NORTHERN CALIFORNIA WINTER

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Illustration by Matthew Laznicka for In These Times.

A day of soaking rains.

Crowds of sparrows

Foraging in garden mud

For seeds exposed by the downpour.

Gutters and storm drains

Clogged with great clumps of wet leaves.

Persimmon trees 

Stripped of their foliage

Their naked bodies ornamented

With glowing orange lanterns.

Shiny, water-slicked buckeyes 

And bay nuts 

Littering the ground.

We have waited and waited

And waited

For the rains to arrive

To drench the soil

To fill the creeks

To bathe the dry woods

That throughout the hot, dry, red-flag season

Whispered in our uneasy dreams

Threats to erupt in flames

That would come fee-fie-foe-fumming 

Down the mountain

Like a malevolent fairy tale giant

With a hunger for our homes,

For our neighborhoods,

For our bones.

Rest easy sing the little silver-footed fairies

Dancing on the roof,

For now.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and only journals. His new book At the Driveway Guitars Sale is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. He podcasts poems of aging, memory, and mortality at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife Cynthia in northern California.

NEO THE VACILLATING NEAR-EARTH OBJECT

by Lee Nash




NEOWISE—your one-size-fits-all comet,
or call me C/2020 F3—
I’m hardly striving for the poetic,
named for an infrared telescope. Find me
booming near the northwestern horizon,
gassing off through the zigzag stars of Lynx,
zooming to the Great Bear, and on
to you, dear Earthlings, to be your Jumbo Jinx.
A survivor—I’m back from the far side,
SOHO’s tracking my line; ATLAS and SWAN
are steam, their bodies disintegrated...
It’s enough to make a messenger wan.
Darlings, though I’m unpredictable,
I do my utmost to be a spectacle.

I’ll do my utmost to be a spectacle,
an astral show before I dissipate,
though it’s not under my control...
To miss me would be rather unfortunate.
If I die, I’ll light up your skies; if not,
see you in 8786!
Catch me chilling in Auriga’s chariot,
conscious of my mission to transfix –
that’s why I’m here, after all, to wake
you Homo sapiens from your dopey state.
A Sign to break crass rhythms, wipe this slick
of insolence from your brows, conflate
your problems with my stellar viewpoint,
at risk of putting all your noses out of joint.

Risking putting all your noses out of joint,
I really must make clear to you, the heat
is on—for you, not just for me. Climate
is a touchy subject, isn’t it?
Excuse me? What about your right
to holidays and international travel? Of course!
But from where I’m flying the desperate plight
of islanders is difficult to ignore:
I see grandmothers planting mangroves,
their bare feet sinking into deep water,
bushfires out of control, great de-frosts
and fry-ups, dwindling groundwater...
Hence, my humble attempt to purify
your thoughts with a brief, erratic fly-by.

Your thoughts. With a brief, erratic fly-by,
I’m unlikely to change your perspective.
You’re far too set in your ways by now; I
doubt I’ll get your attention. Forgive
my cynicism... But I’m no sungrazer,
no ice crystal who doesn’t give two hoots,
no bolide or passionless trailblazer,
no sympathetic meteor content to shoot
your wish. I am, please, apocalyptic.
Dears, don’t take this badly, but if I were
to stray from my elliptic,
and plunge into your globe, the saboteur
of your finest achievements... What calamity!
What tsunami of plastic debris!

What a tsunami of plastic debris
would wash up on your greasy sardined shores!
Breathe easy, the laws of physics constrain me,
and, of course, I obey the first cause –
a humble servant, not for me to preempt
the misfortunes of the Anthropocene:
I’m merely omen, harbinger, event –
though I’ve been around since Pleistocene.
Excuse me, my humor is misguided.
A world reeling from a harrowing plague,
you’re surely feeling a little jaded
and I fear my message is somewhat vague...
I shall try to be perfectly clear:
get your shit together or the end is near.

Get your shit together or the end is near.
It bears repeating, for you haven’t listened
to scientist or teenager—
instead, you surgically scrub your hands
from guilt. So here I am, NEO—your herald
in a modern guise, your two-tailed flare;
WISE—your perspicacious portent, errand
sent from heaven against your laissez-faire.
Doomsday. What a negative word that is.
Better to leave it to Hollywood,
enjoy it in a bucket seat, drinking cherry fizz.
We comets are misunderstood!
Does this seem like a game or a riddle?
While your ley lines warm up like a griddle?

While your ley lines warm up like a griddle,
you dream of investing in cooler climes,
treat my warning as tarradiddle,
for there’s no one to punish your eco-crimes.
Before I return to the depths of space,
please think of how you consume and pollute...
you’re an odium to the human race
and your energy drive just won’t compute.
Or else, I shall assume a death wish.
I’ve seen it many times on many rounds.
Celestial destroyers are not squeamish,
and sadly pale blue dots aren’t out of bounds.
For your cataclysm, I’m on it:
I’m NEOWISE—your one-size-fits-all comet.

Lee Nash writes poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in diverse journals and anthologies, including Acorn, Ambit, Angle, Magma, Mezzo Cammin, Slice, and The Best Small Fictions 2019. Her first poetry chapbook Ash Keys was published by Flutter Press. She was a 2018 Bath Flash Fiction Award prizewinner, joint winner of the 2019 Princemere Poetry Prize, and is First Prize winner in Fish Publishing’s 2020 The Lockdown Prize (haiku and senryu category).

I WAS WONDERING . . .

by Tricia Knoll 

A cadaver dog named Echo searches for human remains in a van. A husband-wife team, Karen and Larry Atkinson, worked their way through devastated properties near Eden Roc Drive in Paradise with their dog Echo, an English lab. Echo dashed ahead, nose to the ground, and then returned to Karen, who would point the dog toward the next place to be searched. REUTERS/Terray Sylvester, November 14, 2018.

Of course, I was wondering
but you don’t just pipe up
to ask this about these fires
that everyone is explaining
for why the forests are dry,
why these houses stand
in the wildland interface,
what climate crisis ramps
up the drought. And now
I don’t have to ask where
are the cadaver dogs
doing their work?
They are there, sniffing.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who responded to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as a public information officer—a few weeks after the cadaver dogs had come and gone. A friend of hers worked with his dog on this hard job after major hurricanes in Florida two decades ago. More responders with more hard jobs.

DARWIN AT WORK

by Howard Winn

When watching orangutans in nature documentaries, it is easy to imagine them as graceful rulers of the canopy; to whom climbing and brachiating through the trees is as natural and simple as breathing. This, however, would be an incorrect assumption. Just as toddlers learn to walk from following their parents, and through plenty of trial and error, young orangutans too must learn how to navigate the world around them. As the largest arboreal mammal in the world, orangutans face a steep learning curve when first grasping how to maneuver on their own in the forest. —Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, August 1, 2018

If humanity does not change its ways
soon there will be no orangutans
we are told by the latest scientific
findings and the survey of these
strange beasts who seem like the
crazy cousins of homo sapiens
but in a world run by the rules of
business capitalism these sub-human
beasts have no union to protect their
status in a jungle with profit hidden
in the vines and the rain forests
just waiting for the latest entrepreneur
to make the proper business move
perhaps Chinese or Middle Eastern
to join the one percent who own
the semi-civilized world stash the
profits off-shore and buy expensive
real estate in London or New York
while the residual orangutans in
their diminishing jungle residences
find themselves as homeless as
the other immigrants of this time
with no where to go and no welcome
there or anywhere even if labor
is running short in the civilized nations.


Howard Winn's novel Acropolis is published by Propertius Press. He has poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

IF ONLY ORCAS ATE SEAWEED

by Linda Stryker

The orca named J35, or Tahlequah, carrying her dead calf on the seventh day. Credit: Ken Balcomb/Center for Whale Research via The New York Times: “The Orca, Her Dead Calf and Us” by Susan Carey, August 4, 2018.

Our babies are dying, she said
without words. Look!

as she held up her newborn
and newly dead on her nose.

Days go by, and she still
clings to the tiny she-orca.

Do something! she says
without words. Look!

Our clan will die of hunger,
where are the salmon we

feed on? grandmother
orca says without words.

Our babies die of hunger,
as do we. You, humans,

can solve this. You must,
she says without words.

Her loud voice carries over
the waves and into hearts

who want her to live, but
who know she cannot.

Linda Stryker writes from Phoenix, Arizona, and is a volunteer radio reader for Sun Sounds. Her chapbook Starcrossed was recently published by dancing girl press. Her creative writing has been published in Highlights for Children, New Millennium Writings, Ekphrastic Review, Third Wednesday, and Chiron Review, among several other venues.

CALIFORNIA STATEWIDE FIRE MAP, AUGUST 2018

by Ron Riekki

Source: CAL FIRE

for Zachary Schomburg and Nick Flynn

“Where the hell is global warming?” —DJT

“The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” —DJ Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three


I used to sit on the shore and watch the waves,
but now the shore is closed and the heat waves

and I’m seeing death in the woods and feeling
death in the air and hearing death on the radio

and knowing death is lurking next to Death so
that there are two deaths everywhere that I look

at all times and the death is the death of booths,
the death of voting booths, the death of all

of the animals near the voting booths and in
the voting booths, except there are no voting

booths anymore, just the rigor mortis of these
electoral colleges that are universities with no

freedom of speech unless you count death
speech, the threats to countries, when we don’t

want to concentrate on the fires, on the air
outside of my apartment right now with its 154

red listing of unhealthy and main pollutant:
atmospheric particulate matter, which really

means death but we can’t say death when we
mean death, and what I mean is the newspapers

are having the headlines of California Ablaze
except that we’re told all media is fake that

death is fake, although here we’ve had more deaths
from forest fires in the last year than in the last

decade combined and we are becoming the last,
with the death taste in my mouth—can you

taste it?—The cereal I had this morning was death
brand.  And the milk was death.  And the bowl

was made out of death and I ran after my death-
bus but missed it so I walked through the forest,

a shortcut, except the deer were on fire and my
head was filled with the particles of death

because death is made up of the little things,
the smallest moments of ignorance, the tiniest

bits of hate, until they pile up and I just read
the graffiti near my apartment: CALIFIRENIA

with dotted capitalized Is in cartoonish flames
and 1.4 million acres is burning in thirteen

states with the third-degree burns of the earth’s
crust, the earth’s nerve endings being destroyed,

its skin swelling, the way these wounds tend to heal
poorly, and the heat is a death and the death is a heat

and this is not theater but rather our lives, my life, your
life

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

THE WORDS MATTER

by Tricia Knoll

McKibben warns us loud and clear.
Stop pussyfooting about climate change.
Say, shout, shriek, yell Climate Crisis.

My friend makes sandwiches for 400 firefighters
near the Dufur, Oregon wildfire . . . and comes back
later to cook dinner. She knows: Climate Crisis.

Another friend in LA with asthma says
I can’t breathe and she is choking,
Climate Crisis.

When you dowse your spring-flooded living room studs
with bleach, splash it heavy and roar:
Climate Crisis.

When the people who have known one island
where their ancestors lived and died take a boat
to somewhere else, their chant is Climate Crisis.

When you’re hot and the heat breaks all records,
you know that elders and babies are dying,
and you weep, Climate Crisis, Climate Crisis.



Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who is witnessing her state setting a record for the number of 90 degrees in one summer. Her most recent collected poetry is How I Learned To Be White (Antrim House, 2018).