NEW CHEERS FROM THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST

by Cecil Morris

Get a load of this: Columbia, Breakside unveil beer made from bear poop" —Oregon Public Broadcasting, January 28, 2026.

Bear scat—that’s bear crap 

to those of us not naturalists 
or bearded survivalists wise 
in the euphemisms of nature 
(or ursinus faeces if you 
prefer the snooty gloss of Latin 
or Pooh poop if you’re still child-like 
and delighted by certain sounds). 
Bear scat beer—a new lager called 
Nature Calls—is a wild brew infused 
with—dare I say it—shit collected 
in Montana, the big sky state, 
where a new breed of ranchers scour 
the land for the not-quite-gold gold 
and sell it to be fermented. 
I suppose the USDA 
does not inspect or certify 
for purity the scat in vats 
of yellow lager so you might 
be getting a foragers blend 
of deer droppings or raccoon turds. 
Does that matter? The real question: 
Would Norm drink it were it on tap?

Norm superimposed on Breakside.com screenshot.

Cecil Morris, a retired high school English teacher, has poems appearing in The 2River View, the Common Ground Review, The New Verse News, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection At Work in the Garden of Possibilities (Main Street Rag) came out in 2025.  He and his wife, mother of their children, divide their year between the cool coast of Oregon and the relatively hot Central Valley of California.

PLANTING TIME IN UKRAINE

by Anne Harding Woodworth

A crucial portion of the world’s wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war. Credit: Vitaly Timkiv/Associated Press via The New York Times, March 20, 2022

The fibers of the breadbasket are unraveling.

Metaphor is of no use in wartime.

 

Call the breadbasket what it is: fertile country

that supplies grains near and far,

 

threatened now, as arable fields lie unplowed,

despoiled by the Bear at planting time.

 

Metaphor is useless. The tractor with plow

(or seeder) attached should be chugging out

 

into the fields now and on into the end of April—

but won’t be.

 

Man or woman on a tractor—easy target for the Bear.

But that’s metaphor, too.

 

Call the Bear what he is: greedy and cruel creature.

And not all bears. This one is a singular carrier of evil,

 

who leads his cubs to do his bidding.

There’s little grain left for the families,

for the animals, and none to ship out to Egypt,

Indonesia, Morocco, Israel, Spain, Tunisia.

Tunisia, once called a breadbasket itself,

until it was swallowed up by desert.

Now do you see how metaphors

don’t always work?

The world is hungry and hungrier, as the Bear

destroys fecund fields. No seeds will open.

No grains will be harvested. The breadbasket

empty, crushed. War destroys metaphor.

 

Food! is the only word left.

Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry Trouble received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry.

LIMITS OF LANGUAGE

by Amy Small-McKinney

The shootings never stopped during the coronavirus pandemic, they just became less public, researchers say. —The New York Times, December 1, 2021

           

Let’s say you are struggling to speak.

A six-year-old has been ensnared by a shooter

in the sights of his makeshift automatic.

Let’s say you don’t understand his language of righteousness.

You look for oxygen.

For the locust that grows nearly twenty-feet tall.

 

Let’s say his mind empties body disconnects

returns astonished by his own rage.

Let’s say you want to walk a path

through the black locusts that survive drought lousy soil

pollution sea spray light and shade its clusters of white or pink

fragrant as your own body once was.

 

Let’s say the shooter turns his back, decides not to kill.

Notice how the locust’s treetop becomes a bear holding its cub.

Now, a bird. How the Arctic tern lives longest

and travels in its lifetime

almost three times around the moon.

 

Let’s say you loved this path, following your beloved

onto another trail that looped past a waterfall then a stream

where human figures loomed above in the distance

and you could only guess if they held

guns or each other.

Amy Small-McKinney’s chapbook One Day I Am A Field written during Covid after her husband’s death, is forthcoming with Glass Lyre Press. For the 2020 virtual AWP, she co-moderated an interactive discussion, Writing Through Grief & Loss: The Intersection of Social and Personal Grief During Covid.  Her second full-length book of poems, Walking Towards Cranes, won the Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2017. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, Baltimore Review, Connotation Press, and SWWIM. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, judged by poet Chris Bursk. Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.  Her book reviews have appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner and Matter. Small-McKinney resides in Philadelphia.

RADICALIZED

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Sunday, March 8, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.

RADICALIZED
by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: RCOG Globeal Network International Women’s Day Page

The main thing was, she
listened. A
cliché.

So we told her
everything: how we cared

how we couldn’t
stand

watching all the news, how sad we felt.

She said we’re right. We told her
more: little

slips like pretty dolls
with long loose hair

laid on their backs –

here: the teacher
who won’t look
at us

my mother’s glass of brandy
every night,
her soft red cheeks.

She said the answer and it was
the one we wanted.

On the big plane
looking down
at the dark world we held

our coats wrapped tight
as love

around our ribs. The future waited like a bear,
still asleep.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Hobart, decomP, The Tule Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others.

RADICALIZED

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

Image source: RCOG Globeal Network International Women’s Day Page

The main thing was, she
listened. A
cliché.

So we told her
everything: how we cared

how we couldn’t
stand

watching all the news, how sad we felt.

She said we’re right. We told her
more: little

slips like pretty dolls
with long loose hair

laid on their backs –

here: the teacher
who won’t look
at us

my mother’s glass of brandy
every night,
her soft red cheeks.

She said the answer and it was
the one we wanted.

On the big plane
looking down
at the dark world we held

our coats wrapped tight
as love

around our ribs. The future waited like a bear,
still asleep.


Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California's Central Valley, where she works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in Word Riot, Hobart, decomP, The Tule Review, and Right Hand Pointing, among others.

THE BEAR NO LONGER DREAMS

by Aileen Bassis


Pushing aside a bottle on the table
and tearing off a piece of bread,
there’s a whisper, “Maybe
the bear wakes again,” and a rank smell

comes in the cracks between the boards.
The bear swings
a heavy leg over a door sill,
floorboards gasp.

The bear fills the room, hunger turning
his glassy blue eye a colder shade,
“I bring stability.”
His breath burns like ice,

the bear’s gravelly voice,
crackles like a radio broadcast
heard late at night
in a Lada careening

down the highway to Donetsk,
“Cousins,”
he pauses to lift a thick nailed paw,

“always, we were one.”


Aileen Bassis is a visual artist in Jersey City working in book arts, printmaking, photography and installation. Her use of text in art led her to explore another creative life as a poet. Her poems have found homes in many publications including Gravel Magazine, Milo Journal, Specs Journal, Spillway, Grey Sparrow Journal and Amoskeag.