AIR QUALITY ALERT

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

The National Weather Service has issued an air quality alert for Aug. 11-12 for multiple northern Michigan counties because of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. —Lansing State Journal, August 10, 2025

We’re in charge of so little. Less than an acre; a cat. Clearing debris from the street drain. The few things we control are so inconsequential, no one cares. Not even us. Take my lungs. Please. Take Canadian wildfire smoke. Their wilderness makes civilization  hard. Even deer here in Michigan wear masks. How do they get them on?  Last week, we found out we were made of plastic. Today particulate matter is coating our lungs with Teflon. Silver Beach is like the bottom of an ashtray half full of gin. Haze, the weather man says, trying to fool the tourists. Maple/bacon smoke rolls in, a plague from the Northwest, but we are so far gone, its smell only makes us hungry.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

MUSE IN ALFALFA FIELDS

by David Spicer

I roar through Utopia in my steroid
Chevy, cram a baguette in this gorge
of a mouth, a poster boy for broccoli
haters, climbing Hesitation Hill
to the cliff. I’ve declared myself
a winner, the empire below,
the valley with the ultimate prizes—
ruler of this huge county, thousands
following me, migrating to Utopia
to work for me, and women who
think I’m a sweetheart, holding
daisies’ secrets—and I’ve decided this
is the time: I can’t be their gatekeeper
because the face in the cracked mirror
no longer listens to reason, I’m tired
of spewing poison spit from my
darkened haze. No longer a cinch
to win, tired of foes who ruffle
my ego, I’m leaving the keys
in the ignition and detaching the bicycle
from the Chevy’s roof to hop on a nut
cruncher of a seat, riding to the beach
in the rain. Maybe one day I’ll hop back
on the train, but until then, take a tip
from me: when work stops being a gas,
it’s time to muse in alfalfa fields
and disappear to another county.
Not in this dream, you gullible lemmings.

David Spicer has had poems in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,  Gargoyle, Mad Swirl, Reed Magazine, Slim Volume, TheNewVerse.News, The Laughing Dog, In Between Hangovers,  Easy Street, Ploughshares, Bad Acid Laboratories, Inc., Dead Snakes, and in the anthologies Silent Voices: Recent American Poems on Nature (Ally Press, 1978), Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing From Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), and A Galaxy of Starfish: An Anthology of Modern Surrealism (Salo Press, 2016). He has been nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net, is the author of one full-length collection of poems, Everybody Has a Story (St. Luke's Press, 1987), and four chapbooks. He is also the former editor of Raccoon, Outlaw, and Ion Books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee.