THE BETRAYAL OF TIKKUN OLAM

by Beth Heller

art by Nina Bonos

To repair the world, they said,

was our duty and our privilege
and the reason for our continued existence
 
Israel was supposed to be
the place where this work was embodied
and my body was put to use in its garden
 
I carried water in buckets
My 15 year old arms reaching toward trees
planted in the name of hope

We looked across the border
into barren desert and felt pride
And this was the mistake

This pride in green fields on one side
and desert on the other
We thought it meant they didn’t care

or couldn’t do the hard work of growing
We thought we had the right
and the power

And that THEY did not
And that THEY only wanted bombs 
and rage
 
This pride is the killer
the border, the dividing line 
between right and wrong

When all we had to do was step over 
a nonexistent line in the sand
drawn by meddlers and offer a hand
 
Now it is too late
The healing has flipped to genocide 
in no other name than power
The thing that was planted
was hate
on both sides of the fence
 
Tikkun Olam is for all of us
A responsibility and
a privilege

And the path is a walk
through a rain of blood
nurturing nothing

Same as it ever was
in this desert where humanity
has wandered far too long
 
Blame us
Blame them
Blame everyone

Or not, but walk
Walk that path 
towards oasis

The one fountain
contained in our bodies
everywhere

The same blood pumps through all of us
The same blood stains the ground
on either side of the fence

The same blood
calls out for 
peace

Beth Heller’s poetry has appeared in a variety of chapbooks and anthologies, including those of the Austin International Poetry Festival, the Houston Poetry Fest, Wild Word: Poets of the Gunnison Valley, and Fools Court Press, Houston, as well as newspapers and journals such as the Mountain Gazette, Fungi Magazine, and most recently and after a decades-long absence from public poeming, Medicine for Minds & Hearts: a MycoAnthology of poems inspired by a love of mushrooms, Fungi Press.  She moves around but is currently nested in Western North Carolina

THE SEA CANNOT SPEAK FOR ITSELF

by Renée M. Schell

More than half of the world’s ocean has changed colors in the past 20 years, a phenomenon that is likely driven by climate change, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The study, which analyzes decades’ worth of satellite data, found that 56% of the global ocean—a territory larger than the total land area on Earth—experienced color change between 2002 and 2022. While the researchers didn’t identify an overall pattern, tropical ocean regions near the Equator seem to have become steadily greener over time. (Photo: Edoardo Fornaciari—Getty Images) —Time, July 13, 2023

Fifty-six percent has become green.

Can we still say azure ocean

or blue sea?

 

Now Aqua, the research satellite,

reflects back the lush color

of phytoplankton,

 

tells us with its seeing eye

that for the past twenty years the vast

waters of Earth have been changing 

color.

 

With chlorophyll out of balance,

how can our oceans,

the teeming gallons,

 

survive this attack?

Revert back?

 

 

Renée M. Schell’s debut collection Overtones was published in 2022 by Tourane Poetry Press. Her poetry appears in The New Verse News, Catamaran Literary Reader, Literary Mama, Naugatuck River Review, and other journals. In 2015 she was lead editor for the anthology (AFTER)life: Poems and Stories of the Dead. She taught for seven years at a Title I elementary school in San José, California. 

LET HER WEAR GREEN

by Tricia Knoll

Did the ‘Barbie’ Movie Cause a Pink Paint Shortage? The film recreates the famous doll’s brightly colored world—with the help of one specific shade of pink. —Smithsonian, June 8, 2023

Witness a shortage 

of pink paint

from the set design

of a Barbie movie. 

 

Let her wear green

for chlorophyll,

eco-warrior for a hurting

planet short on good sense

 

as cancer drugs are hard

to come by. This rainbow

month colors fly

 

on flagpoles and banners. 

I’m so sick of pink. The only

Barbie I have sits in a wheelchair;

she is a woman of color

 

beautiful color. 

Barbie Fashionistas Doll #166 With Wheelchair & Crimped Brunette Hair

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet well beyond Barbie years. Her work appears widely in journals, anthologies, and seven collections—the most recent being One Bent Twig (FutureCycle Press, 2023) which brings together poems about about trees she has planted, loved, or worries about due to climate change.

ALWAYS A POEM, JIMMY

by Indran Amirthanayagam 

The melanoma spread from

skin to liver to brain and

President Jimmy Carter

started to fall often, walking

in the peanut field, at church

on Sunday, at home. He wrote

Always A Reckoning. I wrote

The Elephants of Reckoning. 

We exchanged our reckonings

in 1997 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

I was assigned to the American

Embassy and sat down with Jimmy,

Rosalynn and Chip to talk

politics, health and environment.

The President visited to gather

facts in his fight against

river blindness, one of countless

maladies and challenges 

he dedicated his life to resolve. 

These included everything 

he faced as president—

hostages, recession, first steps

to making America green

and sustainable—and every 

election after as he traveled 

the world to observe their 

conduct, to help keep them 

safe and free. Jimmy Carter,

you walk blessed, a life 

of good deeds and 

harvests and fighting 

back against the blows, 

approaching a century, 

a marvel. Godspeed. 

Thank you again 

for the poetry.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

WHAT TO DO WITH MY DEAD BODY

by Lois Wickstrom

At his funeral, CJ looked as if he would sit up and laugh when he thought we had grieved enough. He wore his best suit and his best grin. But he never ate a bite of the food we brought. Nobody alive could have resisted that long. Nobody is that good at playing dead.

The casket, the rented hall. It’s all theater. Being dead doesn’t require props or an audience. When I’m dead I don’t want anybody to doubt it.

My mother was cremated, at the lowest priced place she could find in the yellow pages. My brother sprinkled her ashes beside one of her favorite mountain streams.

The smoke from cooking her dead body turned the air gray. I do not want my last act to be pollution.

At the green burial grounds, each corpse is wrapped in a shroud of cotton, and buried six feet under.

I like the idea of being eaten by worms. My corpse does not need a room of its own.

During the yellow fever, more than 10,000 bodies were piled up and buried together in what is now the parking lot where I worship. Being dead has not changed. Being buried means the same.

After embalming wears off, caskets corrode, and worms eat us, we will all become fertilizer.

Why wait?

As soon as I’m dead, throw my remains in the composter. Twirl the knob and spread my loam in the nearby woods. When all my organic parts have been consumed by new growth, layer new dead above me. And let them rot.

Lois is a former science teacher. She has written a series of science-based folktales, and turned some of them into plays. In each modernized tale, the protagonist achieves a better ending because of learning scientific principles. Lois likes to garden, ride her bike with her husband, cook, and she votes in every election.

LULA WINS!

by Indran Amirthanayagam

We have a chance

 

to reduce the burning and looting of the Amazon.

 

We have a chance

 

to support green technologies in one of the world's ten largest economies.

 

We have a chance

 

that the poor, the left out and the abused will have a champion again in the Alvorada Palace.

 

We have a chance

 

that a reasonable, negotiating left-of-center government will join hands with its neighbors and work towards climate justice and advancing human rights worldwide.

 

We have a chance

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

 

KNIFE

by Katherine Smith

(Ann Telnaes/The Washington Post)

I asked the apple tree

how can you live, knowing?

and the trees answered

scattering brown fruit for deer.

I asked the field sectioned off with black tarp

how can you live, knowing?

And the grass answered

cracking the sidewalk with green.

I asked the mother

how can you live, knowing?

And she answered

holding her child in her lap.

I asked the smiling family posing

with their guns, how can you live, knowing?

And they offered 

silent smiles glittering like knives.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

THIS IS MY DREAM IN GREEN

by Jean Varda

“Green Dream Painting” by Mykola Ampilogov

Cold bottomless water

transparent fish,

birds awaken with hesitant

flute like songs.

Walking in the evening down

graceful tree-lined streets,

soft rain falling all night,

where I breathe cool moisture

through a screened window.

This is my dream in green,

fireflies silently rising

above thick wet grass.

Not the brown sky of my home

with a faded pink pock a dot

for a sun.

Not sirens, helicopters, low flying planes

and a fire that has no end.

Deep moss green water lapping

on a muddy shore,

full rivers, lakes, ponds

bird song, ocean breeze.

Not four hundred miles of

spreading flames

fire fighters sweating in their gear

smoke so thick it looks like

night in the morning

a dark cloud rising

seen from the other end

of the continent

a desperate smoke signal for help.

 

Jean Varda is a poet living in Chico, California, not far from the Dixie fire. She has self-published six chapbooks of poetry. Been published in numerous literary magazines. Leads poetry writing workshops and has started open mics.

THIS IS NO TIME FOR SILENCE

by Katherine West

It is time to get up and do something
Time to make a flag and wave it
Not a banner of boundaries, not that tired old striped thing
Maybe an aspen sapling against a pure sky, lit

From above so it seems to pray
Maybe an image will sing louder than words
Something troubadour and chaste
Speaking quietly of return

Can we take it to a new world again?
Plant it on the beach, come in peace?
Can we make a second chance to begin
To turn the world green

Instead of blood red?
Or is this the end?


Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness, performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov, and teaches seasonal poetry workshops that revolve around "wilderness writing."  She has 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 Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and TheNewVerse.News  which recently nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize.

THE DAY THE CROWS CAME

by Susan Carlson

Crows by Mary Quite Сontrary

A crow floats past on level wings

noiselessly.

—D.H. Lawrence, "Winter-Lull"

You woke up dark.  Troubled by a murder
of crows, the ones that were circling our roof.

I was reading the New York Times, focused on words
flocked in columns, the orderly murmuration of print.

The world’s a scary place, sure, and worse
is today.  Of course I knew that, holding

as I was, so much of it right there in my hands.
But not enough for you.  You wanted to know

why we continue cruelly to evolve when there is enough
to eat.  Why does now have to be a harbinger flying

the foreboding flag of then?  I wanted you to leave me alone
in my Midwest nest where I am responsible and planned

to recycle the paper I was folding up, green citizen that I am, despite
refusing electronic notification of the state of our planet, its trees.

You refused your morning coffee, asked me to google what it means
when a place is centered in the silent swoop of level wings.

You made me watch them, those crows, made me wait for
their caw.  Look, you said, just look at the effort their occasional

intermittent conversation requires.  And when one came to rest
on a branch just long enough for me to see his brunette breast

compress with the quick bark of what he had to say that day –
I was compelled to hear it again.  And so we found ourselves

silence-bound beneath their somber wave.  All those crows folding above
ground, weighting our wait for what was to be a dire and dismal cry.


Susan Carlson lives, works, and writes in southeastern Michigan. She has attended workshops including Tin House, the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her poems have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Pretty Owl Poetry, The Literary Nest, The Other Journal, and Typishly, among other journals.

AND SO IT GOES

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer 

Dating back 40,000 years to the Denisovan species of early humans, new pictures show beauty and craftsmanship of prehistoric jewellery. It is intricately made with polished green stone and is thought to have adorned a very important woman or child on only special occasions. Yet this is no modern-day fashion accessory and is instead believed to be the oldest stone bracelet in the world, dating to as long ago as 40,000 years. Unearthed in the Altai region of Siberia in 2008, after detailed analysis Russian experts now accept its remarkable age as correct.  New pictures show this ancient piece of jewellery in its full glory with scientists concluding it was made by our prehistoric human ancestors, the Denisovans, and shows them to have been far more advanced than ever realised. 'The bracelet is stunning - in bright sunlight it reflects the sun rays, at night by the fire it casts a deep shade of green,' said Anatoly Derevyanko, Director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. —Anna Liesowska, The Siberian Times, May 7, 2015. Photo: Vera Salnitskaya

Thirty thousand years before the Stone Age,
someone made a bracelet of chlorite.
In the sun, the same sun that we know,
the bracelet glittered and reflected the rays.
In the night, just as dark and steep
as our night, the bracelet cast a deep shade
of green. Green, even then, was the color
of growth and new life. And the bracelet,
say the scientists, would have been worn
as protection from evil spirits. Not much has changed,
really, though the Denisovan people are long,
long gone from the caves in Siberia, gone
from the planet forever. But I think of how they,
like the homo sapiens, were moved
to make beauty. How they, too, perhaps stood
outside on a clear spring night
and felt the wind, the bright slap of the stars,
the possibility that art might save us.


Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer lives in Southwest Colorado. Her poems have appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion, in back alleys and on river rocks. One-word mantra: Adjust. 

THE GREEN CITY

by m.nicole.r.wildhood

Shell Arctic Drilling Fleet OK'd To Use 'Green' West Seattle Port. —KUOW.org, January 14, 2015

Boxes clickclack like LEGOS
escorted by confident cranes over
fragile veins to keep the whole world
up and racing.

The city, from their point of view
a sidebar, has enough year-round jade
for mercantile satiation
if only it were capital

and not growing things.
Traditionally, the city has guarded
all its life – it would rather
articulated bus jackknife all over the highway

than salt the roads during a snow
because of the tainted runoff
into the salmons’ stream.
This city that cares so much for its fish

is the same city that is making room
for an armada of royal oil drillers
to station among the blocks and birds.

Every green movement
can be whitewashed;
every commitment to fish
can be watered down.


m.nicole.r.wildhood is a Colorado native who has been living in Seattle – and missing the sun – since 2006.  She has been a saxophone player and registered scuba diver for over half her life.  In addition to blogging at http://megan.thewildhoods.com, she writes poetry, fiction and short nonfiction, which have appeared in The Sun, Lodestone and Ballard: A Journal of Street Poetry, ditchpoetry.com and Café Aphra.  She and her husband, who is gifted both as a structural engineer and as an artist, often collaborate on poetry/painting pieces.  She seeks to be an advocate for those experiencing mental and emotional suffering and celebrates the misfits, the non-conventional and the bold.

KNOWING THE GREAT UNKNOWN

by Laura Rodley

Can I keep an Aborigine
alive in the desert
where he can draw up water
from under the sand
if I recycle my cans
can I keep the leaves green
there in the desert
where even the lizards are parched
if I use less gas, change my oil
can I hold out my hand
across this great distance
if I only use the dryer at night
when electricity use is less
easier to trundle along the wires?
And can I carry you in my arms
through the desert when you have given up
past the kangaroos, errant camels,
if I plant more trees, their leaves
giving oxygen to you, to seep
into the desert air, invisible
but still there for you to breathe?
And if I keep my heat down,
will it bring you more water
underneath the sand where you
dip your straw to sip
while I carry you to my house
so I can lay you down;
I’m carrying you to my house
so I can lay you down.      

Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.

SPRING PEEPERS

by Martin Elster

Spring Peeper. Image source: Virginia Herpetological Society

Spring peepers trill and whistle in between
the avenue (where drivers rush toward shops),
construction site, the woods, the putting green.
No one stops to listen to these drops

of sentience small as buttercups and shrill
as piccolos. They hide amid the stalks
that rise up from a liquid eye as still
as a spyglass pointed at the equinox,

Unblinking for eternity. The first
of April. The environs dance and ring
with notes from frogs who, though they’re unrehearsed,
belt out a song precisely tuned to spring.

These lusty soon-to-be inamoratos,
iconic crooning harbingers, will soon
be silent. You who ride inside your autos,
roll down the windows! Do not wait till June!

Martin Elster, author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens!, is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in such journals as Astropoetica, The Flea, The Martian Wave, The Rotary Dial, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan. Martin’s poem, “Walking With the Birds and the Bones Through Fairview Cemetery” received first prize in the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition 2014.

STIFLING HEAT

by Laura Rodley


This poem is going to cool you off
no jumping into a bathtub
full of ice cubes, no witch hazel
drenched in sheets
across your chest, no rapid
heartbeat of starlings, your heart
beating, siphoning air,
it is this poem rubbing
the dripping condensation
of its long green bottle
against your forehead,
gurgling down your throat
when thirsty; you tip the poem
up to drink.  It is this poem,
its ice cubes set between
your breasts, its shorts
that you are wearing, pink madras
cotton with only one slim zipper
the halter top that matches;
feel the soft cotton against
your skin, run the cool green
bottle of the poem
against your arms,
drink it, drink slowly,
make it last.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.