CLIMATE CHANGE

by Joan Colby

The Great Wave at Kanagawa (from a Series of Thirty–Six Views of Mount Fuji), Edo period (1615–1868), ca. 1831–33. Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849); Published by Eijudo. Polychrome ink and color on paper; 10 1/8 x 14 15/16 in. (25.7 x 37.9 cm) (Oban size). H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (JP1847). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The tides steal the bones of the cities
Like feral dogs. This is how warming engages a civilization
Built on greed. Ambition fuels the cyclones that rove a landscape
Where the earth’s deep gases are fracked from their caves. Drones
Concentrate on brevity, the riskless killing. Fires rage
In the eucalyptus where no aluminum carapace can save us.
The earth shakes with grievous faults. A wave
Rises in a template of doom on the Japanese woodcut.
No place is immune.
In Mumbai, the boy thief says a bad life
Is still a life.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.

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.