WAR

by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan

"War, what is it good for? Absolutely Nothing."

—Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, “War,” 

sung notably by The Temptations and by Edwin Starr.

Mothers Mary, Teresa, and Cabrini were spotted on the # 17 bus, 
headed to the city to go shoe shopping.

Buddha sat cross-legged, waiting for his plane,
while Jonathan Edwards read a magazine.

John Wesley, Bodhidharma, and Mary Baker Eddy
contemplated the meaning of one and two and three.

Krishna looked at his reflection and saw Vishnu looking
back at him chewing bubble gum.

The Dalai Lama and L Ron Hubbard argued politics, 
music, and art while sipping French wine.

Martin Luther marched at the protest, shouting how change is needed, 
and Zoroaster banged his drum.

Mohammed and Moses were searching land surveys
as to where they should build their houses.

Confucius was heard reading from The Analects,
as Lao Tsu was seen in Central Park writing a poem.

Jesus was whispering to his cousin, John the Baptist, 
about today’s newspaper headlines.

Pythagoras put down the math problem to play a game
of chess with St Francis of Assisi.

Ramachandra was seen talking to the incarnation of Mahavira, 
each texting with someone else.

Mani and Guru Nanak wore sunglasses and laughed while
crowning each other in checkers.

George Fox, John Wycliffe, and Joseph Smith debated the alignment
of the stars in Tuyuca.

Adi Shankara and Emanuel Swedenborg played double Dutch
with Baal Shem Tov and Brigham Young.

Helena Blavatsky, Aurobindo, Zarathustra, and Thich Nhat Hanh
practiced downward dog.

Saint Teresa of Ávila listened while William Booth asked
Ramana-Maharshi “Who are you?”

And all the while, all the gods that have ever been, are, and will be,
were busy eating McDonald’s.

Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan is the first woman to be appointed Suffolk County Poet Laureate (2009-2011). She was awarded by the Walt Whitman Birthplace the title of 2017 Long Island Poet of the Year. She has been honored with a Long Island Writers Group Community Service Award and the MOBIOUS Editor-In-Chief’s Choice Award. She is the founder and president of Long Island Poetry & Literature Repository, and the Editor of Long Island Sounds Anthology. She has penned six chapbooks and a children’s book, Would You Hug a Porcupine. Tammy has earned her Ph.D. in Humanities & Culture in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at Union Institute & University. Her dissertation was on: The Healing Power of Poetry. She teaches at Long Island University at the C W Post campus.

A REQUIEM FOR ZOMBIE FIRES DEVOURING THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

by Daniel Brennan

While most wildfires burn out in the open, another form of Arctic fire is more difficult to detect. So-called zombie fires can smoulder in peat beneath the Arctic’s icy surface, throughout the winter months. When spring comes, the fires reignite surface vegetation, emitting carbon dioxide from both the vegetation and the peat, which is a natural carbon dioxide store. A report by climate scientists concluded that the increase in the number of these overwintering wildfires is directly linked to climate change. —World Economic Forum, January 11, 2023. Photo: The Bogus Creek Fire in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a state where the vast majority of carbon emissions from fires come from burning soil.Credit: Matt Snyder/Alaska Division of Forestry, via Associated Press via The New York Times.

We should have guessed by the gray, curled perfume

reaching up from a temporary grave that all good things

stay hungry. A terrible beauty; keeping one eye open

in the coldest sleep, keeping an eye on God himself. 

Blessed be the land that cracks like old skin under 

our sun, the land that shivers off its frost to be eaten

alive by a boiling stomach. Blessed be the earth that

houses the black-nailed hand reaching toward heaven

as the soil softens, as it splits open its breast to reveal

every fiery jewel we thought lost to winter. 

The disbelievers, they will tell you it cannot be this way. 

They will tell you that these new gods, burning just

below the lips, the foils and folds of the mind, should

extinguish in the night as they have for a millennia. 

But the most famished deities find the sky. These,

my sinner’s hands, hands which have held dirt in the shape

of lonely men and men crawling deep back down into

their graveyard dirt, hands which have found every other aspiring 

angel in the dark corridors of night between body high

and exaltation, these hands must clasp in a bent prayer

for someone, for something. Find meaning in the revelations,

the peeling snowfall that has blanketed a red mask of death. 

Find God in the furious inferno creeping up through nutrient-

rich soil, screaming to the heavens, making us believe

in an eternal life, for these flames do not die, only slumber. 

Blessed be this new generation of disciples, apostles, apotheosis 

in freeze-frame. They must learn to worship the earth that

cannot keep its fiery dreams beneath a dark shawl

of rock and root and snow and seed. We inherit the 

land that devours itself, the endless eulogy below our funeral pyre. 

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a resident of New York City, but grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania (ultimately serving as a focused source of ecology-based inspiration). As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Brennan’s work aims to capture both the vastness we feel in the face of our ever-changing planet, while confronting our own bodies and the daunting elements of intimacy we feel every day. His work has appeared in CP Quarterly, Grand Little Things, Feral Poetry, with upcoming work in the Garfield Lake Review. He currently lives in Manhattan, and works full-time in advertising.

WAITING FOR ARMAGEDDON

by Gail White

Explosions in Kyiv heard live on air https://t.co/JGLvh4k8tX

— HectorM (@JaguarVer) February 24, 2022

All times are times of impending doom,

If one knows how to read the signs.

But old gods walk through the living room

And lay down nets and fishing lines.

Clutching the mesh, I begin to seek

Wonders and signs I’ve let slip by:

The fish impaled on the heron’s beak

Miraculous as the butterfly.

Between war and depression the end will come.

With plague and famine we take our chance.

But the cat moves her kittens one last time,

And the sandhill crane does a mating dance.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

JEALOUS GODS

by Devon Balwit

            for Mary Oliver 1935-2019

This morning, the world mirrors rather than mocks,
fog-shrouded, pines diffident in gauze.

Mary Oliver has died. Determined to save
the only life she could, even she yielded

in the end. Now, she awaits the mercy of time.
I read her and carry her memory one day further.

The spirit, she writes, needs the metaphor
of the body. Mine pains me and would do better

to seek another vessel. What sufferer can be
heroic? Look me in the eye, Mary. Tell me

all do not long to pass the dark baton.
Her cricket moves grains of sand, dedicated

to its humble effort, but what if, secretly,
it ached for more, the dead poet missing

the yearning shuttered behind its elytra?
I appreciate evangels, welling good news,

but old gods are not so easily shed. Jealous
of our attention, they are not above

turning our heads where they want our gaze
or of swallowing the prayers of well-wishers.


Devon Balwit's most recent collection is titled A Brief Way to Identify a Body (Ursus Americanus Press). Her individual poems can be found here as well as in The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Fifth Wednesday (on-line), Apt, Grist, and Oxidant Engine among others.

CHASING THE AMERICAN DREAM

by Lind Grant-Oyeye

“Unpresidented,” by Sue Cole at the Galerie St. Etienne via The New Yorker, January 1, 2017

Forty thousand [immigrants] had come [to the U.S. since January] from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office. —The New York Times, December 23, 2017

Some day, a hut hurting someplace—
from creaked bolts, jolts and thunder bolts
may find sunshine, side by side the spire
of Mar-a-Largo—a dream.

After the settling of rain, hurricanes and all,
then would they embrace what is left
of the saltiness of seas and foreign sand left
on shore or savor jointly, the after taste of sea weed.

After the atmosphere has rested from pouring rain,
side by side still, they will behold clearly the combined smiles
of gods which used to hide behind layers and layers
of pretentious stratopheric ozone—

After the smiling of gods,
side by side still, they will pour out whatever soot is left
in their bellies as contrite offerings to the gods—
the joint confessional and thanksgiving of immigrant houses,
made welcome.


Lind Grant-Oyeye, a winner of the Universal Human Rights Student Network human rights poetry award, was born in Nigeria. She has work in several literary magazines world wide.

CASTING SPELLS BEFORE DAWN

by Joan Mazza

Purified by a long bath in water scented with lavender,
I perform old rituals, light every candle I own,
daven in veils, and say the rosary, chant and meditate
to cast out darkness, rage, desire for revenge.

Ishtar, Aphrodite, Thor— I call upon you. Venus,
Sekmet, Horus, bring kindness, restore gentle words.
Jesus, Moses, Mother Mary, let us welcome those
who suffer, offer food and housing to shunned women

with unplanned, unwanted babies. Let us educate them
in the skills of mothering the next generation, teach boys
peace-making, eye-gazing, empathy, how to plant
a garden, how to cook. Let us join again in dance

and song, teach music rather than how to operate
drones and guns. We must stop marching toward the cliff,
stop degrading our air and water, defiling habitats.
I pray to every god I don’t believe in to step up now

when we need help most. Our bridges and roads
are deteriorating, our land is eroding, the ocean
is full of plastic. Oh, gods of any color or country,
quell my fear of demagogues, bullies who foment hate,

the greedy elite who eat and eat and will not share.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Kestrel, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, Buddhist Poetry Review, and The Nation. She ran away from the hurricanes of South Florida to be surprised by the earthquakes and tornadoes of rural central Virginia, where she writes poetry and does fabric and paper art.

SUMMER'S HEAT

by F.I. Goldhaber

Pele. Image source: Dragons Faeries Elves & the Unseen

In the Pacific Northwest we've a
love-hate relationship with the sun.
While we treasure our short summer for
blue skies and joyous celebrations,
the natives sigh with relief when Fall's
first rain brings water to thirsty plants.

Though winter skies are ever dreary,
Spring's vibrant colors compensate for
months of precipitation. Here we
know the difference between drizzles
and sprinkles, cloudbursts and showers;
applaud brief sun break appearances.

But now summers last too long. Spring rains
refuse to fall. Winter's snow pack shrinks
every year, cutting skiing time short.
Fire season starts earlier and lasts
longer, kills more firefighters, burns more
acres, and destroys more homes each year.

Perhaps we should beg Lono to cross
the ocean and join Pele whose fire
rumbles under our feet, threatening
to burst from the peaks surrounding us,
and tear asunder the land on which
we build houses and cultivate food.

Maybe if we welcome the old gods,
eschew worshiping the trinity
of money, power, and oil,
we can avoid inclusion among
the species eliminated in
the planet's sixth wave of extinction.


As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, F.I. Goldhaber produced news stories, feature articles, essays, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now, her poems, short stories, novelettes, essays, and reviews appear in paper, electronic, and audio magazines, ezines, newspapers, calendars, and anthologies.  Her newest book of poetry Subversive Verse collects poems about corporate cruelty, gender grievances, supreme shambles, political perversion, and race relations. 

AD ASTRA

by Bradley McIlwain

“A new meteor shower sparked some celestial fireworks late Friday and early Saturday (May 23-24), amazing stargazers across North America even though it did not reach the spectacular "meteor storm" levels that some had hoped for.” Photo: A small Camelopardalid meteor streaks through the northern lights as the Milky Way shines overhead in this stunning photo by stargazer Gail Lamm from Balmoral, Manitoba in Canada on May 24, 2014. Credit: Gail Lamm   --Space.com, May 24, 2014

A wolf sings
out my back gate
where does he go
at four a.m.?

The undergrowth
is cool, calming.
Tonight, we are
both prey

to the sky gods,
hungry meteors
dripping from the
womb

a golden apple
waiting for the
sleeping hero
to awaken


Bradley McIlwain's poems have appeared in The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly, The Open Mouse, Platform Magazine (Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia) and in anthologies such as Love Notes: A Collection of Romantic Poetry from Vagabondage Press (2012) and The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly Vol. 2 (2013). His poems have previously appeared in The New Verse News.