EVACUATE, EVACUATE!!

by Dick Altman

in Northern New Mexico

Wildfire near Tres Piedras New Mexico grows to over 1,800 acres —Santa Fe New Mexican, June 28, 2026. U.S. Forest Service photo.

Firefighters Mourn 3 Fallen Comrades as Blazes Ravage Utah and Colorado. Fires are raging in the arid Southwest after a warm winter. Forecasters say the fires may grow rapidly, and parts of Colorado have been ordered to evacuate. —The New York Times, June 28, 2026

I feel the old anxiety,

my pulse rising,

as the season’s first fire

expresses an unbridled

appetite for destruction,

exploding in three days,

from thirty acres

to seven hundred,

and still uncontained.

Grab your things,

crews yell,

hammering

on the front door,

and get out now!

How many times,

I ask myself,

must this story

repeat itself.

I watch,

across the valley,

swathes of

tall pine,

go from years

of glorious growth,

to barren shiny char,

in a matter of hours.

It shatters my heart,

when I think

of how I devoted

so much of my spirit

to nurturing

a conifer forest

up here on my home’s

bluff.

And all of its beauty,

decades in the making,

lost forever,

in a single bolt

of predacious light.

Nightmares

of flame

plague my sleep,

whenever

a blaze begins

to devour

a nearby landscape.

Am I next,

repeats in my mind,

over and over.

Evacuate!

The word

riddles me

with fear

and helplessness.

Replant

my life,

as if a cindered

forest.

Could I summon

the strength.

Force myself

to forget the home

I built,

the arboreal

children

I rear

over decades.

Evacuate!

To a tomorrow,

unknown,

uncertain,

voracious,

I weep to myself,

beyond

all reckoning.

Dick Altman writes in the thin, magical air of Old West’s high desert plains, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in the American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Cathexis Northwest Press, Humana Obscura, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The Ravens Perch, and others here and abroad.   Pushcart Prize nominee and poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has authored over 300 poems, published on four continents.

MIGRACIONES

by David Chorlton

on World Migratory Bird Day

Music in flight from the border tonight

and it’s pulling miles

of starlight behind it. Darkness

tuned to grosbeaks, orioles, homesick songs

and the Black-necked stilts

who come down at the golf course pond.

There’s an echo

to the ads between corridos

and the high romance that ends

in a flourish no matter

who stays and who leaves. The trogons

cross to occupy a canyon lined

with pine-oak where sycamores sing

to the daylight. Gray hawks

in the cottonwoods, tanagers where

the edge of woodland

overlooks a wide

and open valley dark priests occupied before

they named the land for

saints, and Black hawks looking down on it

from an indifferent sky.

Doves take back their city

for the summer in tune

with the natural order

of hunger and survival. 103.5, La Tricolor,

playing until morning and then

in the yard, russet crest and

greyly greened, the unmistakable

Trepador cola verde.

David Chorlton lives in Phoenix, Arizona. He writes, paints, and keeps track of which birds show up locally. Originally from Europe, he has learned that not all truth and beauty is to be found in museums and cathedrals (much as he enjoyed seeing them) but in wildlife.

SIGNPOSTS IN DANTE’S ECOLOGICAL HELL

by Richard L. Matta

Illustration by Gustave Doré (1832-1883)

third climate opinion—

the surgeon says

why did you wait so long

winnowing wheat

a merchant trades

for a farmer’s daughter

bulldozed forest…

a herd of cars running

at the burger joint

oil and gas

a lobbyist drills 

for a politician 

water rations

a city meeting 

boils over

flame throwers—

a spirit departs 

from a scorched tree 

one more war crime

the drone creates 

a poisonous cloud

a disposal contractor

doubles his profit

leaking drums wetland

mineral reserves

one more leader leaves

a pit in Africa

Richard L. Matta grew up in New York and now lives in San Diego. Some of his work is found in Ancient Paths, Dewdrop, San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday, Gyroscope, and many international haiku journals.

POEM FOR A YEAR IN UKRAINE

by Shih-Min, Sun

 Ironing   stained glasses
   scruffy, growth of magnitude  soul   
         of every somber
     night  comes forth
     suspended on this land
                        flood of 
                                       living , gasping
                          corpses
 rise and walk : bend
            pick 
                                                                                                                              one shoe up
           fold : clothes / string / dirty nails   unbuckle
                    crusted toes with blood, frosted
                                                                                                                                            moon   black
                                                                                                                      eye of the city   inflamed
                     a year
                                                                                                                     with a year   icy mud   feathers plank
                                             perishable but closer   underneath
 
                                              *

                             When  
                                                                    forest call
                           on each step 
                                                              streaks
                                upon walls, walls 
              birds depart, river sink
                             to depth of the country, the land   all turn into: prayers and songs
 
                                                    the orchard 
                              of life
                      respirate   unceasing
                                                                                              glare   now: wide open

Shih-Min, Sun lives and writes in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work has appeared and will be presented in publications including, The Academy of the Heart and Mind, Dadakuku, Rural Fiction Magazine, Wordpeace and has been selected for Atlanta Review 2022 International Poetry Competition in Merit Award. She started writing while working abroad, inspired deeply by family, teachers, and friends. She loves writing as a way to interpret still life and scenes of bond through language. Visit her on Instagram: @aura_a_u_r_a

DROUGHT’S HIGH DESERT HOWL OF THE WOLF

by Dick Altman

“Megadrought in the American south-west: a climate disaster unseen in 1,200 years.” -The Guardian,  September 12, 2022

D-r-o-u-g-h-t
Whenever I see the word—
I want to dismantle it                                
D—the letter—is easy—
delete and destroy
the most unforgiving letter—to me—
letter O—like a wolf’s maw—
whose mandible blades the heart—
as I watch high desert’s drought
wolf whatever’s in reach
of its insatiable jaws… 
                       
            Golden seas of shimmering
cow-pen daisies
Billowing swarms of insects
that sustain night hawk and bat
Purple Russian Sage beloved
of bees
Acequias—historic hand-dug
streams—feeding pasture
and crop
Rio Grande turned
into a waterless highway
of sand
Weakened pine—long needle
and short—decimated
by bark beetle
Every dead tree a depleted
trove of oxygen
                         
If drought were a song—I’d hear  
a one-note elegy of unyielding spareness—
a flameless fire unfurling in three-quarter
time—a waterless flood whose silent
music swallows all it touches—insistent
waltz whose slow cadences fool hope—
clouds swollen with broken melodies—
cisterns hollow with minor-key emptiness—
Aspen’s metallic yellow of fall chorusing
a month too soon
 
Call me a fool to plant a small forest
of trees—when I build here at seven-
thousand feet in Indian Country—half
of these children—if I may call them that—
fail to survive—no defense against a force
ghostly—merciless in its fury to gorge
on blood from leaf/petal/earth—flame
never seen—flood never felt—rapacious
lupine shadow hidden in the dark of light

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.

THE WEST IS BURNING

by Steve Deutsch

On the rise above 

Route 80, by a trickle

that was once 

a river

 

I watch a line

of traffic

a thousand miles long 

going nowhere.

 

The road has 

buckled and a semi

sits on its side

steam still boiling.

 

One by one

the cars and trucks

run out of gas—

dream irony

 

I suppose,

and people stand

beside their behemoths—

afraid at last.

 

The pine

and hemlock forest 

that lined the road

has turned

 

a sickly brown

and trees light up

like candlesticks

one by one.

 

Children fight

the fire

with blankets

and spit.

 

And the dust

and smoke 

and ash

make breathing

 

an occupation.

The west is burning

and few if any

will make it out.

 

I wake with a gasp—

heart escaping.

Smoke colors the moon

the west is burning.

Steve Deutsch has been widely published both on line and in print. Steve is a three time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is poetry editor for Centered Magazine. His poetry books: Perhaps You Can (2019), Persistence of Memory (2020),  and Going, Going, Gone (2021) were all published by Kelsay Press.

REMEMBERING CATASTROPHE

by Anita Lerek

“The Lost Library Forest,” a painting by Luis Peres

Mother, how much time is left

for us in the forest library, 

where master spines 

clasp woody pages

pollinated by wind?

How much time before 

the boxing up, the clearing out

of minds meshed in ancient tree lives: 

now inventory, cubic footage,

caged, trucked away—

to bonfires staged by haters. 

1933, Berlin: Cigarettes, 

chocolate, sausages for sale!

To music and spotlights

some 50,000 books burn.

Burn the texts, said Artaud. 

Did he yearn for another heaven

to leave scripts of cruelty 

far behind?

I cry for you, Mother, 

stroke keys for you. 

Something must be saved here 

of your wounded spines… words. 

How memory’s flesh burns.     

Wind, carry my voice without a voice—

tell the trees that she, I—

Author’s Note: Homage to the thought of Edmond Jabes (The Book of Questions), and to the poem by Don Pagis, "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car."

Anita Lerek has spent her adult life juggling business with the enchantment of poetry. The visual arts, jazz, and social justice are life-long influences. Born abroad (Poland), she retains a sense of otherness, and a resulting affinity for the divergent. Her poems have appeared recently in Poetry Super Highway, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and River Heron. She is co-founder of Change Artists, a start-up online poetry community relating to political engagement. She is the author of a chapbook, History and Being (2019). She lives with her archivist husband in Toronto, Canada.

GLOBAL STRIKE!

by Katherine West

Geneva (AFP) – A man ended a 39-day-long hunger strike outside the Swiss parliament on Thursday, declaring "Victory!" after the MPs agreed to be briefed by scientists on the latest climate change research. Guillermo Fernandez, who says he has lost 20 kilos since launching his hunger strike on November 1 to push for Swiss MPs to take climate change seriously, ended his fast by gingerly eating a banana outside the parliament building. "Victory!!!!" he announced on Twitter… "Finally the parliament will be confronted with the truth!" His announcement came after the president of the lower house of parliament Irene Kalin, of the Green Party, announced that scientists had been invited to brief MPs on May 2, 2022 about the latest research from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). —France 24, December 9, 2021

I had a dream the millions woke from their dream.  

There was no violence, just numbers.  

Quietly, the millions put down their tools and shut down their computers.  

Quietly, the millions said, "No."  

Quietly, they said, "We want to live."  

Quietly, they marched.  

Quietly, they sang as they marched.  

Quietly, they stood.  

Quietly, they sat. 

Before the capitals of state and country.  

Quietly, they stayed.  

Singing love of forest and river. 

Of life for children and grandchildren.  

Until power returned to the ones who work.  

Until Earth was put first. 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She hs written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. She is also an artist. 

THEY WILL SEE YOUR LOVE

by Alejandro Escudé

For Robert Bly (1926-2021)

When you passed, I entered the forest and walked further than 

I have ever walked. Beyond the shaded path, I found you in the sun.

You sang to me about the old trains that wait in the falling snow.

I took a train just like the one you rode on. There were stars,

And castles erected for me, in the valley below the dictator’s citadel.

And there, we danced dressed up as knights, like so many Don Quixotes.

No one ever came to plow us into the ground with spears as sharp as 

Inadequacy. Afterward, some drove back to the Christian hospital,

Others wept in their anxious offices. Some made it back to their home,

Where their dogs waited dutifully to be walked for a short time.

But I want to thank you for your stories. The pity and confidence,

The marginalia of dragons, and the wise women who danced

In your honor, beneath the flaming cables of industry. Poet king,

I am not going back to the misery factory, where I turned

The levers like vipers, each bite a bite for eternity. I am here for you.

You branded me with the confidence of the son. I see bonfires

Flickering beyond the forest, they have welcomed me for centuries.

They tell me, the men living there, “We see you. And we see your love.”

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

EMPTY PLACES

Illusion painting by Daniel Siering and Mario Shu.

Frederick Charles Melancon lives in Mississippi with his wife and daughter.  He is vaccinated and wears a mask.

PRAYER AGAINST HEALING

by Liz Ahl

A satellite view of the Bootleg Fire burning in Oregon last week.Credit: NOAA, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CIRA via The New York Times.

 

While flash floods hurl  

muddy torrents elsewhere, 

this NYC-sized fire lets loose  

its own brand of torrent,  

floods the drought-dried mountains 

with its hungry spill. 

 

I broadcast a cruel variant  

of prayer: that the destruction  

wreaked by the last big fires 

is still stark moonscape enough  

to refuse this newest ravaging;  

 

that the forest hasn’t recovered enough yet, 

that the masochistic cheatgrass  

hasn’t sprung up enough in between  

the skeletal remains of the trees,  

that the Winter Ridge—awful wish!—

might still be more barren wound than healed;  

that it can’t offer enough fuel yet  

to carry such a conflagration further 

or to deliver its blazing deluge all the way 

to the shrinking shores of the lakes 

or, somehow, beyond. 

 

That we won’t have to wait or pray 

for the too-late balm of October rains.  

 

That this ongoing ruin  

might have some use against itself. 

 

Liz Ahl is the author of Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017), as well as several chapbooks of poetry. Much of her recent published work was composed or revised during visits to the Playa Artist Residency Program, on the shore of Summer Lake, currently threatened by the Bootleg fire. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.

A PANDEMIC PRAYER

by Roderick Deacey

Don’t let me die a COVID death

pinned and tied by wires and tubes,

felled by fear and pain,

enduring dark visions

from potions that numb and confuse,

unable to touch the infinite,

losing the inevitable tussle for breath.

Instead, let me choose a worm’s death,

gently stilling movement

in the warm black soil.

Feeling the earth shiver and move

as it wraps me in its vast body

and cradles me

in its perpetual swing around the sun.

Or let me walk into the ancient forest

and sense the slow sap of centuries

sliding through the rough bark I lean against.

Let me mark the deep rhythm of the wood

as I feel myself slowly sink

into the tree’s heart,

to rest serene among leafy limbs.

Best of all, let me die a bird’s death,

swooping and swirling

high in a star-pricked sky—

not even aware

of tumbling flesh and feathers falling

as I joyously fly on

toward that brilliant rainbow slash of dawn.

Roderick Deacey is a performing poet in the DC area, based in Frederick, MD. In normal, non-viral times, he regularly performs with his drummer/percussionist and bass-player, presenting “neo-beat” poems inspired by the Beat Poets’ poetry and jazz forays of the nineteen-fifties. His beat poetry chapbook neo-beatery ballads was published in 2019. Deacey was awarded the 2019 Frederick Arts Council Carl R. Butler Award for Literature. Crossing genres, he won the Gold Award for best lyrics in the 2020 Mid-Atlantic Song Contest held by the Songwriters Association of Washington.

FALL IS BEAUTIFUL

by Katherine West

Holly turning red
all along the winding trail,
little flames of fall
amongst the wildflowers—
silver hair of the forest

She is dying, dry
before rain, dry after rain
her children all dead
before they are born, before
the holly can burn, it burns

Eighty years to die—
eighty years for the river
eighty years for me
amongst the wildflowers—
silver hair of the river

She is dying, dry
before rain, dry after rain
her children all dead
before they are born, before
the trout can spawn, they are gone

Fall is beautiful
leaves now turning red as blood
all my long, long life
I was a leaf on your tree
but now we fall together

Katherine West is the author of three poetry collections—The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle–and has had poetry published in such journals as Bombay Gin, Lalitamba, TheNewVerse.News, La Petite Zine among others.  She lives and teaches poetry workshops about wilderness writing near Silver City, New Mexico.  

FIRE SEASON

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Since the early 1970s, summertime forest fires—such as the Ferguson Fire last year—have gotten 800 percent larger. Credit: NOAH BERGER / GETTY via The Atlantic

Among the many processes important to California's diverse fire regimes, warming‐driven fuel drying is the clearest link between anthropogenic climate change and increased California wildfire activity to date. —Earth’s Future, July 15, 2019


The creek is drier than dry
The ground is dust upon dust
Every arid hour that goes by
Whispers, “Combust, combust!”
To the forest-covered hills
Where we hike to restore our souls
Jettison aches and ills
And take an hour’s repose.                                
But we know that rainless months
And temperatures gone berserk
Can conjure a blaze all at once
From the merest flicker or spark.
So we walk in the trees without blinders
For we cannot not picture the worst –
A paradise reduced to cinders
Whole biomes expiring of thirst.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California.

DAY RUNNERS

by Laura Rodley

Photo by the poet.

Graying, white foam kicked aside
snowplow’s blade scraping bottom
thrusting wave after wave aside
breaking tides over guardrail
back into the forest’s ledged shelf,
twenty miles an hour, speed of broken sleep,
catching waves solidified as snowfall,
driver dressed in buffalo plaid shirt,
no buffalo skin upon his lap,
pink salt swirling behind, above his exhaust pipe.
He must not reach his own edge,
maintain sharpness as he thrusts the blade
down Route 2, Greenfield to Williamstown,
and back again, coffee in his thermos,
another plow ahead, wave after wave,
cars in a line behind him, crawling.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner for her New Verse News poem "Resurrection," a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee, with work in Best Indie Lit NE.  Publisher Finishing Line Press nominated her Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose for a PEN L.L.Winship Award and Mass Book Award. FLP also nominated her Rappelling Blue Light for a Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, Rodley teaches the As You Write It memoir class and has edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI, also nominated for a Mass Book Award. She was accepted at Martha’s Vineyard’s NOEPC and has been a consecutive participant in the 30 poems in 30 days fundraiser for Literacy Project. Latest books Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point upcoming by Prolific Press.