HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

CALL IT DENIAL

by Gil Hoy

“The rainfall numbers are staggering. But the bigger picture scope and human perspective on the summer flood of 2014 is even more gripping.” --Minnesota Public Radio, June 25, 2014. Image source: CBS

The exhaust from a car can kill you.

I saw a giddy fly knocked for
a loop the other day when it
got too close to a tail pipe,

Just dropped to the ground
like a stone and didn't
move anymore.

And I thought flies were
supposed to be tough

don't they like to eat
rotting garbage?

can’t they lift
a hundred times their weight?

Those carbon emissions
must really be toxic

good thing that most of it
just floats up into the air.

But I did see some
of the world’s glaciers
and a lot of our sea ice

melting as temps rise,

and the weather seems
really strange as of late---

with all those tornados, grapefruit
hail, 100-year floods and all.

Heard that the penguins in
Antarctica aren't breeding as much,

that more snow and rain
are getting other animals
to move from their homes,

and that more insects on
the earth are getting those
spruce trees all chewed up.

And look what’s coming:

sea levels rising---watch out
beach homes---stronger hurricanes
and storms, more floods and

drought, some diseases will
spread, ecosystems will disappear---

But what really caught my eye
yesterday was the dejected look

on the sun's frowning face

when someone mentioned global warming.

It reminded me of the proud
American Indian on his horse

in that commercial from a while back---

he was weeping and looking
at our trash blowing around,

remembering his world as it used to be.


Gil Hoy received a B.A in Philosophy from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Gil also is an elected member of the Brookline, MA Democratic Town Committee, and served as a Brookline Selectman for 12 years. Gil studied poetry at Boston University, and started writing his own poetry in February of this year. His poems have since been published in Soul Fountain, The New Verse News, The Story Teller Magazine, and Eye On Life Magazine. Gil is married, with three children, and lives in Brookline, MA.