HURRICANE IAN: GIFTS IN THE MISERY OF AFTERMATH

by Claire Matturro

Ashley Garner had given up on ever seeing her wedding ring again. She lost it outside her Fort Myers home just days before Hurricane Ian crashed into the coast of southwest Florida last Wednesday… The family stayed at their home during the storm and went outside to clean up as soon as it had passed. “We’re about 10 minutes into cleaning, and my husband is cleaning up the brush and the trees right next to the garage door,” Garner said. “There’s a pile of brush and trees, and he moves over one pile, and the ring was right there.” —AP, October 8, 2022

Garbage swirls around broken people and

lost, bewildered pets while cadaver dogs

prowl mounds of wood and concrete bent to

waste by hurling winds and storm surge. Newly

homeless people crowded into shelters, 

feeling the roughness of unfamiliar pallets 

hard against their skin, are warned that they

must leave though they have nowhere to go.

 

Across the globe, Russians continue

killing Ukrainians, but here

in Florida our focus narrows—

How do we find our missing

mother? Where can we get fresh water?

Find food which tastes fresh

on our sore tongues? Shower off this itch and

stink? Is it safe to flush a toilet?

 

Inland, farmers search for lost horses in

swamped pastures and count dead cows flung

into ditches by river currents broken

free of levees in two feet of rain.

Someone’s pink umbrella floats by

in flood waters spun off a Gulf beach once

seemingly benign and filled with summer kids

splashing in waves not yet turned violent.

 

In all this cursed misery of aftermath

still strange gifts are bestowed—the neighbor

who never spoke to us arriving with chainsaw

to clear the cracked tree sloping over our porch;

hummingbirds unharmed returning to feed;

the perfect stranger who hands clean water,

tangerines, and $50 to an elderly man

crying inside his car that won’t start.

 

Then this, a woman finds her lost

wedding ring she feared was as

gone as the Gulf coast island homes.

She places the ring, retrieved from a pile of

brush and tree limbs, on her finger

soiled by the grime of recovery. She rests,

sitting on the curb, and prays to God, giving

thanks for what she sees as a sign of hope.

Claire Matturro is a former lawyer and college teacher, and author of eight novels, including four published by HarperCollins. Her poetry has been published in Kissing Dynamite, The New Verse News, One Art, Muddy River Poetry Review, Topical Poetry, Tiger Moth Review, Lascaux Review, and is forthcoming in Slant. 

JANUARY 1, 2022

by Susan Delaney Spear

Aboard a Colorado National Guard helicopter, Gov. Jared Polis on Friday, Dec. 31, 2021, gets a flyover tour of Boulder County neighborhoods destroyed by wildfires the previous day. He was accompanied by Brig. Gen. Laura Clellan, Adjutant General of Colorado, and Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle. Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Joe Neguse also toured the area in a separate helicopter. (POOL: Hart Van Den Burg, CPR) —The Colorado Sun, January 1, 2022

Drop into this darkness.

A first-born charcoal sky

and fire-scorched land

smolder yet remain.

 

Today the sun’s detained.

A sparrow pecks

a pile of ashen snow

for sustenance.

.

Drop into this darkness.

Dig deep.

Light the wick within.

Let this year begin.

 

 

Susan Delaney Spear is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood. Her poetry collection Beyond All Bearing was published by Wipf & Stock in 2018.

THE GREEN LIGHT

by Lynn White

US Army Major General Chris Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, steps on board a C-17 transport plane as the last US service member to leave Hamid Karzai international airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photograph: Us Army/Reuters via The Guardian, August 31, 2021

When she saw the green lights

her first thoughts were of Triffids.

Of course she knew they were imaginary 

but was less sure about the green lights 

which enabled their freedom,

an unintended consequence 

of the activity

of some government or other,

a terrifying aftermath.

And who knew what the aftermath 

of this green sky would be.

She could still see them

glowing above her.

So, not yet blind,

she thought.

But then, she reconsidered.

Metaphorically speaking

perhaps we were all blinded

a long time ago

when the green light was given

to the Triffids

who are already rampaging.

We just haven’t noticed yet,

such is our loss of sight.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal and So It Goes.

HARBINGER

by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds

We breathe to wake and,

Lying-in-wait, imagine... 

 

The ground

Buckling off the east coast of

 

The nation,

Enacting the rough ride we just faced, still

 

Face, out of the gate. Look

To January—cold, and colder still ahead here,

 

Yet offering a look

Forward—face it, like an ancient god

 

—The sudden down-home decency

Of purple-tipped crocuses, the wrinkled

 

Unfurling we long to call

Hope in the airborne scent of witch-hazel.

 

 

Joanne DeSimone Reynolds is the author of a chapbook, Comes A Blossom, published by Main Street Rag in 2014. Her latest work is a set of 14 poems exhibited as part of The Art Ramble 2020, an outdoor public art installation in Concord, Massachusetts, sponsored by The Umbrella Arts Center in collaboration with the Concord Natural Resources Division.

NOVEMBER AGAIN

by Juditha Dowd

and I’m doubtful

that no experience goes to waste

if only we’re able to learn from it.

Deer have mangled our deer fence,

that fox is prowling the yard.

Where will we be next year

when these maples shed their gold?

You and I have lived enough

to pretend at wisdom,

take the long view,

but the angles are foreshortened

as our fields turn murky and cold.

Soon the Long Night Moon

and two-faced Janus.

Soon the weeks of ice,

the days of mending.

Juditha Dowd’s most recent book is Audubon’s Sparrow, a verse biography in the voice of Lucy Bakewell Audubon, wife of the naturalist.

RONDEL ON ISAIAH 58:12

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

"Election Results" by Kadir Nelson

Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called repairer of broken walls, restorer of streets with dwellings. —Isaiah 58:12

The repairer of breaches,
restorer of paths

has won by a handbreadth.
Now legions of leeches
and star-belly sneetches
drag out the aftermath.
Maintain the breaches!
Block all the paths!

Enough with the screeches
of stokers of wrath
indifferent to megadeaths.
Heed him who teaches
repairing of breaches,

restoring of paths!

Esther Greenleaf Murer is a longtime contributor to The New Verse News. She lives in Philadelphia.

TARGET

by Joe Amaral

Is it a person?
Oh no, did it get burned?
Looted? Robbed? Murdered?
Is it okay?

That’s a big box store.
Thick-necked. Hard to press.
Sells hoodies and jeans.
Dresses provocatively.
Damaging.
So empty inside now.
Gutted.

Seriously though, can it breathe?
Does it need water? Mama?
Call the police knee. Did it die?

Poor store, almost like a person.
Hard to fit in a bodybag.
There is video evidence.
Linoleum riot for inanimate rights!

Did it have a family? Friends?
Coworkers? A soul?
Will people miss it forever?
What is its past history?
Arrest record?
Stock market trend?

Ahem.      For profit.
Portfolio is looking up.
Tax sheltered. Bailout ready.
Owner made millions.
In a hazardous pandemic.
Workers get paid shit.
Unprotected. Wage theft.

Why are we only mourning
the humanity of lost property?
Joe Amaral,
Injustice reaction:
“Cleanup on Aisle 7”

Insurance will cover.
Nice being able to live again.
Exist. Mend.

Corporate thug.
Got what it deserved.

Joe Amaral’s first poetry collection The Street Medic won the 2018 Palooka Press Chapbook  Contest.

SHELTERING

by Brooke Herter James

“Parakeet” by Kees van Dongen,ca. 1910, oil on canvas, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Still life  day 28
here in Vermont
a solitary junco
half black
half white
sitting on the branch
half white
half black
against a backdrop of pond
black—rimmed with white—
thank goodness for
the small red barn
in the lower right corner
of the scene

I imagine painting
over this canvas
apple blossoms
puffy clouds   a woman
in the foreground
faded yellow robe
leaning out her second
story window
to hang blue towels
and flowered sheets
on one end of a
never-vanishing cord
that travels from this hillside
to Milan   then Barcelona
Wuhan   Jerusalem   Sydney
Seattle  New Orleans  New York

An endless clothesline
adorned  with the fabric
of the world billowing
outwards   music spilling
from all those unshuttered
windows   wafts of coffee
baked bread   squeals of children
running down hallways
pinging marbles on bare floors
dogs barking
I imagine painting
parakeets in wooden cages
singing while we wait


Brooke Herter James is a poet and children’s book author living in Vermont.

CARRYING FORWARD

by Tricia Knoll 

I have too many funerals to plan.
That’s what the rabbi said when asked

how he handles the mourning
and mornings that come after

the worst has happened. I need a break
the physician begs, no more stinking news.

I have to practice healing all over again.
The poet chews up the words she knows

for hate and they rub raw like hand-me-down
rags, unbought, stamped like prison garb.

The child asks after the star. What night
holds the star on that building?

The parents try to say all nights, all stars,
we are all one under all of them.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who grew up in a community similar to Squirrel Hill. She regularly attends a church in a denomination whose buildings have come under violent attack for its religious liberalism and strong social justice stands.

AMERICAN ICON

by Lylanne Musselman

Image source: Terapeak

I saw a bald eagle today
soaring back and forth,
sewing the edge of a
pure, fleecy cloud as if
it were being threaded
from the top of his snow
white head to the tip
of his ivory tail feathers.

I imagined he was quilting
a fresh, new day for Americans,
or embroidering a body bag
to collect the fragile bones
of this once strong,
colorful, united tapestry.              

Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet, playwright, and artist. Her work has appeared in Pank, Flying Island, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Poetry Breakfast, TheNewVerse.News, among others, and many anthologies.  In addition, Musselman has twice been a Pushcart Nominee. Musselman is the author of three chapbooks, with a fourth forthcoming: Weathering Under the Cat, from Finishing Line Press. She also co-authored Company of Women: New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013). Presently, she teaches writing at IUPUI, and online for Ivy Tech Community College.

GUZZLING DOWN THE BLUES

a post-election ghazal
by Joe Pacheco

I wake up each morning but can’t turn on the news,
My coffee’s cold and bitter with the Sore Loser Blues.

Start to write a poem, but I can’t find my muse,
She’s run away and left me with just Sore Loser Blues.

Called up Liberty Travel for a one-way Canada cruise,
They told me they’re booked solid with the Sore Loser Blues.

I’m keeping my Clinton sign, in case we didn’t lose,
But don’t know where to hide it with these Sore Loser Blues.

Maybe I’ll jump into the mainstream and drown my liberal views,
It’ll be easier to swim the narrows with the Sore Loser Blues.

The President-elect is desperate, no Dems left to abuse,
He’s willing to twitter anyone with the Sore Loser Blues.

Our nation’s divided, Pacheco, pick a side to choose,
It’s either freeloading Red states or the Sore Loser Blues.

Joseph Pacheco is a retired New York City superintendent  living on Sanibel Island. His  poetry has been featured several times on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Latino USA and WGCU. He has performed his poetry with David Amram’s jazz quartet at the Bowery Poets Café and Cornelia Street Café in New York City. He writes a poetry column for the Sanibel Islander and his poetry has appeared in English and Spanish in the News-Press. In 2008 he received the Literary Artist of the  Year award from Alliance for the Arts. He has published three books of poetry, The First of the Nuyoricans/Sailing to  Sanibel, Alligator in the Sky and, Sanibel Joe’s Songbook.

MY CHERRY TREE HAS FAILED TO YIELD

by Gregory Palmerino

Gregory Palmerino’s essays and poems have appeared in Explicator, Teaching English in the Two Year College, College English, Amaze: The Cinquain Journal, International Poetry Review, Courtland Review, Shot Glass Journal, The Lyric, the fib review, The Road Not Taken, Autumn Sky and The Society of Classical Poets. He teaches writing at Manchester Community College and writes poetry in Connecticut’s Quiet Corner, where he lives with his wife and three children.

AFTER THE CATASTROPHE

by Siham Karami

Tell me the evenings will deepen
the indigo sky in my brain.
This blue is too endless for laughter—
who'll bring me the color of rain?

Where rivers no longer meander,
sharp borders sink into the plain.
We slice the horizon to order,
but where is the color of rain?

The revelers' feet heard a rumbling
as mountains rose up to complain.
We woke up too late to find morning
and lost the soft color of rain.

The seabirds aloft in the sunlight
a whisper of breeze would sustain.
Old roots pummeled hard under asphalt
break through in the color of rain.

Remind us of wandering prophets;
Remind us of beehives and grain;
Ferment all our sterilized palettes
and reverence the color of rain.


Siham Karami's recent work can be found in such places as Measure, The Comstock Review, Sukoon Magazine, Mezzo Cammin, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Rotary Dial, Right Hand Pointing, Angle Poetry, Think, and the Ghazal Page. 

DONALD TRUMP, KATE MCKINNON, LEONARD COHEN

by Jaimee Hills





Are people safe? You've struck a chord
as we become an angry horde.
Appreciate the optics, now you’ve stopped her.
With painted signs, they chant, they sing,
the minor crowd, assembling,
as cloudy skies compose a helicopter.

A vote inside a vote machine
meaningless but for what it could mean
felt like gambling in a bankrupted casino.
The votes rolled in, in waves like water;
the careless don’t care about my daughter,
heat rising like the shock of jalapeño.

Though someone else's dream is you,
dream on we do, dream on we do,
hardy as the gardens of Pompeiians.
The flowers find the seasons strange,
there’s a changing to their change,
squalled shorelines and the stooping Himalayans.

It’s not illegal just to breathe.
We’ve always struggled. Always seethe.
It feels the wind is howling, blowing through you.
Within the ocean's current form
a shifting rage, a stirring storm,
the bitter burning tongue of Hallelujah.


Jaimee Hills is the author of How to Avoid Speaking, winner of the 2014 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She has been a featured reader in the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She teaches at Marquette University and lives in Milwaukee, WI.

THE WEEKEND AFTER

by Katherine Smith





The quiet of the street’s
Unbroken, except for
The intermittent roar

Of leaf-blowers beneath
The maple trees next door,
The sound of aluminum

Bats struck against a ball.
The shouting near the school
Not far from where I live

Grows louder as I walk
Towards it, past the park.
The light this afternoon

Filters through crimson rain
Of walnut leaves to chips
Of bark beneath the slide,

Merry-go-round and swing.
A sheepdog with my Thai
Neighbor passes by, and he

Scoots his dog’s white rump
To mulch beside the curb
So I can pass. In DC

The protests have begun
And a cold front moves
If not through autumn sky,

Quite yet, then through the hearts
That thump within the half
Of us like a blade. I think

Of the writing prompt,
Abandoned for a walk,
That asked us poets to devise

A proper response to one
The history books will call
Winner. But here I pause

To watch a team of girls
At the softball pitch,
A group of dads, who coach

The way to swing a bat.
I contemplate the courage,
Dignity, and grace,

The beauty, human, flawed,
Of course, as all beauty is,
Thrown towards us like a ball

We couldn’t catch.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014.

CALIFORNIA THE MORNING AFTER

Simon Hunt’s first collection of poems Lesser Magi will be published by Hummingbird Press in 2018. He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and raised in England and the United States.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Homestead Review, Light Quarterly, Measure, Poetry Quarterly, The Raintown Review, The Seventh Quarry, The Sewanee Review, and other journals—as well as in the online publications 14 X 14, Garo, and The Chimaera.  He teaches in Monterey, California, where he lives with his wife and two children.  He is a member of the Board of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, where he has served as a volunteer docent for more than a decade.   

AFTER THE ESCAPE FROM PRISON IN DANNEMORA

by Alejandro Escudé

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, left, and Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin hold a news conference in front of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. Shumlin said his state is ready if the escaped prisoners are found hiding there. —SETH WENIG/AP via NY Daily News, June 10, 2015

Raw world,  animal transfiguration,

Governor         at a podium,
acetone square,  enforcement, 

his word,         forest of 
microphones, gulps of blood, 

mere prey, pair of stags 
stalked for weeks,

footprints

pride, mystery,  a wall a god, 

law, scripture,         a man like deer 

sprints  for the treeline.


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.

DREAMING NEPAL

by Valerie Sonnenthal

Saili, 25, from Selang, said that her 2-year-old son died in the earthquake and that her home was destroyed. She and her two surviving children are now living in a shelter with four other families. Credit: Gardiner Harris/The New York Times, May 9, 2015

silencing her words
lips moving
wordless breeze
swallowing syllables
caught like a tumor
growing slowly
her throat aching
hands twisting
body somewhere
dust thickened
eyes blink
between dreams
days
like yesterday
calm carrying on
errands at the market
life a dream
she once was living
thankful
now thick
in the thick
slow stuck time
floating in wait
weighted
by a city
she once knew


Valerie Sonnenthal joined the Cleaveland House Poets when she moved to Martha's Vineyard in 2006. She writes the Chilmark Town Column plus arts and lifestyle stories for the MV Times, Arts & Ideas magazine, and  publishes Errata Editions' Books on Books series. 

AFTER THE BOMBING

by Howie Good

Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Every bush strung
with shreds of bloodstained light,
there’s so much still to suffer,

an Atlantic of emptiness,
greasy & barely moving,
a slow-creeping blue creation,

like the drone of flies
from an adjoining world.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has a number of chapbooks forthcoming, including Elephant Gun from Dog on a Chain Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. goodh51(at)gmail.com.

CLEANING UP AFTER THE HURRICANE

by Joan Mazza

 

                           for those still suffering

Along the streets of New York, Long Island,

and Staten Island, mounds of debris at the curb

after Hurricane Sandy. Couches and bedding,

pillows and papers, broken dinnerware.

Soggy books already molding. Boats on lawns,

cars deluged. Homes washed away or burned.

Like after Andrew in Miami—

equal to thirty years worth of garbage,

truck after truck in a caravan to the landfill.

Years of clothing gone, some new, coats

knitted sweaters, handmade quilts, towels,

embroidered tablecloths. Trashed.

Some things can’t be replaced by insurance:

the stuffed dog I’ve had since I was three,

my notebooks with first drafts of poetry.

family portraits on the wall, these pie tins

handled by my mother, ladle my grandmother

brought back from Italy. Beloved junk.

 
Joan Mazza has worked as a psychotherapist, writing coach, certified sex therapist, and medical microbiologist, has appeared on radio and TV as a dream specialist. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Perigee/Putnam). Her work has appeared in Kestrel, Stone’s Throw, Rattle, Writer's Digest, Playgirl, and Writer's Journal. She now writes poetry and does fabric art in rural central Virginia.