WARNING

by Jacob Richards

Dangerous air today
they say,
as if i could hold my breath
or turn back the industrial revolution.

Dangerous air today.
Forests burn all around us
old growth turned sunlight 
into sugars
a strange alchemy
now turning sugars into 
a carbon haze
and air quality alerts.

Dangerous air today.
An “I-told-you-so moment”
if only I could catch my breath.
Ed Abbey laughing–
he tried to warn us–
that we were falling and not flying.

Our fears lulled by PR firms 
and impossibly cheap plastic baubles.
“Please put your seat and tray into the full and upright positions.” 
Falling not flying.
Dangerous air today.
Red flag warning,
no burns,
red-eyes
impossible heat.

Dangerous air today. 
Can’t see the mountains–
might as well live in Kansas–
a long nothing.
Without mountains
how can one tell which way is north?
The cardinal directions
are all mashed potatoes–
featureless like a cartoon heaven–
a special kind of hell.

Dangerous air today.
People breath it in
and hate–
as if
that will clear the skies.

Jacob Richards is a writer, editor, activist, and wilderness guide in Western Colorado.

GRAY HAZE

by Mark Danowsky

Smoke from wildfires in provinces of Ontario and Quebec in Canada made Philadelphia’s iconic Belmont Plateau skyline nearly invisible on June 7, 2023. (Kimberly Paynter/WHYY)

The classic way to 

explain asthma

Imagine:

breathing through a straw 

Now, picture flipping burgers

on a charcoal grill

Today, that charcoal grill

is the sky

Endless red coals burning 

up in Canada 

No, Canada is the grill

400+ fires burning

Half of them

Out of control

The smoke has traveled

down to The States

Today, Pennsylvania sky

is an unnatural gray 

A gray that embodies

burnt rubber 

Now, imagine

that straw in your mouth

Imagine trying to breathe  

this burnt rubber air

All this gray 

filling your lungs

Cigarette after cigarette 

with no reward 

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of Meatless (Plan B Press) and other short poetry collections. His poems have been curated in many journals including Alba, The New Verse News, anti-heroin chic, Right Hand Pointing, The Broadkill Review, Otoliths, and Gargoyle. 

FIRE SEASON

by Laton Carter

Smoke turns the morning light orange on Saturday in this photo taken near the Huckleberry Lookout, provided by the Cedar Creek Fire Incident Command. Credit: Cedar Creek Fire Incident Command via InciWeb and OPB, September 12, 2022

It is not that fire is snow. It is not even

that falling ash is snow. The sky

 

is stunned, swallowed

by a yellow glove whose palm

 

opens to haze and drifting filament. Burned

bodies, trees that pursed their mouths, that

 

refused to gasp or cry, handrails that melted, that

obeyed the persistence of time, they are

 

floating. (Floating only appears directionless.)

Summer is winter. Hold up your hand. In winter

 

no one answers. It is not that snow

is winter. Breathe in. Your lips, your throat,

 

your lungs. Prepare yourself.

Floating is not a weightless task.

 

Crucible,

blind pilot, un-

yielding conflagration.

Laton Carter's Leaving (University of Chicago Press) received the Oregon Book Award. His writing also appears in Indiana Review, Narrative, and Split Lip Magazine.

IN THE ASH

by Sandy Sortwell Makau

Flames from the Glass Fire consume Chateau Boswell Winery. St. Helena, CA, September 27, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020. 

Burned remains float over the mountain ridge, houses, old cars, furniture and dreams, reconfigured into gray soot, travel to the valley floor on the wings of scattered ash to rest on my back porch.

The air quiet, oppression settles on every surface a reminder of the fire’s distant destruction, how lives suddenly transform from hope, to fire, to smoke, to ash.

Trapped in my air tight house surrounded by a white fog of smoke; its haze deceives me. Through my kitchen window, I see a cloudy winter day until I open the door, the smoke bullies me with its toxic fumes, it taunts me with the threat of more fire to come, saying to me ‘maybe when the wind changes tonight I will come for you too.’

I walk across the porch, the wind billows swirling like a desert windstorm trying to lift. My footsteps sink into the ash like freshly fallen snow making a path barren and gray. The destination unknown.

The mountaintop has shown me its sadness in the ash today.

Sandy Sortwell Makau lives in Butte County, California–30 minutes from both the Paradise 2018 Camp Fire and this years Bear Fire above the town of Oroville. She is surrounded by fires nearby in northern California, in southern California, and across the border in Oregon. Friends of hers have lost everything in these fires. She is a freelance writer and poet.

ASH

by Katrinka Moore

Smoke rises over a vineyard as the Glass Fire burns. Calistoga, CA, September 28, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020.

Slow-dying ash    still mostly

thick and green    though now                        

the leaves are yellowing                                 

 

The high bare limbs     a haunt

of choice for goldfinches    who

facing east     warble as the sun

 

appears     a deep red sphere    

crosses the sky shrouded

in haze     Come night                        

 

the stars and even Jupiter

are dim     Three thousand

miles away     wildfires

 

rage another morning     Here   

bright singing birds    the glow

of early     color-shifting     fall

Katrinka Moore's latest book is Wayfarers. She lives in Schoharie County, NY.

BREATH OF DAMNATION

by Phyllis Klein

Plenty of people in The City, including this man walking on Market Street, donned a mask Friday due to bad air quality as smoke from the Camp Fire in Northern California drifts down into the Bay Area 2018. (Kevin N. Hume/S.F. Examiner, November 10, 2018)

After the fire fractures its invisible
borders, the air going south becomes
a death powder. The Anna’s hummingbirds,

white-breasted nuthatches, the western
meadowlarks all disappear as if the atmosphere
pushes them indoors. Ominous vapors grab

oranges on their bushes with fingers visible
as ghosts in a dimly lit room. The sun, our lady
of perpetual light, glares down through a haze,

murky blue. Nothing wet. Or shiny. The dirt
tries to move, no wind, no dust, only rocklike
rusty brown with cracks.  Everyone knows this

feeling, a drought, field drained of water,
perdition place of nightmares. Here it is: our
dread of Hades, right outside the window, real

enough to taste, to smell.

Phyllis Klein writes, lives, and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Silver Birch Press, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, TheNewVerse.News, Chiron Review, Portside, and Sweet, a Literary Confection. She also has poems forthcoming in I-70 and 3Elements. She believes in artistic dialogue as an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. And the healing power of anything as beautiful as poetry.

HAZE IN THE AIR

by Jayne Marek

Image source: CTV News Vancouver

morning sky furred by a pale layer so the sun is deep orange
sailor take warning          firefighter take warning

a layer so thin it passes over the Strait like hands giving blessing
but five miles distant          there is no more island

heat even in the northlands begins to rise to spread
to reach inside          where breath scrapes one’s throat

there is so much dried to a crust so anguished and tight
it resists water that could save it          it will shed

the chemicals of desperation in the gray understory
of neglected woods          it will begin to die

all by itself even without the fire stringing its way underneath
the bones of grass          the shattered nests

of starved quail and under the lost tooth of a coyote
that could no longer run          death of the hunter

death of the stands of cedar and fir of alder and salal
death to us all          take up the shovel

and begin to dig a fire line not yet needed on this acre
but what fell from human grasp          will soon blow here

Jayne Marek’s first full-length poetry book is In and Out of Rough Water. Her poetry and art photos appear in About Place Journal, 3Elements, Sin Fronteras, Notre Dame Review, Sliver of Stone, Spillway, Tipton Poetry Journal, Central American Literary Review, and elsewhere.

IT IS DRIZZLING HEAT

by Martin Willitts Jr

NEW DELHI—The death toll from the blistering heat wave in India exceeded 2,000 on Sunday as weather officials said the sweltering conditions would persist for another four or five days. —WSJ, May 31, 2015

It was ninety degrees with humidity topping a hundred,
and the heat felt atrocious
until reading it was one hundred and twenty-two in India
where the roads had melted.

Here the haze was merely white blossoms of agony,
and the residue of moisture disappears before forming.
In India, their minds must have been cooking
and their eyes must feel like frying while sleeping.

Some politician denies climate change
and car tires in India explode overheating.
Somewhere night promises more heat for tomorrow.
Politicians must have air conditioners hearts.

The angry god of furnaces depletes water to bone.
Somewhere a rich person wonders about the fuss.
Comparatively speaking, I have it good to India.
Politicians have assured me heat is my imagination.


Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian. His poems have appeared in Blue Fifth Review, Stone Canoe, Centrifugal Eye, The New Verse News, and others. He has 8 full length collections of poetry and over 20 chapbooks including his social issue chapbook City Of Tents (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2014). His forthcoming full length collection, God Is Not Amused What You Are Doing In Her Name (Aldrich Press) should cause a ruckus or two.