NORTHERN CALIFORNIA WINTER

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Illustration by Matthew Laznicka for In These Times.

A day of soaking rains.

Crowds of sparrows

Foraging in garden mud

For seeds exposed by the downpour.

Gutters and storm drains

Clogged with great clumps of wet leaves.

Persimmon trees 

Stripped of their foliage

Their naked bodies ornamented

With glowing orange lanterns.

Shiny, water-slicked buckeyes 

And bay nuts 

Littering the ground.

We have waited and waited

And waited

For the rains to arrive

To drench the soil

To fill the creeks

To bathe the dry woods

That throughout the hot, dry, red-flag season

Whispered in our uneasy dreams

Threats to erupt in flames

That would come fee-fie-foe-fumming 

Down the mountain

Like a malevolent fairy tale giant

With a hunger for our homes,

For our neighborhoods,

For our bones.

Rest easy sing the little silver-footed fairies

Dancing on the roof,

For now.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and only journals. His new book At the Driveway Guitars Sale is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. He podcasts poems of aging, memory, and mortality at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife Cynthia in northern California.

SQUID SONNET

by Anne Graue

Seven years after scientists caught the elusive deep-sea cephalopod on video, they saw another. Then lightning struck a third time. Here is a juvenile giant squid approaching, attacking, and then retreating from a ring of pulsating blue LEDs on the Medusa deep-sea camera system. Video by Edie Widder and Nathan Robinson via The New York Times, June 21, 2019

It should be immense, for a giant squid—
The one on camera that emerges
from midnight, from nowhere, reaching for light
the bait in front of the lens. It spreads wide
its suckered tentacles, its ghost arms search
for prey. Millions of neurons in pointless
hunting with a stab at the lighted lure—
its only course to return to shadow.
This sonnet only fulfills its promise
to keep itself contained within its lines.
The squid, too, will adhere to nature’s plan—
male or female, to inject, lay and hatch
offspring in a final endeavor to
become food for crustaceans and sea stars. 

Anne Graue is the author of a chapbook, Fig Tree in Winter, and has poetry appearing in numerous journals and anthologies, online and in print. She also has reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Whale Road Review, and The Rumpus, and at Asitoughttobe.com, where she is a contributing editor.

BEHIND THE MASKS

by David M. Katz

AP photo via El Paso Times, June 17, 2018

Behind the masks each Halloween, there are
The kids who quiver for the candy corn.
They come out of the dark to the lights above
The lintels of doors both safe and terrifying.
There are some who are too small to knock
Even at a parent’s urging. They fear
The giant more than they want the sweets.
But most are brave enough to carry on.
For others, at the border, there are no
Such masks. For them, the shock comes suddenly
Out of the darkness, and the giants who
Lift them from their parents’ arms are too
Vast, too high, too formless to be seen.
This is a different kind of Halloween.

David M. Katz’s books of poems include Stanzas on Oz and Claims of Home, both published by Dos Madres Press. He’s also the author of The Warrior in the Forest, published by House of Keys Press. Poems of his have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, and The Cortland Review.  He is currently working on a new poetry collection, tentatively entitled Money. He lives in New York City and recently retired after a 40-year career as a business journalist and editor.

WHAT T***P KNOWS

by Michael Collins

It’s not a question
of knowing it
in your bones:
It’s a question
of knowing it
in their bones—
Rule the mind and all
the rest follows:
Bend ignorance like a bow.
Grow and grow, tower:
Machiavelli said it centuries ago:
Be the giant of hypocrites,
the titan liars; be the giant
of seeming: cut the tree
of knowledge down
and build a stage; bring
your fingers down on the crowd’s great hurts
and know there is no other knowing;
For giants grow larger
in contradiction; they
multiply in lies.


Michael Collins has published one book of poems, one intellectual biography and many uncollected essays and poems.

GIANT DIE WASHES ASHORE ON LAKE COEUR D'ALENE

by Martin Ott

Coeur d'Alene resident Mark Sales told KBOI 2News that he and his father spotted the floating object on Saturday near the boardwalk. (Photo courtesy Mark Sales) —KOMONEWS (Seattle), March 22, 2017

Perhaps Paul Bunyan was rolling bones to stake Babe
against enough food to last the winter, the errant throw

skidding over the Rockies and into the soup. Theories
on how lake monsters could transform into any object

hung on rearview mirrors don’t account for this die
castaway forever tumbling toward its opposite or twin.

Alien vessels were round until the Borg sucked us in,
this camouflage of games and chance rolling in waves,

an invasion of our psyche, lust for numbers, and desire
to be on the last square. Dice, after all, are about turns

and seizing the next piece of land, inexorable steps
in an American game where there is just one winner.

Sometimes the die would disappear in evening mist,
the makeshift worlds we build ephemeral and slick,

until that last passage onto shore, final roll stuck,
the deity of odds nowhere to be seen in the picture.


A previous contributor to TheNewVerse.News, Martin Ott’s most recent book is Spectrum, C&R Press, 2016. He is the author of seven books and won the De Novo and Sandeen prizes for his first two poetry collections. His work has appeared in more than two hundred magazines and a dozen anthologies. He tweets and blogs.