THE BOMB FACTORY DOWN THE BLOCK

by Dick Altman

Photo by Dick Altman.

The aging Los Alamos lab at the center of America’s nuclear overhaul: Contamination incidents, work outages and declining infrastructure have plagued the site, but the lab remains the linchpin in an effort to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons. —High Country News, October 28, 2025

Northern New Mexico

When I settle here,

overlooking

Rio Grande’s

historic valley,

the Jemez 

mountains,

ranging

across

the entire

western skyline,

hold me

spellbound.

 

Daybreak 

brings them

brilliantly

alive,

to be worshipped

by Puebloans,

beyond memory.

Nightfall                         

turns them

into a stage,

where

piercingly

magenta skies,

unllike any 

I‘ve ever seen,

welcome 

high desert’s

glowing

obsidian

dark.

 

I can only

imagine

how

Puebloans

revere yet

what they

call

their sacred

peaks.

I’m tempted 

to call it

sacrilege,  

when I realize,

high on 

a promontory

looms

Los Alamos,

cradle

of the nuclear

age.

 

For me,

the site

is anything

but an artifact.

Friends

work there.

I’ve passed

through it

many times.

Hiked the hills

embracing it.

My ridge aligns

with Mount

Redondo,

a few minutes

south of the lab.

It overlooks
Valles Caldera

said to be

remants
of one

the largest
explosions
ever to rock
the planet.

I often wonder

if Oppenheimer

chose Los Alamos,

for its intimate

proximity

to the caldera.

I can almost

hear him

spurring on

his atom-splitting

cohorts: 

“We may never

match that

volcanic

cataclysm.

But I believe

we have

the minds 

to create

a weapon

of such power,

unlike any 

in human history,

to stop in its tracks,

the war.”

 

For those

like myself,

who call

this majestic

geoscape home,

his era,

to my disbelief,

is far from over.

Just weeks ago,

containers

leaking

nuclear

waste,

of the Cold War, 

were allowed 

to vent

into the air.

The winds,

I dread to say,

prevail from

the west—

towards

my ridge.

 

But what

of the Pueblos,

under which

a lethal chemical

flare in the soil,

originating

at the lab,

slowly worms

its way toward

tribal

ground water?

 

So far,

no amount

of science

or money 

can stop it.

No,

to me,

Los Alamos

lives neither

as just another

spot

on the map.

Nor anything

resembling

history’s 

tomb.

.

Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Landing Zone, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, and others here and abroad. His work also appears in the first edition of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry, published by the New Mexico Museum Press. Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 280 poems, published on four continents.

SWITCH

by Arlene Weiner

Source: Wikimedia Commons

For more than a decade, the West has faced off against the East again in what was widely called a new cold war. But with President Trump back in office, America is giving the impression that it could be switching sides. —The New York Times, February 18, 2025

The boys thought it would be fun
to throw the switch, watch trains
derail. It would be rich
to watch passengers tumble out,
scream. Maybe some would be naked.
 
There were deaths. The feral boys
didn’t care. Order and law
were boring. Boys would be boys
making noise, making money,
thinking it funny to upset sacred cows.
 
Watch it on Twitch, a sport
putting people through the woodchipper
the boys’ skipper, a double dipper, boasted,
who boosted his gaming scores.
Nobody came to stop the boys. 
 
Some men would be boys, breaking trust,
ghosting friends, tribal, looting, bribing,
gleeful masculine energy in a red hat. 

Arlene Weiner lives in Pittsburgh, where she is active in community poetry groups. Ragged Sky Press has published three collections of her poetry, most recently More (2022).

DANIEL

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Daniel Ellsberg, Whistleblower Who Exposed Top-Secret History of the Vietnam War, Dies at 92 —Slate, June 16, 2023. Photo: Dr. Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters Dec. 22, 2011, at Fort Meade, Maryland. PAUL J. RICHARDS/Getty Images via Slate.

I believe that to be a proper critic 
you need to lead a platoon through 
the shit 
 
and sit on every side 
of the table 
read the cables 
from embassies and fire 
bases 
compose a dissertation
on aptly named Decision 
Theory 
 
then join a think tank that took 
its name from something as light 
as Research and Development. 
 
Nor would it hurt to graduate 
from Harvard 
and possess an IQ north 
of the notes a Stradivarius 
hits in the hands of prodigious 
digits that can clean an M1 
beneath a blindfold 
like Jim Brown’s men 
aboard the U.S.S. Tigerfish
in one of those Cold War consensus 
flicks.
 
Daniel had it all 
Ooh Rah 
entering the Corps 
because he was no paper 
lion but under General Lansdale 
read every last word emitted by the Pentagon 
and courted charges under the Espionage Act 
from men who believed the original sin 
of American freedom was journalism.
 
But before people say 
he was just another Eastern
Establishment Jew like Kristol 
Bell Glazer or Chomsky 
bear in mind Harvard had quotas 
 
and Daniel grew up in Detroit 
the same city where Philip Levine 
discovered Garcia Lorca 
who spoke of what was inside 
forgotten little animals 
 
when he lived in Gotham 
 
but that could have been Hanoi 
Hue or the Iron Triangle where Annam 
Chorus Frogs warned peasants by their silence 
 
Daniel defoliated the pretensions 
of National Security 
and for interests of state 
we cannot now forget to say 
 
Requiescat in pace
or better yet 

hold for him a Minyan.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. Recent work appears/will appear in Rattle, Terrain.org, Belt Magazine, and Poetica Review among other places. 

WHAT THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK SAID

by Howie Good

As of January 24, the Doomsday Clock sits at 90 seconds to midnight. Jamie Christiani /   Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

The chemistry set I got for my 10th birthday came with glass test tubes and small bottles of dry chemicals in jewellike colors, plus a booklet with precise instructions on how to rubberize a hardboiled egg. It was the era of the Space Race. The scientist in the white lab coat held the Cold War rank of cultural spokesperson for progress. We were taught in school to worship science, as thousands of years ago a many-eyed beast with a body like a leopard’s and feet like a bear’s was worshipped. The clock declares it’s now nine seconds to midnight. Down in the street, an addled homeless man waves his arms around while remonstrating with a vicious-looking companion only he can see. 

Howie Good's latest poetry book is Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications. He co-edits the journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

THE GHOST OF THE OLD COUNTRY

by Kathryn A. Broderick

My grandmother is from the Old Country

A land of winding cities, valorous heroes, and ancient towers

Across the green-glass seas.

 

She whispers words that flow like water

As she sparks to life stories in that distant place

—But lowly and in secret, shamed by her foreign tongue.

 

Yet her secrets drip into the new life she’s crafted here

Coloring the edges of suburbia in Anywhere, USA

A resilient stain that assimilation cannot wash away.

 

The dust of butter-rich tea cakes

Cling to her withered fingers

As she weaves tales of her faraway home.

 

She tells me of the wild Baba Yaga

A witch that lives in a hut atop a mighty bird’s leg

And the ways to escape her enchantment.

 

She often weaves together the push-pull of escape and return

Haunted by the melancholia of self-imposed exile

As she tries to accept her unwilling divorce from the Old Country.

 

In her garden, soniashnyk bow their golden heads toward the sun

She calls the flowers her little kings with many-petalled crowns

She rests in their shadows as she paints pictures of her lost home.

 

My grandmother died before I knew the Old Country meant Ukraine.

She told me tales of its beauty. I never knew of its death.

She fled from its capital as a child.

 

Her father did not survive the journey

—at least, not as the same man.

Ghosts lingered in his heart.

 

The famine turned into skeletons those that remained.

Their bones returning to the embrace of earth in unmarked graves.

“Have another tea cake,” she’d say. “You look hungry.”

 

What was it like to be Slavic and living in America during the Cold War?

Living under the hostile glare of suspicious eyes branding you an enemy?

Surviving against your will as your family withered away?

 

I sit in the shadow of her sunflowers

Listening to news of Russia’s unprovoked attack

And I feel her fingerprints upon the pulse of the Old Country.

 

The heroic threads and tragedy lining each of her secret stories

Now shout at me from modern headlines.

We dwell in dark times—but in the darkness heroes rise

At least, as my grandmother said, they do in the Old Country.

Kathryn A. Broderick’s work has appeared in First Line and Mirror Dance. Her second novel Gorgon Crown will be released in June 2022.

VISIBLE THREAT

by Mark Ward

U.S. national-security officials have ordered a Chinese company to sell gay-dating app Grindr, citing the risk that the personal data it collects could be exploited by Beijing to blackmail individuals with security clearances, according to people familiar with the situation. —Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2019. Graphic credit: Hong Kong Free Press.

Because faggotry is still a cold war
causing hard glares and opportunism,

whereas heterosexuals can happily keyswop;
their loins are tinder looking for a match.

So their marriage breaks up, so what?
Rather that than exploitation, nothing

to be ashamed of, unlike the down low
romeos exposing torsos, headless homos

send a message: the unveiling is a risk,
each cropped angle is complicit.

We cannot trust a man
whose flesh is pliable

to not be ruled
by its kneading.


Mark Ward is the author of Circumference (Finishing Line Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cordite, Assaracus, Softblow, and many more. He is the founding editor of Impossible Archetype, an international journal of LGBTQ+ poetry. He is currently working on his first full-length collection, Nightlight.

IN RUSSIA WE TRUST

by Alejandro Escudé

Image source: Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off

As the giant bulldozer sets on the Pacific Ocean,
the sidewalks like lines of code, we stalk the tributaries
for the basket carrying a babe who will save us
from ourselves, rotund Botero-like madres slap tortillas
of treatises on the why and how, while u-boats listen in,
a wave breaks, five white horses carrying five bare dictators.
Some remember the Cold War, and Reagan, a nice old man,
I recall feeling for him as a child, knees pressed to my cheeks
beneath a desk, not really understanding what nuclear meant,
a helicopter with a red star, a boxer with platinum flat-top hair,
not this chaotic whispering, a country hardly unearthed
from the rubble of the last century, heroes resigned to knocking
on the president’s door for a medal, a dog bowl of decency.
This nation has gone to war for less, these protean times can’t
always can be summed up by the word “mess.” Now Putin
slams a cold coin on his desk, one head Hillary, the other Trump,
landing with a reckoning thump, a crimson wall behind him,
the words perestroika and glasnost spray-painted in white,
a black pen and a black pen, the wind, the dot of his blue eye.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

ON A CITY BENCH

by B.Z. Niditch

Rinsing dollops
of rain shadows
on a city bench
before the new year
through a foreign
body of thoughtful
reflection,
with his dark glasses
and unshaved manner
in veteran overalls
from another era
since the cold war
of another season
took a few years
off him,
wearied from exile
homeless,
yet still marching
for peace
now with a walker
on rubble
of pavements
pacing near
the back waters
on your city bench
exhausted
in stretched
out fatigues.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Le Guepard (France); Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others.  He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.