A TAN-RENGA HAIGA

Photo by Marjorie Pezzoli

[Kenya] was left reeling after peaceful rallies last month to protest planned steep tax increases flared into deadly violence, with police firing at crowds who stormed the Parliament of Kenya, leaving it partly ablaze. Led largely by young people, the protests plunged [President] Ruto’s administration into the most serious crisis of his presidency, forcing him to abandon the tax hikes and scramble to contain the damage. —AlJazeera, July 11, 2024 

Christina Chin is a painter and haiku poet from Malaysia. She is a four-time recipient of top 100 in the mDAC Summit Contests, exhibited at the Palo Alto Art Center, California. 1st prize winner of the 34th Annual Cherry Blossom Sakura Festival 2020 Haiku Contest. 1st prize winner in the 8th Setouchi Matsuyama 2019 Photohaiku Contest. She has been published in numerous journals, multilingual journals, and anthologies, including Japan's prestigious monthly Haikukai Magazine.

Marjorie Pezzoli is a silk painter over 30 years, a visual artist, storyteller, and haikuist. Her writings cover joy, hope, grief, and cosmic wonders. Nature is a huge inspiration. Since 2019 her poems have been included in thirteen poetry anthologies and numerous online journals. She started writing when she found her daughter Alyssa's nearly blank journal in 2018; Marjorie filled its pages when she could not. This act began her writing journey. Her work deals with grief, hope, earth stewardship, and cosmic wonders. Photos taken while out walking Beau, the dog with Betty Davis eyes, inspires much of her work. Marjorie looks for words worth more than a thousand images.

THE LAST BRIGHT MOTES

by Devon Balwit

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real and that he is “studying” whether the United States should withdraw from the global warming agreement struck in Paris a year ago. —Washington Post, December 11, 2016

The feather star unfolds itself forward, frond
            after frond, like an Escher stairway,

impossible, yet in perpetual motion, somewhere deep
            off the coast of Thailand, unaware

that protection of its ocean has been handed
            to the oil-hungry, who will crack

the sea floor until it oozes black, until such creatures
            dance only as bright motes in memory,

those who love them too weak to halt the juggernauts
            of greed and indifference.

Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. She has a chapbook Forms Most Marvelous forthcoming from dancing girl press (summer 2017). Her recent poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News before as well as in numerous print/on-line journals, among them: Oyez, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, The Cincinnati Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Timberline Review, Trailhead Magazine VCFA, The Prick of the Spindle, and Permafrost.