ODE TO PROGRESS

by Tim Walker

Where are the mayflies of years past?
Or their descendants for that matter,
missed for many a May? But hey, at least
our windshield’s free of bug splatter.

Are night-blooming plants bereft of pollination
by moths confused by light pollution?
Praise be to LED lights, so productive,
we splurge on ever greater wattage!

And how does the little busy bee
keep up morale in its collapsing colony?
Being a social insect is overrated, vastly,
like being a seed-dispersing beasty.

The plants will learn to do without them.
We’re all tightening our belts. In the long run
we’ll concoct “honey” from sorghum
and petroleum byproducts, Amen.

Tim Walker read, for pleasure, the complete novels of Charles Dickens while earning a BA in Environmental Studies, and the complete novels of Anthony Trollope while earning a PhD in Geological Sciences, and has worked as a computer programmer, healthcare data analyst, used book seller, and pet sitter. He lives largely in his own head, while he corporeally resides in Santa Barbara with his son Dana and their cat Cassiopeia. His essays and poems most recently appeared in Harpy Hybrid Review, 3:AM, Fatal Flaw, Rock Salt Journal, and are forthcoming in Sneaker Wave Magazine and TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes.

TRIOLET ON A CADENCE FROM ELIZABETH BISHOP

by A. E. Stallings

Arugga AI has created Polly, the first AI-powered pollination robot. It can recognize 97% of all plant specimens.

We’d rather have the robot than the bee 

Although it meant the end of honey 

And honey’s aureate anthology. 

We’d rather have the robot than the bee. 

Greenhouses, hushed, far as the eye can see:

No buzz sweeter than money! 

We’d rather have the robot than the bee, 

Although it meant the end of honey. 

A.E. Stallings is an American-born poet and translator who lives in Greece. Her most recent volume, Like, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A selected poems, This Afterlife, is forthcoming in December from FSG in the US and Carcanet in the UK.

A COLOR THEORY

by Lynda Gene Rymond

Nearly unnameable colors press upon my heart. The silver-brown of Diego’s eyes, his rectangle

goat pupils glow with benevolent courage, the green-violet thumbs of asparagus erupting from

sandy soil, chaste lavender-pink of my cold fingers wielding the root knife. Lapis-tanzanite of

swallow wings and peach-buff of their underbellies. Sanguine-scarlet heads of the British soldier

lichen devour the log ends of our cedar gates, the viridian-onyx feathers of Pirate Jenny and

Halfpint as they scratch spent hay and devour the umber-gray scattering pill bugs. A threat-black

military transport flies low over my husband as he strides in his bee suit to a wind-thrown hive.

War is not here but its cogs and hammers now tense and click in every zone. My neighbor’s

poultry, gold-glinting as pocket-watches, are loosed like a dare to red-tailed hawks and sooty-

legged foxed, yet they live this day. If I could grip this small colorless invisible peace, could break

and pass it like honey-dripped bread to those who might not taste such again. Even now the

bees find red maple flowers and fly the pollen home in scarlet-orange bundles. Bundles. So many 

carrying bundles.

Lynda Gene Rymond has been runner-up for Bucks County Poet Laureate in 2019 and 2021 and a finalist in 2020. She has poetry appearing in the Schuylkill Valley Journal, Heron Tree Review, U.S. 1 Worksheets, and the anthology Carry Us to the Next Well (Kelsay Books, 2021.) Her short story “Turn, Turn” won the 2020 Pennwriters short story competition. She authored the children’s books The Village of Basketeers and Oscar and the Mooncats (Houghton Mifflin). She lives on Goblin Farm in Applebachsville, Pa.

WE CAN STILL DREAM

by Katherine West

American Dream, mixed media in resin artwork by Raphael Mazzucco.

            "I have a dream... we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."  —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

Last night I dreamed of rain

It overflowed the culverts 

It washed out the road in waves 

Like a sea in the desert 

It filled the arroyos like a lover 

Or the tide before love the opening 

Before the opening the flower 

Dreaming of the bee dreaming 

Of pollen generations of honey 

The wealth of the hive 

And the queen humming 

Her birth song of infinite flight 

Over a globe of no boundaries 

One garden all colors 

A palette of rainy territories 

Mixing new shades forgetting borders 

Katherine West is the author of three collections of poetry and one novel: Scimitar Dreams, The Bone Train, Riddle, and Lion Tamer, respectively.  She has had poetry published in Bombay Gin, Lalitamba, Tanka Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and TheNewVerse.News who nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019.  She lives in the mountains outside of Silver City, New Mexico where she translates Mexican revolutionary poetry and creates custom, hand-made poetry chapbooks.

QUEEN

by Scot Siegel

Image source: Pinterest

for Melania

One hundred days the Queen hibernates,
burrowed deep in a cavern of bark.

Every day, a star blinks on, or off,
birth of another scientist, or murderer,

and someone loses his or her job.
Every day is someone's first

at something, waking up married, burying
the dog, eating dinner alone as a widow.

Every spring, the earth gets back to work.
Queen searches for a dry place, a loft or shed,

a wedge of light between truss and stud,
someplace warm and undisclosed,

close to the source: Wood she'll strip from lap
or fence, chew and mix with saliva.

She works fast, connects petiole to rafter.
Spins the nest about the center stalk, weaves

combs for drones whose eggs take five to eight
days to incubate. Then they get to work.

Everything they do is for the Queen.
She never returns to the same nest.


Scot Siegel, Oregon poet and city planner, is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems (2016) and Thousands Flee California Wildflowers (2012), both from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. His poetry is part of the permanent art installation along the Portland, Oregon Light Rail Transit ‘Orange Line.’

ALI

by Skaidrite Stelzer

Skaidrite Stelzer is a Toledo, Ohio poet whose work has appeared in many literary journals including previously in TheNewVerse.News.

ESCAPEE

by Laura Rodley

Image source: “StarLink Corn: What Happened”

It was only a kernel of corn
that dropped from a bag
that someone bought at the market
but the kernel of corn
grew and kissed the rest
of the corn silks rustling
on stalks to its right, its left
so they become the genetically
engineered corn just like
the seed that was dropped
changing the 10,000 year old
Mexican corn, changing what
they thought was pure
into a genetically modified crop,
and not just one plot
it was all of them,
the cast of the wind
the kiss of a bee,
the hop of a katydid,
all them bringing pollen
from across the boundary
that corn cannot see,
it only bears the fruit;
three ears of corn on one leaf,
dried out stalks, the corn
that the farmer’s wife
pats into tortillas
something he did not bargain for
or even want.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). 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.