ON THE CLOCK

by Diana Morley

The world’s torrid future is etched in the crippled kidneys of Nepali workers. Kidney disease has become epidemic among Nepali migrant laborers working in the extreme heat of the Persian Gulf, presaging the world's climate change future. Photo: Sak Bahadur Chhantyal, 48, was working on a construction site in Oman for six years before he was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. He has been on dialysis at the National Kidney Center in Kathmandu for almost two years. (Sagar Chhetri) —The Washington Post, January 6, 2023

Surely it’s time.

Time to say

we’re fueling 

our pot 

heating on

high

now scalding 

our insides 

after shriveling 

our skin 

raising black spots

burned not tanned

where we sit

not 

stirred— 

to get up

in uproar

to say 

our kidneys 

now cooking

like 

beans.

Diana Morley has published poems online and in journals as well as two books of poetry and a photographic/poetic documentary of Oregon’s 2020 wildfire and renewal. She writes and resides in North Carolina. 

MAKE DINNER WITH THE TELEVISION ON

by Alice Campbell Romano

Photo of @AdamParkhomenko’s family trapped in Ukraine.

Face what you have to face. Chop onions. Let your

eyes sting for the kitchen screen where a city is rubble,

nothing stands, all the ground is chunks of bricks

and stones, a wreckage more extreme even than the

leavings of a tornado the TV showed you last hour.

What does it profit an autocrat, an absolutist,

unless that his obliteration is more terrible than a work

of nature. I am that I am, God the destroyer. Onions

sauté now with sliced red peppers in a little olive oil.

You feel so feeble. But you don’t flip the remote to

California’s Gold. You add the chicken tenders, while a

newscaster tells you what you know. Children starve.

Alice Campbell Romano is a New Yorker who spent more than a decade in Italy, adapting Italian movie scripts into English. Her work has been published in print journals and online, most recently by Willows Wept Review and Ekphrastic Review's Starry Starry Night Anthology; this week in Prometheus Dreaming and forthcoming in Beyond Words.

MAKING TOMATO SAUCE WITH MY DAUGHTER

by Grant Clauser

So here we are, tucked into the house
with nothing but sighs to lengthen
and shorten the hours
while sickness stalks the season
like cracks in a sidewalk
children are taught to avoid.
We're listening to the kitchen radio
report number after number,
ten more dead in our county
as we stir tomatoes in a pot,
add basil, garlic, one glug
of wine and one of olive oil,
and slowly the house turns into
something other than a house
from mixing and stirring simple things—
pot of steaming pasta, breadsmell from the oven,
mingle like birdcall in the backyard
to help us forget our fear of news and neighbors
to become a kind of blessing we savor,
acting normal when the world is not.
It's a skill, I think, not the sauce, though
that too takes practice, but the mingling
we make of this. One life kneading another,
one day becomes the next, an hour
staring out the window becomes an afternoon
we soon forget. And we try to forget too
the money we've lost, the sunlight we're missing,
the ambulance pulling shadows down the road.
And now our old complaints get older
with disuse until they fade away, replaced
with new ones. And now the sauce is bubbling,
tongue tip on the wooden spoon says it's done.
Somehow we all sit down to dinner,
cross hands as we reach for bread.
The old dog under the table,
confused as always, still
rests his head on my knee.

Grant Clauser's fifth book Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven is forthcoming from Codhill Press. He's won the Cider Press Book Award and the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. He works as an editor and teaches poetry at Rosemont College, and can be found on twitter at @uniambic.