LAST DAYS OF FREEDOM

by Mickey J. Corrigan

What about the women who think
they are shore birds in startled flight
over the unruffled sand, eggs nestled
in jagged rock crevices slap-fed
by the bathe and bash sea?

Don't blame the shoreline, comfortable
in the lap and suckle, the eating away
the sloping of high grass dunes
hillcrests ever flattened by time
and growth spurts of starlit cities.

What about the clotted clapboard graves
narrow streets, neighborhoods blissful
in their ignorance, their pancake morning
sameness, their white cream frosting
smothering rich cakes of desire?

Don't blame the strong men barging
onto the ark, boarding forcefully
pillage in their knife eyes, hammy fists
full of weaponry, double strapped bullets
draped across broad hairy chests.

What about the meat-and-potato talk
in the pubs and pastel living rooms
all our fears shrunk to shadows
blued under hot white moons
gibboning in a lurching black?

Don't blame the suck and slur of the tide
days trailing by, forgetting themselves
in the flutterkick to a shared illusion
spoon-fed to us in flying dreams

the windswept sky like a blue door
that will swing shut behind us.


Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes Florida noir with a dark humor. Novels include  Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, 2019). Kelsay Books recently published the poetry chapbook the disappearing self. 

2020, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF RODNEY USHER

by Bob Bradshaw

I noticed a condemned property
posting on his door

when I rang his doorbell
but my old friend's appearance

jolted me more.
What's wrong?  I demanded.

"I can't sleep, I'm as restless
as a storm’s waves.”

He grabbed his chest.
A tightness was gripping him

like a vine's hold
on a rotten wall.

“Heart failure—
from that damn virus.”

His doctors had dismissed his worries.
There is no virus, I assured him.

It vanished in the spring.    
May even have been a hoax.  

He was manic.  He was sweating.
“It’s the coronavirus.”  His breathing

was heavy, choppy like surf.
“It’s gotten inside.”

Relax, I told him.  The plague
has vanished.  Gone.

You can leave your house now.
“Still, I can't help worrying:

at times my heart's
a wild flapping

like an osprey tangled
in fishing line.  The more I fight it,
     
the tighter my chest
becomes.”

Is your house safe?  
I noticed a crack splitting

the front wall. "This house,"
he sighed, "teeters on a sea cliff

that's crumbling.
Erosion causes the cracks."

Why don't you leave?
He shuddered. "I can't.

Outside isn’t safe.” Nonsense.
Sure, tests once showed

people were sick. But praise be
there are no more tests.

So, no more sick people!
It’s common sense.     

You’re just behind the times.
Time to go back to work, my friend.

But you should get a handyman
to fix up this house.

“No kidding,” Rodney says.
“At night the joists crack,

and my sense of balance
falters as the house leans.

I slip like a man on wet pavers,
my heart a bird thrashing

its wings against its cage." I nodded.
Clearly he couldn’t face

the “new normal,” a world
safe again.

He was hopeless.  
What could I do but go home?

I had business to attend to.
I could no more persuade him

to leave his sanctuary
than I could have convinced

a starfish to loosen its grip
on a rotten pier.

His last letters show
a man crazed, damned

by inexplicable fears,
slipping over the edge

like his mansion
which broke apart tumbling

into the Pacific—
nothing in the end

for my friend to hang onto,
even the sea washing
its hands of him.


Bob Bradshaw is a retired programmer living in California.  He is looking for the perfect hammock for his retirement.  Recent work of his can be found at Dodging the Rain, Eclectica, and Ekphrastic Review.

SPILLED WATERCOLORS

by Diane Elayne Dees

Tweeted by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir from the International Space Station.

From space, the aqua, cream, azure, and cerulean
appear as if blended by a master painter
with an eye for serenity and expansion. I imagine
a second painting, this one bright, yet soft,
with puffs of spoonbill pink and splashes
of sea turtle green streaked across a peaceful
background of bunting indigo. From space,
the Louisiana delta is an impressionist’s dream
of water and feathers and the reflections
of a stippled sky. Up close, the picture tears
at the edges as the coastline rapidly recedes.
The Rusty Blackbird, black bear and Great Blue
fade behind a foreground of erosion and loss.
From space, the watercolors spill a dream-like
beauty onto a canvas teeming with life,
while the landscape shifts precariously,
altering the perspective forever.

Diane Elayne Dees has two chapbooks forthcoming. Her microchap Beach Days is available for download and folding from Origami Poems Project. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

EASTER

by Howard Winn

Easter Island is critically vulnerable to rising ocean levels. . . . Many of the moai statues and nearly all of the ahu, the platforms that in many cases also serve as tombs for the dead, ring the island. With some climate models predicting that sea levels will rise by five to six feet by 2100, residents and scientists fear that storms and waves now pose a threat like never before. “You feel an impotency in this, to not be able to protect the bones of your own ancestors,” said Camilo Rapu, the head of Ma’u Henua, the indigenous organization that controls Rapa Nui National Park, which covers most of the island, and its archaeological sites. “It hurts immensely.” —Nicholas, Casey, The New York Times, March 15, 2018

Discovered by the western world
on that religious holiday
although the residents of
the island knew it was there
at the end of long canoe trips
some thought the huge heads
could only be the work of beings
from other planets not of this
world until inquisitive explorers
found the remnants of unfinished
heads and now as the seas rise
despite the anti-science deniers
and the islands sink beaches
disappear and vacations to
swim with warm sand under
foot are no longer what the
adventurous wealthy can
indulge in as trees vanish
and Pacific waters wash over
farm lands and orchards of
tropical fruit while history
and inexplicable stone heads
vanish into the southern seas
to remain only for a time in
memory or in history books
the fate of things in a world
of times past and legend
takes the place of scientific fact

Howard Winn has just had a novel Acropolis published by Propertius Press as well as poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

FOR NOW

by Lori Desrosiers

I look out my window
and it is not raining acid
my street is not flooded from erosion
the air is not filled with smog
the herons who fish from the nearby river
are alive and the trout are plentiful
honeybees drink from backyard honeysuckle
gardens grow rich with flowers and new grass
an hour away the ocean is swimmable
the astounding thing is
with one signature
the rain, the air, the soil, the fish
the birds, the flowers, the bees,
the water, and we humans,
not slowly, but quickly
perish

Lori Desrosiers’ poetry books are The Philosopher’s Daughter, Salmon Poetry, 2013, and Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, Salmon Poetry, 2016. A chapbook Inner Sky is from Glass Lyre Press, 2015. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium Review, Contemporary American Voices, Best Indie Lit New England, String Poet, Blue Fifth Review, Pirene's Fountain, TheNewVerse.News, Mom Egg Review, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New England College. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She edits Naugatuck River Review, a journal of narrative poetry and WORDPEACE, an online journal dedicated to social justice. She teaches Literature and Composition at Westfield State University and Holyoke Community College, and Poetry in the Interdisciplinary Studies program for the Lesley University M.F.A. graduate program.