ELECTION SEASON

by David Chorlton

Photo of Cooper’s hawk by Jason Finley at Birds of Westwood.

Midsummer heat as October begins
and a shivering cry
from out of sight signals
the coyotes’ prayer to the sun
when they give back the world
to human rule. The quiet neighbors
 
have begun setting out
yard signs to reveal
their innermost beliefs. 
One side sings, the other
screams. Some just want
a shake-up to discover
what outlaw spirit brings
while still as thought
 
the Cooper’s hawk
on a street lamp against
the orange clouds has winter
in one eye and summer
in the other. Another day the heat lasts
 
into darkness, later
than the evening news, long after
Happy Hour is over
and midnight’s face glows bright
high above mendacity,
 
doubt and the choices
to be made between line dancing
at Cactus Jack’s
or voting for the silent stars.

David Chorlton moved to Phoenix from Europe back when Phoenix still had a little provincial quaintness to it. Growth applies to the good and bad qualities alike, and it isn't always easy to adjust. Leonard Cohen's famous lines help: There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

THROUGH DESERT CLOUDS

by David Chorlton

An Ariane 5 rocket second stage deployed the James Webb Space Telescope shortly after launch on Dec. 25, 2021. It's 'humanity's last view' of the new observatory, says NASA PAO Rob Navias.

A cloud filled with shadow

floats up towards the gods

veiled in shades of cold

who look out from the mountain

and talk among themselves

about creation and energy

channeled to become this slender ridge

as the first step to infinity

and home for the coyotes

who come out every night to ask the stars

for guidance through the dark.

Word has it

 

from the hawks ascending

that a rocket has left the Earth

to go so far back in time

that all remaining to be seen

are the final ashes from

the cosmic dawn. What

a flash and what an echo

must have issued from the moment,

they reflect. And yet

 

not a single mockingbird

and no woodpeckers flew

from the crash. The day

is chilly but beautiful in how

the sheets of rain drift past

each other, and crossing

the peaks are the souls

the fates could never capture for themselves.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix, who continues writing, painting, and keeping track of the local bird life. His newest book is Unmapped Worlds, a collection of rehabilitated poems from his files of the past.

21 GRAMS

by Alan Catlin

“Mountains are hard to climb

thus walls are your friends.

Learn your walls.”

            —Bukowski

“We laugh at your walls.”
Drug cartel tunnel rats.
Digging from one safe house
to another safe house.
Under border fences, razor wire
enclaves, ICE patrol car roads.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels for shrink wrapped
pure. White death by the pound.
Powdered snow by the kilo.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels under prison walls.
Two and half miles of digging.
No problema.  Cell to freedom
service. “Viva El Chapo!”
Viva Empire of the Opiates,
Reign of terror Take Two.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Steel stanchion impediments
where concrete is called for.
Easily breeched by purchased
at Wal-Mart, Home Depot,
Lowe’s, metal cutting tool department.

“We laugh at your walls.”
Tunnels for coyote caravans,
pay the tolls, travel the underground
railway. “Refugees show us the green,
hombre and we deliver the goods.”

“We laugh at your walls.”
US Army supplied terror cells
of the night.  Drug enforcers,
Zeta killers, Sinaloa lackeys,
CIA trained Torquemada’s.
Slipping under barriers, walls.
Mescal high, take-no-prisoners
instructed, rape and pillage experts,
mercenaries for moola, hostile
and loathsome, heartless as
the street criminals they once were,
laughing at walls.

Find a tunnel and fill it, ten more
are dug. Once you are in The Life,
The Life is in you, there is no looking
back, no escape possible: one foot in
Sodom, the other in Gomorrah.
Not point in last wills and testaments:
no one will bury you when you are killed
unless the tunnel you are in collapses.


Alan Catlin has published dozens of chapbooks and full length books, most recently the chapbook Three Farmers on the Way to a Dance (Presa Press), a series of ekphrastic poems responding to the work of German photographer August Sander who did portraits of Germans before, during, and after both World Wars.

HOW DO WE GO FROM HERE TO THERE?

by Michael H. Brownstein

Part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as the 10-02 area, serves as the summer breeding ground for two hundred thousand caribou. Photograph by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty via The New Yorker, December 20, 2017

President Donald Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, who opened their first year in full control of Washington on rocky terms, are closing it with a flush of late legislative achievements: a sweeping tax overhaul, a long-sought repeal of a pillar of the Affordable Care Act and a surprise deal to open up Arctic drilling—all signed into law Friday. —The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2017

Hold onto these works.
Let the laps come between us,
The field swamps of black blood leaking from metallic arteries.
Is nowhere safe?
Let these secrets divide us.
Snow fell last night.
In the great white house, the small man looks over his great expanse of green.
He does not know what he has sewn.
The wolves are leaving, coyotes join forces:
wild dogs, feral cats, the great grizzly, the large boar of the forest.
My dog is going blind.
I am covered with scabs of disconnection.
In the far north, whales lock behind cages of plastic.
In the west, fire storms and Gomorrah.
In the south the wrong pythons multiply into more pythons.
Is nowhere safe?
Was the cause of this man in the house on the hill to cause disharmony?
Did he think the snow covering the great oil spill pristine and fresh?
Did he think the snow covering the streets of my town clean linen white?
Did he believe the snow falling over the east blister free and safe?
The man looks out his window.
There is no snow where he is,
only a vast discord sinking into morass and danger.
The snow falls acid white chemically deranged from the sky,
and when it lands, muck and mire, gray, black with fresh blood.


Michael H. Brownstein was the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam, 2011.