent plane and missile from launching.  Go to sleep

in the dark and wake, ten hours later, to discover thousands

of alien aircraft have landed all over America.  And you

discover you no longer live in the land of the free.  You

want to escape, but to where.  Software that runs your car

has been high-jacked.  Look out to the street and strange

uniforms shove your neighbors into a line.  Like

American soldiers dismantling Indian villages that believed,

by treaty, the land was theirs.  Like Ukrainians waking

to ground and aerial attack.  Living on New Mexico’s

high desert plain, at seven thousand feet, might seem like

I’m literally above it all.  This is Indian Country.  My stock,

though not  my   eastern  European  forebears, nearly

obliterated Indigenous territory. Across the street and down

the  block, survives a   ten-foot   square of sacred, protected

ground. A metaphor of diminishment at the heart of one

civilization’s rise, another’s living burial.

 

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, 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.

HORRIBLE

by Alejandro Escudé

‘We must demand that national leaders create a fair and humane immigration system, including a path to citizenship for immigrants, and a safe and fair asylum process for Haitians and all others seeking refuge in the US.’ —Xochitl Oseguera, The Guardian, September 28, 2021. Photograph: Félix Márquez/AP

There are horses galloping 

Within the word, horrible.

Lashing at migrants, 

Centaur on the Rio Grande.

The water parts at first 

To let in the fifteen thousand,

Refugees from Atlantis 

Who bore a hurricane, a quake. 

Children held aloft by mothers 

With earth-bare arms.

I paint the scene for you 

In poetic bronze, a cowboy

Breaking a colt in chaps 

On a corner store in Sedona.

Only this bronze is flesh, 

A border patrol agent in chaps,

Lassoing a sun containing 

The origin of language. 

Syllables like hooves, 

Ten gallon hats, and boots along

The river the color of bronze, 

Dividing a land formed 

Of bodies from the land itself. 

Congo moon, Texas slug. 

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.

THE MATAMOROS-BROWNSVILLE BRIDGE

by Janice MacKenzie

Asylum seekers have been waiting for hearings in Matamoros, Mexico, across the Matamoros-Brownsville Bridge from Brownsville, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images via Vox. Organizers say the camp is one of the last remaining along the U.S./Mexico border. Migrants returned to Mexico have faced months-long postponements in immigration hearings held underneath tents and in trailers across the river in Brownsville. Many of those returned to Mexico live in tents along the river for the duration of proceedings. Some have been living homeless for over a year, surviving with the assistance of Brownsville and Matamoros-based aid groups. Hearings are currently postponed until Texas reaches Stage 3 of its reopening plan. Due to a surge in cases, it will likely be months until proceedings begin again. Prior to COVID-19, the camp’s population was estimated to be over 2,500 with more asylum seekers living further into Matamoros. A recent census conducted by Angry Tias and Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley documented 960 residents, suggesting that people have been abandoning their cases. —The Brownsville Herald, July 29, 2020

On this side, the tent city—
mud, flies, the stink of
unwashed bodies and latrines
families crowded together—
no hope, no future

On that side, steel & concrete—
cages for the children
uniformed men, with guns and
cold eyes
fences and barriers—
but hope for
something better

Between them, the river
wide and muddy, snaking through
the tall grasses and scrub brush
a barrier—but also a friend
giving water, a bath,
clean clothes

And spanning that divide,
the bridge—
symbol of connection,
of joining together
of safe passage

Now, a different kind of barrier
unfriendly concrete and steel girders
barbed wire and chain-link fencing
forming a narrow corridor
like a cattle chute
to check points,
to rejection

On this side, the sign reads
“Feliz Viaje”—
“Happy Journey”
though my journey was
anything but happy

On that side, an American flag flies
over a sign:  “Welcome to the United States
of America”—
but there is no welcome there
for me
and never will be

Janice MacKenzie is an acupuncturist, an activist, a poet and a photographer.  She came back to poetry after a long hiatus during which she built her acupuncture practice and became active in acupuncture politics.  The current political situation in the U.S. calls for poetry and activism. Janice has organized a weekly vigil since June, 2018, for the children of the migrants/asylum-seekers stuck at the Mexican border.  She lives in Sellersville, Pennsylvania.

REQUIEM FOR CIVILITY

by Janet Leahy





And now it has come to pass—at a time when we most need him
—Civility has died. We are not sure how we can go on without him.
He tried to quiet the storm of ridicule, the spitefulness of debate
that swirls around us. He could not abide the absence of truth
in the public square. The Civility family has known several recent losses,
a younger brother Justice, worked at the border, tried to stop the separation
of families. After two years Justice came home, exhausted by the inhumanity
he witnessed, the callous treatment of little children, who need a mother,
a father, to hold them close. Justice died one year ago. And his sister
Compassion, protested when the electric company turned off heat to
families in arrears of payment. Last January she fell into a winter
of discontent, illness took her vitality and her life. His only surviving
sibling is Charity, a poet. She chronicles lives lost at the border, lives lost
fleeing homelands not safe to return to. Lives lost seeking asylum
in the land of liberty, the land of plenty. We remember bodies washed
ashore on the banks of the Rio Grande—Oscar, his arms wrapped around
his 22-month-old daughter Valeria, he carried her under his shirt
as they were swept up by raging river currents. We cannot erase
that picture, of father and daughter, it is locked forever in our memory.
Charity will read this poem at the memorial for her brother . . . we are not
sure how we can go on without him.

Janet Leahy is a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poetry and works with critique groups in the Milwaukee-Waukesha area.  Her poems have appeared in Bards Against Hunger, the 5th Anniversary Edition and the Wisconsin Edition,  in Soundings, Ariel Anthology, Bramble, The Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, and others. Online her work has can be found at TheNewVerse.News, Your Daily Poem, and Blue Heron.

MIGRANT

by Frank De Canio





Duress held captive by her will,
she held him thrashing in a boat
then waded through the waves and chill
that kept his hardened heart afloat.
She then assayed the Rio Grande,
less émigré in sore distress
than athlete in a marathon.
Her mettle hammered out US
of A above the custom house
across the line from Mexico.
Nor would the trials still pending douse
the girl’s triumphant afterglow
at having weathered storm and stress.
A tough as leather pioneer,
she trumpeted resourcefulness
to claim her valor’s broad frontier.

Born & bred in New Jersey, Frank De Canio works in New York. Shakespeare is his consolation, writing his hobby.