EVACUATE, EVACUATE!!

by Dick Altman

in Northern New Mexico

Wildfire near Tres Piedras New Mexico grows to over 1,800 acres —Santa Fe New Mexican, June 28, 2026. U.S. Forest Service photo.

Firefighters Mourn 3 Fallen Comrades as Blazes Ravage Utah and Colorado. Fires are raging in the arid Southwest after a warm winter. Forecasters say the fires may grow rapidly, and parts of Colorado have been ordered to evacuate. —The New York Times, June 28, 2026

I feel the old anxiety,

my pulse rising,

as the season’s first fire

expresses an unbridled

appetite for destruction,

exploding in three days,

from thirty acres

to seven hundred,

and still uncontained.

Grab your things,

crews yell,

hammering

on the front door,

and get out now!

How many times,

I ask myself,

must this story

repeat itself.

I watch,

across the valley,

swathes of

tall pine,

go from years

of glorious growth,

to barren shiny char,

in a matter of hours.

It shatters my heart,

when I think

of how I devoted

so much of my spirit

to nurturing

a conifer forest

up here on my home’s

bluff.

And all of its beauty,

decades in the making,

lost forever,

in a single bolt

of predacious light.

Nightmares

of flame

plague my sleep,

whenever

a blaze begins

to devour

a nearby landscape.

Am I next,

repeats in my mind,

over and over.

Evacuate!

The word

riddles me

with fear

and helplessness.

Replant

my life,

as if a cindered

forest.

Could I summon

the strength.

Force myself

to forget the home

I built,

the arboreal

children

I rear

over decades.

Evacuate!

To a tomorrow,

unknown,

uncertain,

voracious,

I weep to myself,

beyond

all reckoning.

Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, and others here and abroad.   Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 300 poems, published on four continents.

THE WEST IS BURNING

by Steve Deutsch

On the rise above 

Route 80, by a trickle

that was once 

a river

 

I watch a line

of traffic

a thousand miles long 

going nowhere.

 

The road has 

buckled and a semi

sits on its side

steam still boiling.

 

One by one

the cars and trucks

run out of gas—

dream irony

 

I suppose,

and people stand

beside their behemoths—

afraid at last.

 

The pine

and hemlock forest 

that lined the road

has turned

 

a sickly brown

and trees light up

like candlesticks

one by one.

 

Children fight

the fire

with blankets

and spit.

 

And the dust

and smoke 

and ash

make breathing

 

an occupation.

The west is burning

and few if any

will make it out.

 

I wake with a gasp—

heart escaping.

Smoke colors the moon

the west is burning.

Steve Deutsch has been widely published both on line and in print. Steve is a three time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is poetry editor for Centered Magazine. His poetry books: Perhaps You Can (2019), Persistence of Memory (2020),  and Going, Going, Gone (2021) were all published by Kelsay Press.

HERE IN THE WEST WE SMOKE

by David Feela

California lights up first thing 

in the morning

while Utah brews 

its second cup.

Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado

congregate on the patio

like neighbors, sharing stories

about wind and lightning strikes.

The Marlboro man 

still saddled, staring west,

leans toward sunrise’s glowing tip

and inhales the day. 

David Feela writes monthly columns for The Four Corners Free Press and The Durango Telegraph. Unsolicited Press released his newest chapbook Little Acres in 2019.

EXHALATION

by Pepper Trail

"The T***p administration has hailed its overhaul of federal pollution restrictions on coal-burning power plants as creating new jobs, eliminating burdensome government regulations and ending what President T***p has long described as a 'war on coal.' The administration’s own analysis, however, revealed on Tuesday that the new rules could also lead to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 from an increase in the extremely fine particulate matter that is linked to heart and lung disease, up to 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory problems, a rise in bronchitis, and tens of thousands of missed school days. "—The New York Times, August 21, 2018

Edenton, North Carolina


Mother, your breath shallow and slow, almost gone
Barely moving the sheet on your hospice bed

You are reluctant, now, to inhale
To bring in the world, its noise and its pain

So much easier to breathe out, to gentle
And at the end of that emptying, to stop

But the stubborn body kicks, the heart turns over
Begins again, will not yet let you go

Mother, it’s all right.  You are strong
Nothing, in the end, will stop your dying


Ashland, Oregon


The world, the west, is on fire
Vancouver to Yosemite, all tinder, alight

Halfway between, we must breathe
What air there is, what we are given

When we speak, smoke is what we say
And so we have stopped speaking

The mountains are gone, the valley
Through the windows, everything

The smoke is where we live now
What we breathe in, and then out


Washington, DC


He does not mind the world, the President
Thoughtless, he inhales its floods and its flames

Exhales this atmosphere in which we live
Gives us, this week, the “Affordable Clean Energy Plan”

Not Affordable, or Clean, or Energy, or a Plan
Simply another act in a lifelong history of harm

Power plants, cars, planes, you all and me
Together, we contribute: 408 parts per million

We are told there is nothing to be done
We are told there is no choice.  Just breathe

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. In his spare time, he leads natural history tours around the world.

THE SKY IS THE LIMIT

by Alejandro Escudé

“Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,’ Donald Trump Jr. Said,” —The New York Times, July 11, 2017

There is no way to confirm what we know.
A parade of Windsor knots. The meetings.
The taking and taking of meetings. In the East,
they say the West is “out here” when they’re
here. I travel the freeway under fiery skies
listening to the bare news sans the clothing
of images—unnecessary—as the haves take
more, history theirs, the colleges are theirs,
the homes, the beaches, the pearly oceans.
How do we unearth the hoard under the blip
on the metal detector? And how many cast
members! The lawyer, the singer, the orphans.
In the age of T***p, aren’t we all orphans?
Our ageless souls stripped from our organs.


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.