DEEPWATER PORTFOLIO

by Zumwalt

 

 

Endangered Rice's whales live their entire lives in the gulf, where they're vulnerable to vessel strikes, noise pollution, oil spills and climate change—all of which could increase with more drilling, scientists said. Other animals, including threatened manatees and endangered sea turtles, also could be put at risk, experts said. As the Iran war pushes energy prices sharply higher, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invoked national security in seeking an exemption from endangered species laws, which make it illegal to harm or kill species on a protected list. The seldom-used Endangered Species Committee granted that request on Tuesday. Rice’s whale is the only whale species that lives year-round in the Gulf of Mexico, where there are fewer than 100—and possibly fewer than 50—left, scientists said. —PBS, March 30, 2026

The subsea map is neatly partitioned

into optimized lease zones;

seismic airguns fracture the water column 

with monetized concussions.

Audit sediment for trapped hydrocarbons;
seamlessly filter out the pathetic,
low-frequency protests of a dwindling pod:
fifty surviving Rice’s whales, biological oddities,
drowning in our modern energy paradigm.

Stupidly stubborn, incredibly spoiled,
they insist on quiet currents
and fatty silver-rag driftfish delicacies,
never exerting effort to adapt
to the tides of quarterly dividends.

Let the regulatory committees squawk about their grievances:
the diamond-tipped drill bit demands results.

Flood aquatic corridors with commercial logistics:

it's an obvious course of action.

Trade the flawed architecture of God's creations
for the unquestionable superiority of the combustion engine,
the freedom to wage war against any nation,
and the right to consume without restraint.

 

 

Zumwalt's poetry feeds on alienation, shifting reality, and forced adaptation. Zumwalt, a proud repeat contributor to The New Verse News, has recently been published in The Society of Classical Poets.  

EAGLE ELEGY

by Susan J. Wurtzburg

Once an endangered species, bald eagles, including at Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota, came roaring back to life. They now confront a new foe: avian flu. —The Washington Post, October 5, 2024

Iconic American bald eagle, feathered vigilance,

predatory golden gaze far-focused 

across the valley, where coyotes jump-kill 

mice and voles. Fur-encased small prey,

meaty morsels for white-headed sea eagles.

 

Yellow hooked beaks prominent on the Great Seal,

where bald eagles unfurl their wings, a defiant

symbol of the USA. Environmental laws nurtured

these raptors, saved from harms: DDT, hunters,

lead bullets. Biologists lauded their soaring story.

 

Exaltation for these wide-winged fliers slumps 

with the advent of avian influenza. 2021: year

that birds begin to fall from the sky, falling, falling,

across the USA. Now, 2024: talons clench, beaks twist,

wings flail: collapse of iconic bald eagles widespread.

 

Emblematic birds, do you auger an apocalypse?

 

Susan J. Wurtzburg received 1st place in the Land of Enchantment Award, 2024, the Save Our Earth Award, 2024, and the Elizabeth M. Campbell Poetry Award, 2022, and was a semi-finalist in the Crab Creek Review Poetry Competition 2022, and in the Naugatuck River Review's 14th Narrative Poetry Contest, 2022. She was a Community Poet in the Spring 2023 Poetry Workshop, Westminster College, Salt Lake City. Wurtzburg is a Commissioned Artist in Sidewalk Poetry: Senses of Salt Lake City, 2024. Her poetry book, Ravenous Words, with Lisa Lucas will appear in spring, 2025.

A STRENGTH & BEAUTY RARE

by Dick Altman

Flying jewels I thought they were

as a child.  To entice one onto

a finger, to bring it up to the nose,

as the black-bordered tangerine

wings slowly opened and closed—

could a little boy be any more

smitten?

                        *

Thirty-five years later, on a lake

in upstate New York, I rediscover

Monarchs—beguiling not of fragile

sweetness, but ferocity almost beyond

the syntax of belief.  I’m transfixed

at how they tilt against late summer’s

gusting head winds.  As if they had

no choice.  As if wings were oars—

as if boats launched from shore

into raging tidal seas—as they press

forward, only to be repulsed—again

and again.  As they fight, tirelessly,

to stay aloft above the aqueous grave

awaiting any that falter.  Fight as if

drowning in air, frantic to surface

in northern Mexico’s Mil Cumbres hills. 

Frantic to give birth, after voyaging

twenty-five hundred hectoring miles,

until they all but drop.

                        *

The vision of embattled, desperate

fleets returns, when I drive into

the Cumbres, dumbstruck by forests

black and orange, pulsing, folding,

unfolding, eager after winter to create

a new generation. One destined

to traverse, like their forbears, lake’s

grueling flyways north to Canada.

                          *

I pee as a kid on a log bordering

our cabin’s path to the water.  What

of my essences lures Monarchs

to the spot in droves, I’ll never know. 

Part of me evolves into part of them.

An entwining of winged and bipedal,

one bound to earth, the other to air—

a lifetime ago, and I behold it yet

with a child’s wonder un-frayed.

                            *      

Days of Monarchs’ madness pass.

The lake’s autumnal transit

a fragment of memory.  Gales black

and orange out-fought, out-flew

the winds.  When Milkweed,

their caterpillars’ favorite food,

their only food, succumbs to man’s

punishment of earth, winged courage

proves no match.  But when

imagination wanders back to those

bejeweled days on the water, I conjure

soaring, gliding gems of fortitude. 

Pray for the day skies confetti again

with their dancing fury. Odysseus

takes twenty years to sail home.

Monarchs, but a few months.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where,at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.

A MONARCH BUTTERFLY POSES SOME QUESTIONS

by Mary K O'Melveny

Do you remember the noise of my wings?

A lace veil as it flirts with a summer breeze.

A blade of grass as it shakes off morning dew.

 

In Mexico, a million of us sound like waterfalls.

At rest, we cling to tree limbs like gold, onyx,

ivory jewelry that has been hidden from thieves.

 

We fly high above sleeping migrants everywhere,

whose hopes pirouette in zephyrs and exospheres

as they dream of flight patterns to safety.

 

Do you recall the first time you saw one of us?

How you were awed by our delicate wings, how

we landed like a first kiss on a purple cone flower? 

 

How you imagined what it would be like to float,

unfettered, without apology? Without accountability?

How it takes so little to ignite imagination’s fiery call.

 

Our journeys from your garden to jungle sanctuaries

span generations. Some days the ground is littered

with bodies that resemble coins from Spanish galleons.

 

I have been airborne for 2,500 miles. I have traversed

obstacles my ancestors never knew: poisoned fields,

droughts, drones and planes, wildfires, clearcut forests.

 

Still, think of that moment of lift, when air currents

lick your skin as a lover might. Always optimists,

we remain your ardent guides to Elysian Fields.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

LINGUICIDE

by Akua Lezli Hope

 

No elder bids are there to sing

Regent honeyeaters’ male song

So young ones copy other things

their bird culture nearly gone

 

Regent honeyeaters’ male song

tells females if they are strong and fit

Their bird culture is nearly gone —

we play old recordings to fix it

 

Tells females if they are strong and fit

if they sing the right song

We play old recordings to fix it

fearful they won’t last long

 

If they sing the right song

extinction will be kept at bay

We’re fearful they won’t last long

as their habitat shrinks away

 

Extinction will be kept at bay

when females hear the strong songs

As their habitat shrinks away

we strive to correct our invasive wrongs

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music,  sculpture, and peace.  A third generation New Yorker, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, SFPA, Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations. 

TO KNOW A MONARCH

by Phyllis Klein

To know it only as a photograph, a memory.

Never to witness again a community of millions clustered 

on Eucalyptus branches, now empty.

These fragile slivers of stained glass

no longer clinging to winter respites.

What is a world that would allow

this extravagant pollinator to die off?

This migrational miracle. 

Rumi says, You were born 

with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?

I want a humanity that weeps 

copiously for this animal who starts off 

in a crawl, shows us how to fly. I want

processions, dirges everywhere,

want to howl over milkweed, bereft, without 

purpose. So much loss. I want to rend my garments.

Burn kaleidoscopes of butterflies into my skin.

What good would that do? Or I could slice

open the sky, so their ghosts torrent down. 

What do I know of softness—my origins 

in an ice-house, in a tradition of cruelty,

of abhorration, torn appendages. Where

are the wings for this? Where the flashes 

of orange slipped through our fingers?

Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2018 and again in 2020. She has a new book, The Full Moon Herald  from Grayson Books. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, she sees writing as artistic dialogue between author and readers—an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. 

DARWIN AT WORK

by Howard Winn

When watching orangutans in nature documentaries, it is easy to imagine them as graceful rulers of the canopy; to whom climbing and brachiating through the trees is as natural and simple as breathing. This, however, would be an incorrect assumption. Just as toddlers learn to walk from following their parents, and through plenty of trial and error, young orangutans too must learn how to navigate the world around them. As the largest arboreal mammal in the world, orangutans face a steep learning curve when first grasping how to maneuver on their own in the forest. —Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, August 1, 2018

If humanity does not change its ways
soon there will be no orangutans
we are told by the latest scientific
findings and the survey of these
strange beasts who seem like the
crazy cousins of homo sapiens
but in a world run by the rules of
business capitalism these sub-human
beasts have no union to protect their
status in a jungle with profit hidden
in the vines and the rain forests
just waiting for the latest entrepreneur
to make the proper business move
perhaps Chinese or Middle Eastern
to join the one percent who own
the semi-civilized world stash the
profits off-shore and buy expensive
real estate in London or New York
while the residual orangutans in
their diminishing jungle residences
find themselves as homeless as
the other immigrants of this time
with no where to go and no welcome
there or anywhere even if labor
is running short in the civilized nations.


Howard Winn's novel Acropolis is published by Propertius Press. He has poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

FIRST POEM OF A NEW YEAR

by Linda Lerner

Photo credit: Nick Cobbing at LegalPlanet

I thought of the polar bears when
he told me of waking up with
his arm flapping around like it wasn’t his

not right away, of course,
but after he’d gotten more accustomed
to it, like the polar bears

who’ve been unhomed & had to
scavenge for food on land when
the ice began melting,

told him I understood, though
I’ve never seen a polar bear or been
in his place; he thought that having scraped off the
last vestiges of immunity after a bad fall

I felt more vulnerable but that’s not what I meant,
something had gradually shifted; none of us
were where we thought we were;
one morning a stricken body politic
woke up flapping about in utter confusion asking
                                                what just happened 

my friend looked at me and asked,
one hand forcing the other to get past it

Linda Lerner has new work in Onthebus, Chiron Review, Gargoyle, and SoFloPoJo. In spring 2015, she read six poems on WBAI for Arts Express. Her recent collections include Yes, the Ducks Were Real and Takes Guts and Years Sometimes (NYQ Books) and a chapbook of poems inspired by nursery rhymes Ding Dong the Bell Pussy in the Well.

THE MUZZLING

by Devon Balwit

From this week's New Yorker.

Human-generated underwater noise doubled every 10 years during the last half of the 20th century, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Program. That cacophony is having a huge impact on life under the waves. Dr. Baumgartner compared it to a cocktail party at which everyone is talking at once and you can’t hear the person next to you. . . . “The cumulative noise is making it difficult for the animals to hear each other most of the time, not just once in a while,” Dr. Clark said. “Over a month on average, whales are losing approximately 85 percent of their opportunities to communicate.” That’s devastating, he added, for creatures who vocalize to find mates, to forge friendships and to share information about food sources. —"The Great New York Whale Census," The New York Times, July 7, 2016

Once there was silence
            in which we swam

long tendril trails,
            vocalizing.  With moans,

clicks, bubbles’ bright
            jewel boxes, we

welcomed mates, celebrated
            reunions, warned

of danger.  For lazy stretches,
            we made no sound.

Now, you are noisy, and
            we are deaf.  We

hear only motor roar, the rage
            of gears, your sonar,

your soundings.  To speak, to hear,
            we press against each other

like the blind.  Some promise
            a future once again silent.

Until then, we call to no one but ourselves,
            darkness within darkness.

Devon Balwit is a teacher and educator in Portland, Oregon.  Her poems have appeared or will in TheNewVerse.News, The Fog Machine, Of(f) Course, Birds Piled Loosely, The Cape Rock, The Fem, The Prick of the Spindle, Dying Dahlia Review, drylandlit_press, 3 Elements, and Leveler.

THE VOICE OF REASON

by Clara B. Jones

Image source: FrackFreeNC.org

I am twenty-nine years old, an environmentalist, and a tool of Big Business. In the eyes of my parents and my pastor, I am a success, a good girl who can do no wrong. Though I have an uncommon amount of support and encouragement, I feel like an imposter. Dad always told me to do the right thing, but that is easier said than done. I grew up in Haywood County without the means to be idealistic. Some of my friends in graduate school were from Chapel Hill and Davidson, never forced to eat chicken wings and dumplings at the end of every month. Doing the right thing was always a practical matter. I was cut out for a career in Science, taught to weigh costs and benefits from an early age. But, I didn't know it would turn out like this. Doing the right thing is a complex matter, something Dad never pointed out. I wrote my dissertation on long-leafed pine, taking a job with the Forestry Department, hoping to continue my studies on endangered trees. But, my boss had other plans, assigning me to survey all the conifers in a five-hectare plot in Lee County. At first I was told that Forestry was revising their species lists. But, when I spotted trucks from the Mining and Energy Commission, it was obvious that I was part of an environmental impact study. Who might have imagined that Raleigh would favor hydraulic fracturing in the Great Smoky Mountains? Any high school Physics student could tell you that shattering shale deposits causes toxic leaks. Raleigh wants to be part of the gas drilling boom. Frack Free NC says fracking is an environmental justice issue, but my boss says NC needs to be free of freaks. “You can't stop progress.” is his favorite mantra, and maybe he's right. I considered asking for a transfer to the Conservation Department but decided I would stay on the job to be the voice of reason. At least natural gas is cleaner than coal.

Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Asheville, NC. As a woman of color, she writes about identity and power. Erbacce, CHEST, Ofi Literary Magazine, Transnational, Quail Bell, Bluestem, The Review Review, and 34th Parallel are among the venues her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in. In the 1970s, Clara studied with Adrienne Rich and has studied recently with the poets Meghan Sterling and Eric Steineger.

THE DEMISE OF THE MONARCH

by Tricia Knoll

“Monsanto’s Roundup and genetically modified crops are harming everybody’s favorite butterfly.” -- Warren Cornwall, Slate, January 29, 2014
 
“The monarch earned a mention yesterday at the summit between the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada. ‘We have also agreed to work on the preservation of the monarch butterfly as an emblematic species of North America which unites our three countries,’ Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said at the conclusion of the one-day summit.” -- Tim Johnson, Miami Herald, February 20, 2014


Lear floated his orange and black king-robe
over a land of riches, undivided by boundaries,
surrounded by gilded butterflies of court,

assuming he had many to choose
from, the daughter-flowers of his loins,
his flight certain in reign and retinue.

Sorrow. His good world
not so good. Poisoned. Vicious.
Short-sighted. All he took

for granted a last wingless jump
from a low cliff, obscure.
His day of the monarch dwindling

as branches wind-ripped from firs,
the flattering tongues of milkweed
and sycophants lying, patterns

dividing machinations
of the false from the loyalty
of the good

magnetized migrations.
Lear asks Cordelia to share
who wins, who loses.

This monarch,
the oldest who hath born
the most.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland poet, snowbound alone in her house for seven days. Her chapbook Urban Wild is now available from Finishing Line Press.