READING THE TEA LEAVES

by Kit Zak 

Since our first report, the massive campaign against climate science – and action on climate, funded by oil barons the Koch Brothers has come to light. And while fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, whose very products are causing global warming, continue to fund think tanks driving the campaigns, much of the foundation funding has now been driven underground, masked by a funding front-group called the Donors Trust – and its associate Donors Capital Fund, two “donor-advised” funds created to hide the real givers and thus shield them from negative exposure of their support for these campaigns. Funding to the organizations that comprise the denial machine has risen during the Obama presidency, just as the urgency of climate solutions and promise of policy advances also rose. --Greenpeace, September, 2013

three falls later
traces of Sandy's wrath linger
losses top 50 billion
in a swath from Norfolk to Maine

Tacloban's cyclone
bodies line roadsides
the unnamed dumped in mass graves
thirst  hunger  disease stalk
the half-dead search for Mom and Son
among shack-splintered debris

tornadoes blight Illinois
tearing through twelve states
the highest winds ever
telephone poles stuck in trees
cars flipped upside down, found two lots away
500 homes in one town rubbled

fossil fuel moguls sigh
calculate their rising costs.


Kit Zak lives with her husband in Lewes,  DE. She has most recently had poems published in an anthology about motherhood as well as in the following journals: Avocet: A Nature Journal, The Blue Collar  Review,  and A Time of Singing.

COST ANALYSIS

by Ed Bennett

When the Senate passed an expensive border-security measure two weeks ago, the fate of immigration reform in that chamber was all but sealed. The amendment made the overhaul easier to swallow for some Senate Republicans, paving the way for its passage last week. But the added measures also mean the government won't be saving as much money as first thought, according to a new Congressional Budget Office estimate. --Niraj Chokshi, National Journal, July 3, 2013

It’s all over, as they say,
except for the shouting.

Sixty votes obtained
on the contrails of the last election, the promise of presidents to come;

but shout they will
with every word and sentiment
aimed at brown skins and accents, that brave new world of inclusion.

Lets do the math:
six billion to open the door,
forty five thousand per head
to keep out the rest,
twelve million votes, give or take,
new to this canvas of electoral politics.

If you cannot stop the rush of history
or the perfidy of the Upper House,
do the math,
run the numbers,
call the count until the figures
roll up against a frail economy
to ask the question:
“Can we afford?”
“Dare we spend?”

Then we will digitize them,
distill their humanity into dollars and cents,
(they will be easier to ignore that way)
and our knock about faith
will be justified with numbers
as smooth as the cash count
at a teller’s window,

as empty as a hypocrite heaven
on an unexpected judgement day.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.