TODAY

by Laura Rodley

For you, my grandchildren,
I am saving pine needles in the forest.
For you, my grandchildren
I am hanging up my clothes, saving energy.
For you, my grandchildren,
I am walking the hot sand at East Sandwich.
not flying using fossil fuel, not expanding beyond.
For you my grandchildren,
I am weaving the leafy fronds at Ashfield Lake,
swimming in it, swimming prayers.
For you, my grandchildren,
I drive as little as possible,
work as expeditiously as I can, conserve.
For you, my grandchildren,
I hold my hands over the cool breath
of the snow, so blue, so crisp, so cold,
so I can pat your cheeks with the snow’s breath,
so you can remember the feeling of snow.
For you, my grandchildren, I pray
for the earth’s forgiveness for walking
on her surface, how she holds me suspended
in this time, so close to your future.
For you, I wear sweaters, and burn less oil, no wood,
and send my emissary ghost to Standing Rock.
For you, my grandchildren,
I keep watch for the barred owls that rest
on the hemlocks in our yard.
I’m remembering it all for you:
their wide wingspan, their dark eyes
that hold the future of the long dark night, infinity,
and I tell you this, my grandchildren,
I chose not to be afraid, because I am remembering,
I am remembering all of this to give to you:
the cold breath of the snow, the people
at Standing Rock, the tall hemlocks, the green water
of Ashfield Lake, I am giving you the coldness
to hold onto when the sun bears down
and Massachusetts gets hotter,
I am giving you forests full of hemlocks, ash trees,
beech, canopies of leaves to walk under;
I am giving you the shelter of pines;
this is what I am handing down to you, my legacy.

Laura Rodley's NVN poem “Resurrection” won a Pushcart Prlze and was published in the 2013 edition of the anthology. She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee, won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

#LOVETRUMPSHATE

by Brian Glaser

Levi Snyder-Allen dressed as a wolf when he joined his mother Diana at a North Dakota oil pipeline protest. The wolf is an endangered species in North Dakota. About 30 protestors gathered for a "Stand With Standing Rock" demonstration against the North Dakota Access Pipeline in Santa Ana on Saturday. (Photo by Bill Alkofer, Orange County Register/SCNG Nov. 27, 2016)

By ordering construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to resume, the President is participating in one of this country’s oldest traditions—repressing Native Americans.

—Bill McKibben, The New Yorker online, February 8, 2017

Dakota Access protesters vow 'mass resistance.' 
They will be hard to stop. 

—CNBC, February 8, 2017

“No trespass, no peace.”
That’s the chant as my son heard it when we stood
with thirty others
at a Santa Ana intersection
to show solidarity with the water protectors of Standing Rock.
As a beginner, I was impressed by the preparation of the young woman
who had organized the gathering:
not only summoning us all,
but the extra signs, bilingual informative flyers, a whistle to acknowledge
the gestures of agreement from passing cars.
And the chants, begun across the street from where we stood,
connecting us like impalpable thread.
Just today, the Army announced that it will shut down
the encampment blocking the black snake
in December.
Kurt Vonnegut said of the afterlife that one might have to choose
an age to remain for eternity.
I might choose sixty-five or so,
I think, but forced to commit to one I would miss
the overtones and undertones and ironies
with which the chant describes the changing years
of my already forty-three:
no trespass, no peace.

Brian Glaser has worked as a grant writer, a dramaturge, and a professor, and he has created six environmentally themed courses at his current school, Chapman University. Glaser has published more than thirty poems, translations, essays and reviews.

THE WEIGHT OF WATER

A Rhupunt by Elizabeth Spencer Spragins

The white man buys
With gold-plate lies.
His honor dies
On rocks that stand.

With greed, with guile,
Pale fists defile
The streams with bile
That poisons land:

“Hail, bottom line!
For leaks, a fine;
Let squaws drink wine!”
We understand

Their appetite
For oil will blight
Our sacred site,
Yet they demand

We yield this ground.*
Despoilers pound
The earth, and mound
Its bones and sand

With metal paws.
The hungry jaws
Of drill that gnaws
Devour our land.

Their serpent’s bite
Pours black of night
Through earth despite
Our protests and

Appeals to law.
So from the maw
Of death we claw
The dead, command

Their ghosts with dance,**
Add spear and lance
Of spirits’ stance
To human hand.

We string each bow
With words, strike blow
In court; the snow
We will withstand.

Foes agitate
With stones of hate;
Lakota wait
On rocks that stand.

* Current plans call for the Dakota Access Pipeline to pass under the Missouri River less than one mile upstream of the Standing Rock Reservation.  The Lakota have protested on the grounds that the project will contaminate their sole source of drinking water and disrupt their sacred lands.  



**By 1890 the Lakota faced starvation as a result of the U.S. Army’s systematic decimation of the buffalo, their primary food source. Members of the tribe began to practice the ghost dance, which was said to harness the spirits of the dead to fight on behalf of the living.  Sitting Bull was arrested for refusing to stop this practice, and the resulting conflict led to his death and the subsequent massacre of his supporters at Wounded Knee.

Elizabeth Spencer Spragins is a linguist, writer, and editor who taught in North Carolina community colleges for more than a decade.  Her tanka and bardic verse in the Celtic style have been published in England, Scotland, Canada, and the United States.  Recent work has appeared in Quarterday Review, Society of Classical Poets Journal, Bamboo Hut, Skylark, Atlas Poetica, Halcyon Days, and Peacock Journal.  She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA.

NORTH DAKOTA

by Carl Boon




See the snow, the fire
in the snow, a native girl
swinging through the cold.
See what happens
when the water cannons
finally turn away,
the steed retreat,
the acute limbs
of authority and order
look elsewhere.
Hear the temporary joy
of a mother, maybe
yours or mine; listen
as the wind keeps her
eyes still distant
from what we love
and often despise—
the shopping mall,
the restaurant, the news.
It is almost 1823, it is why
we write songs
that tremble in the gut
all-conquering,
that verb that needs
a thousand more
to make a story. Hear
empire’s sound
moving back again,
white hands, white
ears that finally listen
in suburban rooms
of a thousand books
and a thousand quaint
mistaken phrases.

Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Ink In Thirds, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.

TENDING

by Jeremy Thelbert Bryant

BREAKING NEWS: The Army Corps of Engineers said that it would not approve permits for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a dammed section of the Missouri River. —The New York Times, DEC. 4, 2016

A mother bird, in the tree my grandfather planted, drops food into babes’ beaks.
How long have mothers tended this world?
A police officer opens hose on a woman protesting pipeline. A piece of her rips away.
How long have women fought for earth and man?
The babes without knowing to be grateful, blindly eat.
Water washes away blood, but dirt and rocks remember.

Jeremy Thelbert Bryant is a poet and a writer of creative nonfiction who lives in Virginia. When he is not teaching English, he is burning incense, listening to music, drinking coffee, and writing. He finds inspiration in the red of cardinals, in the honesty of Frida Kahlo’s artwork, and in the frankness of Tori Amos’ lyrics.

CONFRONTING THE GHOST OF BULL CONNOR AT STANDING ROCK

by Dana Yost

Pray With Standing Rock November 26th at 3:00 PM Central US Time

So.
Bull Connor lives
again, dragging his water hoses
to North Dakota. The spray of hate
and intolerance. The dogs, the nightsticks,
broken bones and open wounds.

But.
Bull Connor
forgets. On the streets of Birmingham,
people slipped and fell as his hoses shoved
them, slickened their footing, exposed a shin
to dog teeth and paw. But they got back
up. They outlasted the water, the spray
that sliced flesh. They stitched and bandaged and stood
and took it again, the sidewalks resolute
with the content of their character.

In North Dakota, they get back
up, too. They will let their flesh be split,
they will outlast the hoses. Duty and justice
will overtake the ache. Open wound, broken bone: honorable sacrifice
for the right to march over the bridge. Bull Connor with his nozzle
always ends up the embarrassment, the one slip-sliding
down the drizzle, down the sidewalk of disgrace.

A lifelong resident of the Upper Midwest, Dana Yost was a state and national award-winning daily newspaper journalist for 29 years. Since 2008, he has published four books. His fifth book, a history of 1940 Middle America, comes out early in 2017. 

STANDING ROCK RESISTANCE

by Akua Lezli Hope





Hey-ya Hey-ya Hey Hey O O

where is it that you go
cars stopped and searched
on their way to the gathering
where others sing and pray
land protectors, land protectors
sing and pray, police, police
stop intrusive machines
that churn holy ground
that plow the sacred into memory

Hey-ya Hey-ya  Hey Hey O O

gather all ye tribes to save
life water in North Dakota
Standing Rock Sioux
started in prayers in April
avert the threat to sacred earth
defend clean streams
at this end of the fossil fuel era
battle pipelines which burst
which quench an alien thirst for profit
trespass on treaty lands

Hey-ya Hey-ya  Hey Hey OO

a german shepherd pants with blood on his mouth
his nose drips with Indian blood
his handler yanks him this way and that
other dogs snap at horses’ legs which dance away
charge protectors, bite and wound
other handlers advance, spray the eyes
of protectors, mace Indian faces

Hey-ya Hey-ya  Hey Hey OO

come all defenders
stand by those whose land
has been blooded by slaughter
drowned by dams, washed away
confront the threat to who remains
from 17 banks, $3.8 billion
arrayed to transgress, to dig under rivers
dirty the clean, desecrate holy places,
intruders threading poisons
through the precious warp of earth
to steal again First People’s land

Hey-ya Hey-ya  Hey Hey OO

this is prayer ground
this is sacred water way
this is where First Peoples stand
this is where protectors stay.

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, and metal, to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, adornments, and peace whenever possible. She has won fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Ragdale, Hurston Wright writers, and the National Endowment for The Arts.  She is a Cave Canem fellow. A crochet designer, she has published 114 patterns.  Her manuscript Them Gone won Red Paint Hill Publishing’s Editor’s Prize and will be published in fall, 2016.