NOW THE DYING WHO ARE ALMOST DEAD, ARE DEAD

by DeWitt Clinton

“The end of the earth,” acrylic painting by Tobi Star Abrams

The end?  Well, we could hardly call it that, as if

Whatever just happened, isn’t found in an old

Paper thin tome nobody’s read for a zillion years,

Instead, the end, or The End, just keeps blistering

The heck out of nearly everyone, though some

Are immune, and will never know when any End

Is just around, looking for hopeless dopes like most

Of us are now, prayers done with, floors mopped

With Clorox, as if that would scare anyone away,

But the Bugs like that deep inhalation we take when

We walk into any room, like sniffing lighter fluid

Right into the lungs where it plans to stay and stay

Until all of us are turned over onto our stomachs

By the kindest of medical staff, hoping the deep

Breaths will pull us out, but most of us have already

Died, and had no clue anything was like The End as

So many are whispering about now, as if Breaking

News isn’t about a new political cataclysm, but rather

Breaking the hearts of so many in so many hugely

Different parts of our world, everywhere even in

Antarctica, and who brought the Bugs in to such a

Pristine, icy world anyway?  ICU’s are now in gift

Shops, chapels, parking lots with unique tenting

Materials and refrigerator trucks behind and out

Of sight, keeping all the dead quite cool until we

Find a place that will prepare the dead without

Ending up as the prepared dead.  That’s our new

World with the best hopes of looking ahead nearly

Two or three years out, and even then, new varieties

Will awaken all of us again, those who aren’t quite

Living any more, but just waiting, you know for what

Don’t you, call it what you want but here, it’s The End.

Recent poems by DeWitt Clinton have appeared in Lowestoft Chronicle, The New Reader Review, The Bezine, The Poet by Day, Verse-Virtual, Poetry Hall, Muddy River Poetry Review, Across the Margin, Art + Literature Lab, One Magazine, Fudoki Magazine (England), and The New Verse News.  He has two poetry collections from New Rivers Press; a recent collection, At the End of the War; and By a Lake Near a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters, poetic adaptations of Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Chinese.  He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater, and lives in Shorewood, Wisconsin.

ELECTION SHOCK, TWIN CITIES, 2016

by Sue Reed Crouse

You will tire
of using his face

to pick up dog shit.
You will quit saying cataclysm

because cataclysm unites
a country. You will cull Facebook,

CNN, the front page from your day.
You will say, I’m done, I’m through

fuck it. You will get your household
Canada-ready. You will roam the woods,

call on the willow, golden in the low light
and the pond, steeped in the oak’s rich tannins.

But then, you will go downtown and see
Somali school girls swinging, their shashs

billowing and you’ll drive on Lake Street,
where Dia de los Muertos celebrations—

with marigolds, calavaras, offrendas—
were held last week. You will

pass houses
flying the rainbow flag

and you’ll go home
and get to work.

Sue Reed Crouse is a 2011 graduate of the Foreword Program, a two-year poetry apprenticeship at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Much of her work is elegiac in nature, exploring themes of grief and loss after losing Laura, her 20 year-old daughter in 2008. Finding fresh ways to explore this universal theme through image-driven poetry helps her navigate the sorrow and, hopefully, help others who grieve. Crouse’s work appears in Verse Wisconsin, The Aurorean (Showcase Poet), The Talking Stick (First Prize, Honorable Mention), Grey Sparrow, Earth’s Daughters, Damselfly Press, Midway Journal, Sleet Magazine, Unhinged, Little Lantern Press and a chapbook entitled Gatherings: A Foreword Anthology. Her manuscript One Black Shoe was a finalist for the Backwaters Prize last year.

GREATCOAT SHADOW

by Gary Bowers

Massive Nor’easter bigger than Hurricane Sandy expected to bring winds, snow, cold blast to Northeast for late March. Posted on March 25, 2014 by Anthony Watts on Watts Up With That?

We do warm.
Some soon day, when cataclysm is a daily thing,
The managers-by-crisis of our orbiting home
Might scatter squares of molecular-malleable metal
In a greatcoat for the Earth
Above the atmosphere.

We may cool.
Since weather is, in an interrelationship this size,
Irreducible to a set of equations,
There are bound to be consequences
No software simulation nor flight of fancy
May anticipate.

We may learn,
In the greatcoat shadow,
New transient joy
Of occluded sun and eclipted moon
Before the next
And final crisis.


Gary Bowers is a northern-Arizona poet whose specialties are acrostic, illustrated verse and the sonnet form. He is the author of Lives of the Eminent Poets of Greater Phoenix: Volume I. He lives happily with his collagist girlfriend Denise and their cat Cookie in Cottonwood, Arizona.