SIRENS IN THE DISTANCE

by Nancy Byrne Iannucci

Drought has parched the Northeast U.S. for weeks, draining reservoirs, priming the landscape for damaging wildfires and pushing politicians to implement water-saving measures. More than 58% of the Northeast is in moderate drought or worse, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. —NBC News, November 15, 2024. Photo: The Jennings Creek Wildfire burning behind homes in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., on Nov. 10. Credit: Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

In the name of the Bee —
And of the Butterfly —
And of the Breeze — Amen!  

—Emily Dickinson, "The gentian weaves her fringes"

                                                       

The rustling leaves 
sound more like abandonment
to me now than the innocence of autumn.
 
Tumbleweed has traveled from the West,
kicking up dust in foreign streets,
making me squint like Clint
 
in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
this time, I’m convinced,
it’s the Devil breathing,
 
tempting Grandma Moses’s
rolling fields of matchsticks
to give him just one spark.
 
I think the phrase, hell on Earth,
has been said too many times,
our words have become
 
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
the bees have warned us. 
the rains in Spain have explained
 
why Whitman’s grass is dead
and Kimmerer’s sweetgrass
 won’t braid, and now,  
 
the Earth is responding
in sirens, sirens blaring,
blaring in the distance
 
getting closer
and even closer,
are we listening now?

 
Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a librarian and poet who lives with her two cats: Nash and Emily Dickinson.  THRUSH Poetry Journal, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Eunoia, Maudlin House, San Pedro River Review, 34 Orchard, Bending Genres, and Typehouse, are some places you will find her. She is the author of four chapbooks, Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021), Primitive Prayer (Plan B Press, fall 2022), and Hummingbirds and Cigarettes ( Bottlecap Press, 2024). Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci

THE HEART OF IT ALL

by Bradley McIlwain

Whitman—

I hear the chains

Across N. America

At Capitol Hill

Where we’ve all become 

Capital—

Loose change

In the pockets 

Of pirate politicians

We elected 

To change—

Only to decline it; 

False prophets 

Who paid God 

To burn Sodom & Gommorah 

But they can’t kill my pride 

The way they put a bullet 

In Bonnie & Clyde.

People are still dying—

Trayvon. Floyd. Till—

Still, they shot Lewis in bed

Like Billy the Kid 

20—unarmed 

Dreams spilling out onto the sheets.

Ohio weeps in the streets.

Neil Young heard the drums;

Police are cutting us down—

What’s at the heart of it all?

You abolish slavery,

But commercialize prisons;

One shackle for another, 

Brother divided by brother

Under the foot 

Of the blood spangled banner

Still soaked in the soil

Of migrant workers

From the states to the border 

Across bus stops and shelters—

The buck doesn’t stop

At Roe v. Wade

When in a state of insanity 

Some judge decides 

In a state of supremacy

That women no longer 

Have control 

Over their bodies?

Over… my… dead… body

It’s time

To untuck injustice where it lies

Unbury the dead

And loosen their tongues

So we can unlearn

The things our fathers 

Have done—and do.

I no longer trust in God

The way I trusted in you.

The all seeing eye 

Has lost its shine 

And I see you

In tent cities

Crying out for food—

Whitman, 

Our people yearn. 

We are the choir 

Of others raging 

For freedom across the voiceless night, 

Rattling the chains for change.

Bradley McIlwain works as a Teacher-Librarian, where he strives to provide meaningful and inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and advocacy. He believes that poems and poets can be agents for social change. Bradley’s latest book, Dear Emily, was published by Roasted Poet Press in July.

THE PURSUIT

by Alejandro Escudé

Once I thought it was Nietzsche’s

Übermensch crawling up the Minority

Leader’s arm, a furry man, but no 

Sasquatch, a green hue around it.

But then I came to realize it was

Aristotle, his arched beetle back 

On the President’s shoulders, 

having lapped up the milk of logic. 

A stone cave for a poet to live in

and call out of, the trees out there

appearing as just so many lies.

One enters a labyrinth of razors

in the city, having been cooped up

in the house for many months.

Ever noticed that driving fast

is a form of geekiness? I sink

into a neutral speed, observing,

as Whitman did, the dead grass

of the center median. Airliners

crisscross the sky at different

depths of air. Nothing collides.

People only collide with them-

selves these days. Conflict, if 

it takes place at all, takes place

in whispers over false transoms. 

At night, looking up at the stars,

one sees no nature, only an urban

concentration of skyscrapers

formed of galaxies, planet rings

on-ramps and off-ramps, screams

suppressed by cynical tweets, 

statues masking WiFi towers.

I’ve been wrong before, but not

about this. Truth is dead because

truth is romantic. I bring you

to the end of this long car chase

and I bail out, a chopper over me,

its lights illuminating the way 

in or out of the television screen.

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.

CINEMA INAUGURAL

by Alejandro Escudé

It isn’t power, but a podium levitating over a row of graves. You know you’ve heard the word, America. And you sense it, the birds circling over the dignitaries entering the Capitol, where the shadows played weeks before. Weakened, we bow before the ghosts of revolutionaries. It’s all cinema, really.

With the frigid heart of the laborer, I watch, sore yet awake, vowing to do this and that and to do it despite broken hopes. One can’t help the wicked who insist on wickedness, dopes who carry another skeleton body stuffed in their dirty Levis. I can’t help seeing the skull behind the sputtering speech,

lime-white, cracked, battle-bruised as an Apache warrior, porcelain daughters in little Puritan boots climbing steps, old senators making deathly eye contact, defiant smiles. Harrowing wind where Whitman once walked too, to aid the wounded with his round, poetic soul. I am aggrieved

by the last four years, shreds of history, the unholy present of mad insurrection. To see the Viking faces of blowhards storm mahogany chambers only to wander, stunned, hooting devilish battle cries, brandishing antebellum flags, vomiting half-baked theories, chanting croc-shit demands, whaling

creepy hide-seek queries up stairways, around sacred halls. Upward, democracy falls. We’ve been leaping sideways.

I mute the new President, turn to my laptop screen, mask laying on my teacher’s kitchen desk. My students are real; I’m not sure my country is. Even the sun needs a webpage

today and has to publicize the need for its warmth, its rising and setting. Devils wander the corridors having broken

the golden gates of heaven and beaten sword-wielding Michael with a simple, splintered stick. We step forward torn yet illumined. The exodus out of an exodus continued. 

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.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

by Thomas R. Smith





I'm in bed with America.
America is writhing and moaning in her sleep,
twisting the bed sheets around her
as if coiled in the grip of a giant boa constrictor.
America whimpers in her sleep
and turns her head to the left and to the right.
America is having a nightmare.

America is dreaming that the Inquisition
   is back with its old, unimproved tortures.
America is dreaming that the British won
   the Revolutionary War and that Franklin,
   Washington and Jefferson were hanged at Valley Forge.
America is dreaming that she must increase
   her nuclear arsenal because being able
   to destroy the world 5,000 times over isn¹t enough
   if Russia can destroy the world 6,000 times over.
America is dreaming that the southern plantations
   have risen from the dust, and the whips and manacles
   the torch and the hood and the noose.
America is dreaming that water is rising
   around her house and she can't get out
   because the EPA has boarded up the doors and windows.
America is dreaming that drinking melted polar ice
   has changed her children into Syrian refugees.
America is dreaming that her babysitter
   is a registered sex offender.
America is dreaming that her real parents
   are dead and impostor parents are forcing
   her into the family business of carnival geeking.
America is dreaming that Lincoln has just
   shot everyone in Ford's Theater.
America is dreaming that she¹s feeling faint
   after drinking the cup handed to her by Putin.
America is dreaming that she has nothing left
   to eat but the money dragged from the vaults
   after the last billionaire committed suicide.
America is dreaming that Whitman and Emerson
   have pulled up their grave plots and
   relocated them to Ontario.
America is dreaming that all the blood shed by patriots
   in her wars has congealed into a malignant tumor
   kept in a secret room in the White House.
America is dreaming that Henry Ford has
   returned from the dead to help the President
   rewrite the Constitution in 144 characters.
America is dreaming that when the Pilgrims
   go out to the woods for the first Thanksgiving
   all they can find to shoot are skeletons.
America is dreaming that the Italians and Irish
   and Poles have been sent back where they came from
   across the Atlantic in individual wooden washtubs.
America is dreaming that beneath the site of the World Trade Center
   are anti-towers deep underground where
   the real masterminds of September 11th
   are plotting a new attack.
America is dreaming that the President has hacked
   Jesus's twitter account
   and is repealing the Sermon on the Mount.
America is dreaming that a tiny severed hand
   is creeping along the floor like a pale spider
   toward the Button.
America is dreaming that a vast stone head
   from an exploded planet's Mount Rushmore
   is hurtling toward Indiana.
America is dreaming—STOP!

America, can you hear me?
(I'm shaking you by the shoulders.)
I wouldn't be in bed with you if I didn't love you.
Spare yourself this nightmare.
It doesn't have to be this way.
There is still time.

America, dear America, please wake up!

Thomas R. Smith is a poet and teacher living in River Falls, Wisconsin. He teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. His most recent poetry collection is The Glory (Red Dragonfly Press).

I CELEBRATE MYSELF

by Jim Gustafson

CALAIS, Maine — A local man was killed instantly Saturday when he set off a fireworks mortar tube on his head, despite efforts his friends made to stop him, state police said Sunday. —Bangor Daily News July 5, 2015. Editor's note: The file photograph is NOT that of the victim in Maine, but of someone else deserving at least a Darwin Award Honorable Mention.

with apologies to Walt Whitman

I will place a rocket on my head, in a few moments I’ll be dead.
To celebrate myself, I’ll place a rocket on my head. I’ll strike a
match, light its fuse and let the sizzle climb my face. The rocket
will explode my brain and l spread my wisdom around the place.
People will scream as every atom which once belonged to me
will now belong to them. They will drip from their bottles, stick
in their hair. They will be sick because I took the dare. And when
they return to work, the holiday past, the smoke of my own breath
shall whisper.


Jim Gustafson’s most recent book, Driving Home, was published by Aldrich Press in 2013 and is a 2013 Pushcart Prize Nominee. He holds an MFA from University of Tampa and a M. Div., from Garrett Theological Seminary. He teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University and Florida Southwestern State College.  His work has most recently appeared in Prick of the Spindle, Foliate Oak, Poetry Quarterly. He lives in Fort Myers, Florida, where he reads, writes, and pulls weeds.