SHORTAGE

by Tara Menon

The Boston Globe states
there’s a shortage of breast biopsy needles 
in the nation, the result of a recall.
Doctors need to conserve their supply.
Breast cancer diagnoses are delayed. 
 
We mustn’t sprout cancer cells 
at least until the end of March.
Better yet, we must remain healthy 
our entire lives while science
invents ways to cure or prevent diseases.
 
What do we do about shortages
when the Strait of Hormuz closes
or when nations hoard supplies as weapons of wars
or when global warming results in more pandemics,
overwhelming hospitals to prioritize surgeries,
or when doctors are forced to turn down patients
or when the cost of insurance swells to smother us?
What then?
 
None of those scenarios have to happen, you know.
The worst enemy is the shrug of shoulders.

Tara Menon is an Indian-American writer based in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is a two-time finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award. Her latest poems are forthcoming or have appeared in AMPLIFY (Sheila-Na-Gig), The Sucharnochee Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Chaotic Merge Magazine, and Grey Sparrow Journal.

O GREENLAND! MY GREENLAND!

by Anne Gruner

Global AI race makes Greenland's critical minerals a tempting target —NBC News, January 17, 2026

Frozen for millennia,

your ice melts faster and faster,

the shiny shield that protects you

from the sun, reflecting its rays,

like armor deflecting spears, arrows,

and swords but not outrageous fortune.

 

Invulnerable for ages, your permafrost

softens, disgorging its methane and carbon

to fuel the global bonfire of the vanities.

Ancient microbes, freed from glacial captivity

create black holes of “giant” viruses,

standing ready for missions of good or evil.

Fresh and cold, your newly born meltwater

floods the warm salty ocean,

and like a hormonal imbalance,

it slows the sea's circulation,

a fateful harbinger.

 

As your ice bids its long farewell,

you say hello to a new peril,

one from humanity, which may transmogrify

your beauty into toxic mountains of sludge, acid,

dust, and runoff from crushing, grinding,

and chemical bleaching for coveted minerals

and a cesspool of data centers, accelerating

your blackening, melting, warming,

and death. 

 

For the first time in human memory

you have shed tears on your highest peak,

weeping for the Earth.

Anne Gruner is a two-time Pushcart nominee whose poetry has appeared in numerous print and on-line publications including Amsterdam Quarterly Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Honeyguide Literary Magazine, The New Verse News, Humans of the World, Spillwords, and Written Tales. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in Dogwood, Rhapsody of the Spheres, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, Hippocampus, and others. A former CIA analyst, Anne lives in McLean, Virginia with her husband and two golden retrievers.

KRONOS EATS HIS CHILDREN

by Susan McLean

Kronos rules a golden age.
A.I. fulfills his every whim.
He fracks to fuel his leverage.
He won't let regulations trim
his profits or his privilege.

Kronos drives an SUV:
it's comfortable; he needs his room.
When there's a place he wants to be,
his private jet can save him time,
and time is money, naturally.

You can't eat money, though, so when
the ice caps melt, the oceans warm,
droughts, floods, and hurricanes pile on,
and all the crops dry up or drown,

his kids will find he's eaten them.

Susan McLean, a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University, taught a course in Greek myth and literature for thirty years, and finds that those myths continue to resonate with what's happening now.

HAIKU

by Geoffrey Philp

Did you enjoy the cherry blossoms' early peak bloom? It was a warning sign. A 1,200-year record of cherry blossoms shows our current climate is historically unprecedented.  [Photograph byRinko Kawauchi]—National Geographic, March 26, 2024

In an early spring

maples bloom while elms tremble—

dreading a cold snap.

Geoffrey Philp, a Silver Musgrave Medal recipient, is the author of Archipelagos, a book of poems about climate change which was long-listed for the Laurel Prize. Philp’s Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas retells the nativity story, transporting readers back to that holy night in a fresh yet traditional way. His poem “A Prayer for My Children” is featured on The Poetry Rail—an homage to 12 writers who shaped Miami's culture. He  lives in Miami and is working on a children's book Marsha and the Mangroves.

CHECK YOUR PHONE!

by Roderick Deacey

Check your phone—

it’s full of messages,
all are saying
check your phone.
Check your creek—
it keeps on rising,
so do temperatures,
the tundra’s melting,
ice floes are melting,
ice caps are melting.
It appears that ice
is getting scarcer.
Check your freezer—
it’s full of polar bears!
That’s not funny,
they are homeless,
so are penguins.
Check your oceans—
coral’s dying,
sea-weed’s dying,
whales are dying,
fish are dying,
even octopi
are saying bye-bye.
Sea’s full of plastic—
that can’t feed us.
What’s going on here?

Check your phone—
it’s full of fascism,
it’s caught a virus,
it’s caught fanaticism,
anti-Constitutional
Christian nationalism.
The leading candidate
has set a camping date
to rehouse us vermin
soon as he is back in,
billionaires back him,
better believe him!
Hey, great-grandad,
those Nazis you fought—
they’re back again.

Check your phone—
it’s bleeding bargains,
don’t buy bargains,
but buy a bunch
of solar chargers.
And download books—
many, many books—
for long, dark evenings.
Are they coming?
What do Boy Scouts say?
Be prepared! But first,
download this handy volume:
"Edible Plants for Eating;
How to Find Them."
It’ll help you forage
in field and forest—
the hunter-gatherer diet,
you may have to try it!

Check your phone!
Computer projections
predict who’s winning—
no one’s winning!
We’re all sad losers,
no cause for mirth
on screwed-up Earth.
The Washington Post
confirms we’re toast,
The New York Times asks
“It’s really that time?”
CNN says start again,
while Fox whines Biden
should have known.
I wrote The Guardian—
they just groaned.
As for M-S-N-B-C,
they say truth will set us free—
that’s not proven to be true…
so now, what should you do?
You know, don’t you?
Check your phone!


Roderick Deacey recently discovered his bio had been replaced by instructions on how to turn himself in. He remembers regularly performing beat poetry with bass-player and drummer. He also remembers sending poems to literary magazines and occasionally having some published. He has decided not to turn himself in but to turn in a few spare poems instead.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN FISH FORGET?

by Mary K O’Melveny

This summer, Florida’s ocean water temperatures exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit. A recent scientific study revealed that rising water temperatures can cause crucial memory loss to damsel fish and other reef-dwelling species. The fish in the study who were subjected to temperatures as high as F 89.6 did not fare well, failing “to find shelter, recognize their neighbors or find food easily.” —The New York Times, August 23, 2023
Credit.Credit...Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild, via Getty Images]Credit...Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild, via Getty Images] The New York Times August 23, 2023

As Fahrenheit rose, some damsel fish forgot 
where to find their food sources. With each degree,
memories shifted far away. First to go: 
 
finding a meal. Next was fear. Who posed a threat. 
Where danger lay. Which reefs might safely hide 
them, what might portend trouble in sargassum 
 
seas or bubble upward in their pathways 
turning marbles of algae into floating 
spectral groupers or snappers. As memory
 
fluttered away like flotsam, reef fish failed 
to thrive, survive. Each day’s heightened heat seared
off some tiny thought, some echo 
 
that time had taught, some souvenir of before.
Yesterday’s cache of jeweled thoughts scattered
now into a vast void. Who can ever 
 
truly know what is lost as heat sears, scalds?
As oceans warm, equal risk befalls both 
predators and prey. Who will remain alive 
 
as seas simmer and pale coral reefs blanch
white as brides? Will these warmed fish discard scales
of azure, sapphire, magenta, or wispy 
 
tails of sunshine yellow, peachy orange?
Will they recall where eggs were laid or where 
sharks stayed hidden as reefs shrank? What tales
 
will they recount as awareness shapeshifts, 
then fades away like images in an infinity 
mirror? As they spin through steamy waters,
 
adrift in the present tense, our questions
float along beside them. Will we have a future?
What flashbacks will follow Fukishima?

Mary K O’Melveny, a retired labor rights lawyer, lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York. Mary’s award-winning poetry has appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on national and international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s much-praised fourth book of poetry Flight Patterns was published by Kelsay Books in August 2023. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Mary was a finalist in the 2023 Poetry Competition sponsored by Slippery Elm Literary Journal. She is also a co-author of two anthologies of writing by The Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group, including Rethinking The Ground Rules (Mediacs Books 2022). 

SPEAKING OF LEGACIES

by Devon Balwit

King Charles III built his own empire long before he inherited his mother’s. Charles, who formally acceded to the British throne on Saturday, spent half a century turning his royal estate into a billion-dollar portfolio and one of the most lucrative moneymakers in the royal family business. —The New York Times, September 13, 2022

Your average Brit pays to inherit. Not he.

King Charles gets his tax free,

 

the pelf of the Commonwealth studiously invested.

You’d think working folk would grow disgusted

 

at the granting of titles to Saudis for cash, the off-

shore holdings, the real-estate profits,

 

that they’d line up with fists raised rather than phones.

Why should HRH earn 28 million

 

last year alone when inflation’s at 10%?

Are we really so suckered by pageantry?

 

Imagine the Crown Estate and the Duchy of Cornwall

liquidated, the money put towards ending global

 

warming. Now that would be a worthy legacy—

one to send cheering crowds into the streets.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. Her most recent collections are Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press 2020] and Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang [Nixes Mate Books, 2021].

PALLAS (ATHENA) AT A SUMMIT

by Dawid Juraszek

Countries’ climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation finds. Photo: A large plantation of palm trees, which produce palm oil, borders an undrained peat forest in Simunjan in the Sarawak region of Malaysia. When peat-rich bogs are drained and converted to farmlands, they release a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the once-waterlogged plants’ remains degrade with the sudden exposure to air. —The Washington Post, November 7, 2021

The ways the wise ones of our pasts

warred on the bodies of the land

all the while

crafting key words and ideas

for you and me

to grow up with

shaped and scarred us for life

Mountainsides stripped bare

underneath the blazing Sun

is not how it always was

a side effect of wanting more

shrugged off

or sorrowed over

then accepted and assimilated

A shortcut to wisdom

when exploring a narrative

what & who & why & how

hindsight is best

not indulged

as belated foresight

everything so very clear all along

Words and ideas now being crafted

justify unjustifiable

with solutions that could truly impress

only in hindsight

premised on there being a future

to look back on this moment

and give us a thumbs up

Dawid Juraszek is the author of Medea and Other Poems of the Anthropocene (Kelsay Books 2020). A bilingual writer and educator based in China, he is working on a PhD project in cognitive ecocriticism at Maastricht University. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in multiple venues in Poland, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

LICKING OFF THE FROSTING

by Tricia Knoll

Old friends remember Tom’s birthday party

when we were young and houses were small. 

We assembled in the living room to start with wine

or beer, some sort of dip. Then his wife cried out

Pearl! and we all saw that my small gold mutt 

named after Janis Joplin stood by 

the coffee table to lick half the white frosting

off Tom’s carrot cake. No one noticed

for a long time. A decision made to accept

the other half for the celebration.  

 

This fate of glaciers—sneaky heat

licks them away, inch by inch until

it’s too late to do anything but see

what is and try to figure out 

where is the other half of the cake.  

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who believes the impact of the IPCC climate report can be felt in what we know is happening in our own lives—and have known but did not address over decades. Much of her poetry is eco-poetry which you can find at tricaknoll.com.

109 DEGREES

by Penelope Scambly Schott

I was inside at my desk.

The dog poked her nose into my hip.

I didn’t feel like walking her.

I didn’t want to go out.

We went out.

We cut across the school football field.

At the fifty-yard line the dog rolled in the grass.

We walked into the shade behind the gym.

I lay down on the lawn.

The dog lay down next to me.

Her fur was warm against my bare arm.

She licked my shoulder.

My shoulder was suddenly cool.

Even the grass remembered cool.

I am telling you this on a warming planet,

on a planet that still has people and dogs.

I want to say we went home

but it’s all home, isn’t it?

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

PYROCENE THIS TIME

by Corey Weinstein

 

Nowhere winds bluster cloudless skies

blistering skins of rattle-windowed homes,

The parched air bites through wilted gardens,

Dry lightning judges the boiling world,

Heaven’s fiery tongues crackle the air

that booms the world without drenching grace,

Bestowing 8,000 square mile conflagrations,

Gaia’s retribution for dragging incendiaries

up from her breast with mine and pump,

Ripping off mountain tops, greasing her fissures,

Terra not Firma shakes our foundations.

 

Who is this people, these fire starters

that bespoil their nest and neighbor’s land?

In bands they were heroes of ice time survival

in pleasant harmony with their birthing world,

Now their fires are hidden in machines,

Personal aluminum hundred horse teams.

              Firepower unbound

                              Industrial pyro-pathologies

 Burning day and night

                      Blind to deluge and drought

                 Billions          Coal

     Tons             Gallons               Gas

           Billions     Daily     Billions!    

                Unimaginable bounty

                  Essential inferno.

 

A world melting into a grandchild’s future.

Corey Weinstein is a retired physician whose poetry has been published in Vistas and Byways, The New Verse News, Forum, and Jewish Currents. He currently attends writing classes at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in San Francisco and hosts their Poetry Circle. Weinstein has also been published in a number of medical/academic publications. He is an advocate for prisoner rights as the founder of California Prison Focus, and he led the American Public Health Association’s Prison Committee for many years. In his free time, he plays the clarinet in a local jazz band.

THE ANTARCTICA BEAUTY PAGEANT

by Christopher Woods

Temperature in Antarctica soars to near 70 degrees, appearing to topple continental record set days earlier. —Headline in The Washington Post, February 14, 2020


Has fewer contestants this year.
Girls from every continent once competed
Before the heat became too intense.
No more bikini strut, wet tee shirt parade.
Now just a few stagger about in a white furnace
Where the fevered winds that killed the penguins
Blow incessantly across the bones of elephant seals.

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published the novel The Dream Patch, the prose collection Under A Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His photographs can be seen in his gallery. His photography prompt book for writers From Vision To Text is forthcoming from Propertius Press.

DARK OF THE MOON, HEAT OF THE SUN

by Pepper Trail

“One hundred percent girls,” whispered the biologist, crawling next to the pregnant reptile. “This nest will be 100 percent girls.” As the earth gets hotter, turtle hatchlings worldwide are expected to skew dangerously female, scientists predict, making the animals an unwitting gauge for the warming climate. —The Washington Post, October 22, 2019. Photo: A marine biologist helps a newborn sea turtle reach the sea on Cape Verde’s Boa Vista island. Credit: Danielle Paquette via The Washington Post.

In the dark sea, a greater darkness
An absence of starlight, moving
Then on the wet sand, a stone

Stone into turtle, with gathering of breath
And the climb begins, pull and drag
Against all the weight of earth

Far up the beach, with pause for gasp
The turtle curves wings
Into mittened hands, and digs

For this warmth of nest, the ocean shed
This gush of eggs into the place prepared
Hidden among the grains of sand

Then the lurch, the thrash
The torn-up ground, last concealment
Before the run toward home

At the first break of wave
She lifts head, trailing earthly tears
Rests, breathes full, and flies free

So it has been, the mothers forever
Returning to their mothers’ beach
The fathers waiting in the fathers’ surf

But now, the warmth too warm
The nests send only girls into the sea
Until fathers can be found no more

For long barren years, turtles will swim
Far from the beckoning useless land
Bearing eggs for no generation, the last


Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR FOR THE APOCALYPSE

by Jessica Ginting

Photo: Noah Dillon/courtesy NRDC via Fast Company

There is something terrifying about reaching the end of a season
in this age of climate change.

Perhaps this will be the last time it will be like this
and every coming year will be the first time again.

How do we recall moments, or periods, in time without patterns?
Our tapestry needs to be redone, reworked
into a garment fit for wear; our seasonal clothes, replaced
with a wardrobe organized by survival needs.

A coat for the snowstorm, scarves for the haze, hard hats for the quakes,
sturdy boots for the floods & fashionable oxygen masks
for when we’re really at the end of all available seasons.

There is something terrifying about reaching the end of this season,
and not knowing what to wear for the next one.

Jessica Ginting, a writer from Jakarta currently residing in London, has completed a Master's degree in Publishing. Her poetry has been published in Anak Sastra, a South East Asian literary magazine, as well as other publications such as The Bristol Poetry Anthology 2018 and That's What She Said Magazine. Her debut poetry collection Moon Petals was launched at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali in 2017. She is also the writer and creator of the Indonesian superhero comic,  ROSANA!

SCURRYING

by Carl Mayfield 

A man is a child
at both ends of life

and much of the time
between dawn and dusk,

touching his toes
to illustrate how the head

can drop out of sight
and still send thoughts

scurrying in every direction
to bounce off other heads

not all there but alive
in a juice neither visible

nor mute, allowing the new arrival
to pick up a language

to discover how far away
words can be from what matters

while noticing how few travelers
sense there is but one tribe

gathered under a toxic sky
which kills everyone, though

not all look up in time to see
their assassin—themselves—

winking back. A pail should be issued
at birth, to play in the sand at first,

then later to bail water out of the desert
as the second childhood shows up,

a little too late to be enjoyed
but with no less power to stun

as it performs the dead man's float.

Carl Mayfield lives and writes at the extreme northern edge of the Chihuahua Desert. His two most recent chapbooks are High Desert Cameos and Gather Round All Ye Wild Children of the Defrocked Atom.

PESSIMIST'S ODE

by Carolyn Wells

Researchers with the Danish Meteorological Institute making their way over meltwater topping sea ice in northwest Greenland STEFFEN OLSEN via Forbes, August 16, 2019

If Greenland is melting,
I'm going to drink expensive Sancerre.
The reefs are bleached, the white rhinos extinct , the pangolins over hunted,
the forests of Siberia burning, the 2 degree Celsius rising.
I'm going to read the entire works of Dickens. I'm going to quit my job and make soap, sleep with young men, plant carrots and onions and store them all winter, sell my apartment and finally go live in France, where I will stand in silence in front of each WW1 monument, and reflect.
You who died for no reason.

Carolyn Wells is a member of Brevitas poetry group in NYC and a contributor to Alimentum. Her book Your Kiss is a River was published by Nirala Press.

AN OKWARD SITUATION

by Julie Steiner

Video published on Aug 19, 2019

Since "jökull" means "ice sheet," not "rock,"
we're re-christening Okjökull "Ok."
By the time we re-brand
balmy Iceland as "Land,"
will we stop calling climate change "schlock"?

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego. Besides the TheNewVerse.News, the venues in which her poetry has appeared include the Able Muse Review, Rattle, Light, and the Asses of Parnassus.

THE BIG PICTURE

by Devon Balwit

The destruction of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil has increased rapidly since the nation’s new far-right president took over and his government scaled back efforts to fight illegal logging, ranching and mining. —The New York Times, July 28, 2019. Photo: Deforestation in the Western Amazon region of Brazil.CreditCarl De Souza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via The New York Times

The Amazon is ours, not yours, he says,
as if our fates could remain distinct, as if
his clearcutting didn’t squeeze
the air from our lungs, as if the surf

didn’t tumble trash from all continents
into the same vortex, as if our reefs
could keep their brightness despite vents
elsewhere off-gassing. It’s grief

I feel as he smiles and shakes hands with
his environmental minister. So happy
they seem to defraud the children of both
hemispheres of green. His economy

will rise but briefly before it fails,
as our shared earth sears and pales.


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found in here as well as in Jet Fuel, The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Apt (long-form issue), Tule Review, Grist, and Rattle among others.

(RED) HEAT / HOT / HAT (RED)

by Ron Riekki

“By 2050, the Northeast can expect approximately 650 more deaths each year because of extreme heat, the [National Climate] Assessment found.” —“Dangerous heat wave brings misery to 195 million from New Mexico to Maine,” CNN, July 19, 2019

for Robert Francis, Mark Strand, Hayden Carruth, and Reiko Redmonde

Heat and the colors of heat, like coal-mine hells,
and it gets so hot that the moon looks burnt
and the horizon itself is now a broiler pan
and my girlfriend in Lille says, “The fan broke.”
What about the AC?  “What AC?  We don’t have AC.”
And she tells me a neighbor died.  I say, “How old?
as if that’s an acceptable excuse, as if degrees
represent years.  And I remember a line from
Shakespeare: “the very birds are mute.”  And
I remember a line from a newspaper article today:
“June of this year was the hottest June on record

for the world.”  Temperatures climb and I think
of the moment in Free Solo where the guy fell
and we gasped until the parachute opened up
and we aren’t the ones gasping now, but we're
the ones falling.  And when I broke my ankle
in the military, one of the corpsmen said,
“Put heat on it” and there was another
corpsman there and he said, “No, put ice
on it.”  And they argued about it while I looked
down at the purple and brown and orange
under my skin, wondering if I’d ever walk again.

Ron Riekki's latest book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.  On August 25, he appears at Revolution Books in Berkeley with Berkeley Poet Laureate Rafael Jesus Gonzalez and Sacramento Poet Laureate Julia Connor.

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.