EXPECT GOOD NEWS

by Karen Warinsky

 

Bees are in trouble, this we know

but in Oregon no bees died

of pesticide in five years

and somewhere a teen rescued an elder

wandering in 103-degree heat,

a firefighter saved three kids from drowning 

on the Fourth of July

an African coral reef has returned to life,

the same life a tiny girl wants to give

to her big sister

by donating her bone marrow,

while a doctor repaired a man’s hands

through brain surgery,

as scientists discovered a frog bacteria

that can wipe out cancer tumors

and that magic mushrooms

sometimes bring back memories from dementia,

and all the while people pay their bills

donate to the homeless, to food banks,

to hurting people in war zones

and they return money, jewelry and wallets

found in cabs, on the beach,

take out ads and post it till someone calls

take no reward,

Paul and Ringo call each other

every week

and sugar has been found in the Milky Way.

 

Remember there is good news

and never give up, never quit

feed your mind,

look for sugar in the stars.

Best of the Net nominee and award-winning poet Karen Warinsky is the author of four collections including Dining with War  (Alien Buddha Press), and Beauty & Ashes (Kelsay Books).  A former finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Contest, Warinsky has published widely in lit mags and anthologies including Blue Heron,  Consilience, Silkworm, Wordpeace, Circumference, The Naugatuck River Review, and The New Verse News.

2025

by Susan Vespoli

It was the year the garden

wouldn’t grow. Only a few cupped 

palms of sour tomatoes, never red. 

Lettuce leaves limp and bug laden. 

It was the year my ocotillo cracked in half, 

crashed to the ground with a thud. The year 

the U.S. seemed to follow suit. The year of no 

sunflowers in the long rectangular bed stretched 

beneath my office window, (okay, one spindly 

stalk sprouted, then leaned over and croaked), 

the plot where the previous year’s crop had risen 

basketball-player high, a community of petaled 

faces so prolific, neighbors would stroll their babies

past to point and smile. It was the year I bought five

packets of vinca seeds and a big bag of rich mulch,

spread and sprinkled everything over the barren earth, 

and every couple days, through hell-hot summer temps 

and nightly nightmare news, I dragged the hose to the dry

dirt, drenched it until little green arms poked through. 

And the arms grew bodies topped with buds folded

first like origami stars, then unfurled into coral, 

purple, and fuchsia 1960’s-peacenik flower-power 

blossoms that bushed out and flourished like hope.

Flower Power by cressida_carr

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of poetry to stay sane. Her poems have been published in The New Verse News, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Gyroscope Review, Rattle, and other cool spots.

OF SNAKES AND STONE

by Olivia Fortier

 

“Self-portrait in the style of Medusa” by Andrea Mantegna c. 1474 Uffizi Gallery. 
Photo via Web Gallery of Art

 

Though afraid of the water, 

my mother hand-scooped the lake 

to wet my skin before she blew up 

water wings, and slid them to the tops

of my arms. 

 

I floated on the surface of a calm lake, 

the flotsam of a failed marriage;

my father had sided with the man 

who’d raped my mother, when he, 

the rapist, denied any wrongdoing, 

as rapists often do, and it was then 

my mother lost her head.

 

From the water, I watched my mother 

walk the beach in search of driftwood 

for garden ornaments. An hour later, 

her pile was small, her harvest thin, 

so I swam back to shore to help her, 

my skin burned from the sun’s reflection 

on the lake’s mirror top. Seeing her error, 

my mother glossed me with sunscreen. 

Then, stony-faced, as single mothers 

must be at times, doing everything alone, 

she removed my wings, deflated them, 

and withdrew into herself.

 

When it comes to driftwood, 

gnarls and knots are lovely decorative 

features. Dead tree roots are rare finds; 

initially disturbing to look at, yes, but 

given a couple coats of shellac to bring 

out their natural beauty, they transform 

into octopi, or staghorn coral. Or, as 

my mother explained to me as I grew,

the rape survivor Medusa’s head of snakes—

 

snakes being her punishment for Poseidon's

assault against her body with his venomous 

viper; the rape turned any future hopes she had 

for normalcy to stone, which is to say, as Medusa

lied under his shadow, Poseidon projected himself 

onto her—a terrifying appearance, a petrifying gaze.

Then she was called monster while he continued 

to reign freely. Any man who slayed Medusa 

with his long, sharp blade would be called hero, 

and brave; her severed head and deadened mind, 

a trophy. But until then, she was forced to withdraw 

from society and live alone in a cave,

 

for shame. Before Mother died, she told me nothing 

has changed for women, and that I am Medusa’s daughter, 

and that statistically speaking, I will also become

Medusa.

 

I am Medusa.

Olivia Fortier’s work has appeared in multiple literary journals. She is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate.

EARTH DAY

by Pepper Trail

I.

 

Let us give thanks

 

In gatherings or on our own

Stepping carefully upon the earth

Looking closely, bending to the flowers

Lifting our eyes to the swallows and the soaring hawk

Listening to the wind combing the grass and

Carrying birdsong across the creek

Scenting the richness of the soil

Mindfully opening every gift

 

Let us give thanks

 

II.

 

Let us grieve

 

Remembering all that once was given

Meadows bright with butterflies

Daily chorusing of the birds

Far forest-clad horizons

Silent wilderness

Mighty rivers of ice

Blue whales and elephants

Coral reefs in dazzling splendor

 

Let us grieve

 

 

III.

 

Let us protest

 

Lest we surrender to the drowsy sun

In our multitudes, cry Enough!

Name the destroyers

Corporate greed

Oil addiction

Political cowardice

Denial of nature’s rights

Willful blindness to all we do

 

Let us protest

 

IV.

 

Let us plant

 

Let us fall to our knees

Prepare the waiting earth

With our soft and ignorant hands

Plant a tree native to this damaged place

A testament to our desperate hopes

Flourishing past our little lives

A lasting gift of breath 

For our survivors 

 

Let us plant

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

BLOOM

by January Pearson





From the blue loom of rivers
to Florida’s shorelines
where locals sift
sand for Tulip shells,
wind and current disperse
a deadly invisibility,
microscopic cells of algae
bursting in bloom

bursting with growth,
tentacling through coral
and seagrass to spread
its poison.

Karenia Brevis magnified
one thousand times
looks like soft dusty lobes
pinwheeling like a poppy
like a poppy
dead and colorless

dead as the seacow
unlowing in the waves
and the double-breasted
cormorants knuckled
with disease.

The schools of fish
pale in the harbor,
toxin-soaked
and sideways, hundreds
of one-eyes open to blue,
hundreds of ashen one-eyes open
unbloomed.


January Pearson lives in Southern California with her husband and two daughters. She teaches in the English department at Purdue Global University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, Third Wednesday, Gargoyle Magazine, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Journal of American Poetry, The Cape Rock Review, and Summerset Review.

ZOOXANTHELLAE

by Eben Gering

“We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are 'isolated.' They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.” —Sonia Sotomayor dissenting from the majority opinion in Utah v. Strieff, June 20, 2016

There’s a soft green thing inside the stony corals
we call Fingers, Brains, Tongues, that can turn
sunlight into fuel;
this is how the corals grow—an umbilical connection
to our planet’s mothering star.

Something we’ve done to the sea
is making them leave,
and leaving
bones of living reefs
to gasp at wet lenses
that flood with a harshening light.

We know some of why
this is happening—
acidification,
a kind of infection,
climatic instability.

And we also know,
in a better world,
bleached corals can grow again.

If their symbionts return, they’ll sing
the many-colored songs
of the healthy, living
reef.


Eben Gering is an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University.

VILLANGHAZALLE WITH FAUNA

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    at brilliancy of colors bleached to white;
    rage, rage against the dying of the coral reef.
 
elkhorn, staghorn, pineapple, red cauliflower, mushroom, precious red, blue, organpipe, star, brain, torch, cup, sun, bubble, cactus, column, finger, flowerpot, pillar, table, tube, stone, fire

    Before we've even plumbed the trove of life
    that shelters there, prey to manmade blight,
    we rampage, rampage, killing off the coral reef.

purple stovepipe sponge, striped cleaner wrasse, batwing coral crab, slipper sea cucumber, tomato clownfish, yellow nudibranch, magnificent feather duster, nurse shark, marine iguana

    At last we claim the ocean as our fief;
    ours is the absolute, God-given right
    to wage, wage war against the coral reef.

blue spotted sting ray, saddleback butterflyfish, sea whip, chambered nautilus, variable boring sponge, regal tang, purple sea urchin, olive ridley sea turtle, acropora crab, sharpnosed puffer

    When Gaia bore us, she produced a thief
    who, armed with outsize trawls and dynamite,
    would stage, stage the dying of the coral reef.

harlequin shrimp, reticulate brittle star, somber sweetlips, blue-ringed octopus, loggerhead turtle, minifin parrotfish, brown volcano carpet sponge, orange fireworm, flamingo tongue cowrie

    our legacies (and may our time be brief)
    of plastic scum and seas acidified
    presage, presage the dying of the coral reef.

deceiver fangblenny, chicken liver sponge, Christmas tree worm, yellow-bellied sea snake, zebra shark, flying gurnard, sunflower starfish, leafy sea dragon, spiny lobster, zooxanthellae

    The news continues dire, with no relief,
    no end to blind rapacity in sight.
    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    but rage, rage against the killing of the coral reef.


Esther Greenleaf Murer is a relic of the 20th century.  She was brought up on Thornton Burgess's Seashore Book for Children and has a lifelong interest in invertebrate paleontology. 

KEEPING VIGIL

by Emily Strauss


Earth Day is April 22

Today I saw a photo
of deep-winter Alaska
with brown dirt exposed
in the sledding track

and a fissure in the ice
of Antarctica long enough
to calve an massive ice floe
the size of Tahitian Peleliu

where the broken bones
of Japanese soldiers
were found in dark caves
seventy years later

sardines on the Oregon
coast are decimated
by over-fishing, ninety
percent are gone now

a single almond needs
a gallon of water to grow
times a million acres
the land now shriveled

another photo reveals
a twelve-foot python
imported to the Everglades
feeding on raccoons

ignorant of the threat
of a Burmese invader
part of the billion-dollar
exotic pet trade nearby

the air pollution meter
today read 168, only
unhealthy— increased
aggravation of heart, lungs

premature mortality
in the elderly forecast
for those regularly exposed
stay indoors, watch TV

I watched the sky striated
with clouds at sunset tonight,
streaked with corals, reds
coloring us over, keeping vigil


Emily Strauss is a teacher, newspaper reader, concerned citizen, and yes denizen of many poetry pages.