FEMA AND MY DEAD PARENTS

by William Aarnes

FEMA was authorized in 1979

 

Lately, it seems raging storms have gotten worse

and the news about people hunting FEMA agents

has me thinking of my parents, my father

dead six years before FEMA got funded,

my mother dead ten years after FEMA

began helping clean up Love Canal.

My mother voted Republican.

My father voted Democrat.

                        

When our house blew away in 1957,

FEMA didn’t exist, so my parents

                              

had no thought of receiving $750

to help them recover from our loss.

The window wells filled in a millisecond.

Lifted out of the garage, the Bel Air landed in the front yard.

Somehow the piano stood alone in the living room.

Only my bedroom retained all its walls.

                              

Neighbors we barely knew and lived

—their home untouched—a block away

offered a place to sleep (as if my parents slept).

The day after a volunteer van arrived, women

dressed as nurses offering to sell

egg-salad sandwiches. I was ten

and now don’t recall how long

it took my parents to contact

their insurance agent. The tornado

left us little. Picking through debris

my parents laughed empty laughs.

They could do nothing else but rent

an apartment while having our home rebuilt.

They could have used $750

(or whatever the equivalent

might have been back then). My mother

would have hated taking a “handout”

but would have claimed a little extra

as “rightfully” ours. My father

would have diligently filled out the forms

to apply for any additional funds

a federal agency might grant

to help cover some of any shortfall.

My mother, worried about her brothers’ farms,

continued to vote Republican. My father, in favor

of teachers’ unions, kept on voting Democrat.

If alive now, my mother wouldn’t understand

the telling and repeating of hateful lies.  

If alive, my father wouldn’t mind, too much,

being told he tends to condescend.

My mother would now vote for candidates

who support tax breaks for small businesses.

My father would vote for candidates

who support improving ventilation in every school.

They’d agree to give something to Planned Parenthood.

There’s rubble and there’s rubble; they’d agree

to contribute to the children in the Ukraine and Gaza.

They’d worry about where best to donate hurricane relief.

My parents would have welcomed FEMA’s help.

But lately, it seems, raging storms have gotten worse.

William Aarnes lived in Fargo, North Dakota in 1957. He now lives in Manhattan.

EYE OF MILTON

by Jennifer Davis Michael

O Hell, hello, an O of grief:

the eye of Hurricane Milton 

spends its wide wrath,

darkening the world.

Climatology a talent

useless against false shepherds

swollen with profane wind.

 

Once the blind poet

rose from the pool of Styx,

invoking holy light

to flood his song. “Blind mouths,” 

he called those sham prophets

while he still had sight.

The contrary: the muteness of an eye.

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks, both from Finishing Line Press: Let Me Let Go (2020) and Dubious Breath (2022). Her poem "Forty Trochees" was selected by Rachel Hadas for the Frost Farm Prize in Metrical Poetry (2020). She has published several poems previously in The New Verse News.

CAROLINA WRENS

by Clay Steakley

The second day of October.

Thickets of Carolina Wrens

Singing the song called Home.

The mountain towns paved

With floodwash, heaps of silt, 

Deathly mass of wayward trees.

Red maple, Yellow poplar.

Those remaining will pennant

The air in time for the funerals.

The Carolina Wren is small-bodied

And big-voiced. The Carolina Wren is

June Carter singing Wildwood Flower

Ginger lily, goldenrod, and aster.

Red chainsaws, yellow backhoes.

Brown water. Everything is brown water.

A safety-vest-orange maple leaf

On a dark casket is an easy image,

But that makes it no less real.

The Carolina Wren is a plain thing.

Unadorned, like this writing,

But overspilling with living.

Where is a town when it has

Been washed downstream?

It is in the people sharing meals.

Cool in the mornings,

Cool in the nights.

Wrens sing the song called Home.

Clay Steakley is a writer, musician, filmmaker, and theatre artist. His work has been published alongside Aimee Bender’s and Lauren Groff’s in Slake, as well as in Cathexis Northwest Press, Fiction Fix, From the Depths, and Waxing & Waning. He was a finalist for a PEN Emerging Voices Fellowship, and received the Ruby P. Treadway award for creative writing. He was a 2020/21 OZ Arts Art/Porch Art Wire Fellow. Clay's current project is The Fire Cycle, a multidisciplinary collection of poetry, music, film, and visual art. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

IMAGINE WANTING TO LIVE

by Kristin Yates

So much you break 

the windows of your home

with the blunt force 

of your will 

to live—

though the house treads water,

and devastation 

like a muddy choke surrounds you 

where your life, your loved ones, used 

to breathe—

imagine wanting to live

so much—

you crawl to the roof

and you hunch

and you hold

and you wait

and you watch

and you wonder

how many bodies

human

nonhuman

dead

almost dead

are cremated 

in the flood’s current

and you pray to your will to live 

and you pray to the storm

and you pray to tomorrow

to let you       live,

please

let me      live. 

If you look close enough 

on the roof of any storm, 

you’ll find 

someone who wants         to live. 

Kristin Yates is an award-winning poet, artist, cat cuddler, and work in progress from Lewisville, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in Tiny Seed Journal, Beyond the Veil Press, Writerly Magazine, Unstamatic, Campfire Poets, Scavengers, Green Ink Poetry, Last Leaves Magazine, and others.

A WEEK AFTER YET ANOTHER CYANOBACTERIA WATCH ON THE LAKE

by Carla Schwartz

Above: ongoing map of cyanobacteria watches and warnings in Lake Winnipesaukee and other New Hampshire Lakes. Cyanobacteria is a natural part of freshwater ecosystems. But under the right conditions, it can grow too much and cause harmful blooms. Those can produce toxins that are harmful to people, pets, and wildlife, causing symptoms that range from nausea and rashes to muscle paralysis. Ted Diers, the head of the water division at New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services, says people should use good judgment when swimming or letting their pets swim. “If you see an area that looks particularly gross, that has a lot of green stuff in the water, you know, you may not want to jump in the water right there,” he said. —NHPR, August 30, 2024

It’s been days since I’ve been here, where the weather is cooling, swum 
here, a dish left on the counter, encrusted with old breakfast. I step outside. 
The sun, bright. The wind bites my skin. It’s a strong wind with harsh gusts 
thrusting leaves, acorns a-scatter, but I suit up for the cool, tap on my music, 
and step out onto my paddle board to face what the lake presents: a disorganized 
wind, flags pointing where they shouldn’t—into the forecast direction rather 
than against. I paddle with and against the swirling wind. I can’t help think about 
Francine, the latest named storm, drawing its strength from the warm gulf waters
as I ignore the chill wind and slide off my board, leashed to my ankle, to swim. 
I take off against the current, waves wanting to turn my body, to go where I hadn’t 
intended, so every so often I check my bearings to unstray. You might think I swim 
for punishment, punishment for not working the booths for the vote, for not 
dragging people’s asses out to vote, for not acknowledging there’s this hurricane
mounting in the gulf, building toward crescendo tomorrow to crash the Louisiana 
shore, and there will be one more and another and another unless we temper 
the warm waters, but I continue on my swim, not punishment, but passion,
to stroke against the waves, to keep myself from swallowing what the climate 
has begun to spoil, to keep myself afloat.

Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in The Practicing Poet and in her collections Signs of Marriage, Mother, One More Thing, and Intimacy with the Wind. Learn more at  https://carlapoet.com, or on all social media @cb99videos.

SONG FOR A SOUCOUYANT

by Geoffrey Philp

Hurricane Beryl has ripped across the Caribbean with winds of 150mph tearing roofs from buildings, uprooting trees and devastating the islands in its path. —BBC, July 4, 2024. Souvouyant graphic via The Compendium of Arcane Beasts and Critters.

It was only a glancing blow, they said, when Beryl wrapped her arms around the island's spine, pinning us inside our home, avocadoes pelting our roof whose nails barely held against the howls that tore blossoms off the naseberries nestled in the dried gully, which became a river before she overturned fishing boats and ripped houseboats from their moorings. And all the while, she wailed like a Soucouyant, drowning our prayers, leaving us knee-deep in the storm surge, the floods, as boulders tumbled down the mountains into islands of leafless mangroves, the briny odor clinging to my hair. 

coiled at the center 

of the hurricane's fury:

 screams of Africans 

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 is working on a children’s book, Marsha: The Mangrove Guardian, and is anticipating the release of his graphic novel My Name is Marcus on September 15, 2024.

LAST WEEK, WHEN IT RAINED

by Alice Campbell Romano

This river savaged my neighbor

poured six feet of water into his basement

water higher than his head

In another house

and another

and another

she slopped up onto the first floor,

onto the boards

onto the rugs

ruthless

No sooner did one neighbor

finish his repairs

after the hurricane—

seventy-five thousand dollars—

than the river

bulged,

swelled,

pooled,

in every room,

floated

his new furniture,

gurgled and laughed

and rose up outside to cover cars

parked on the street

And down the street on the corner

the whole corner is lined with everything

the family who lives in the house on the corner

has to throw away

chairs, a sofa, bookcases, baby beds, cabinets,

whatever was contained in the cabinets,

why name them all? Everything stored

until a time when the family would agree on

what to sell and when, and now there’s nothing but

mush and melted glue and sog.

The river today winks and scintillates

under the bridge, well between her banks

while a few early autumn leaves ride her ripples.

Am I not beautiful, she whispers.

Alice Campbell Romano lived a dozen years in Italy where she adapted Italian movie scripts into English, married a dashing Italian movie-maker, made children, and moved with the family to the U.S., where they built, she wrote, and the children grew. Her poems have appeared in—among other venues—Prometheus Dreaming, Persimmon Tree, Pink Panther Magazine, Orchards Poetry, New Croton Review; Beyond Words, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Quartet Journal, Instant Noodles Devil's Press, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press. In January, she was awarded HONORABLE MENTION in The Comstock Review's 2022 Chapbook contest, "...not an award that we give every year, but an honor set aside for a few manuscripts." Alice swooned. 

AQUAMARINE

by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried

Smoke billows as wildfires destroy a large part of the historic town of Lahaina.

Associate with me—

an aquamarine ring gifted to me

on my seventh birthday. Years later,

a family trip to an island few could

name. Water off the island the same

color as my ring. Pelicans dive-bombing 

for fish in the bay. On the path to dinner, 

no electric light—stars flung on black.

Now tout le monde, and hurricanes like nuclear 

bombs, know this island and every 

paradise you ever loved. I want to resize 

my ring and slip it on my finger, but

it will change nothing.

Jacqueline Coleman-Fried is a poet living in Tuckahoe, NY. Her work has appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, pacificREVIEW, Topical Poetry, Quartet Journal, and soon, Consequence and HerWords magazine.

LIKE A HURRICANE

by Mary K O’Melveny

She blew in like a Hurricane

A river deep    A mountain high

 

She ditched Ike   Took over the mike

Blew our minds   Broke our hearts

 

Tina Turner knew first hand 

What love’s got to do with it

 

She told us what we needed

Knew what we wanted

 

Tina stamped her feet   Released her hips  

Danced like unleashed wind

 

She defied age   Demanded respect

Broke the rules   Exposed the fools

 

Tina wore Stiletto heels   Spangled dresses

Split sexy skirts    Spiky blonde hair

 

She even taught Mick Jagger

How to dance   swivel   shake

 

Tina shouted loud   Made us proud

Said we’d better be good to her

 

She will keep on like a Hurricane   

Turning    Burning   Churning  

 

Tina was our Queen of Rock ‘n Roll 

Simply the best   Better than all the rest

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

STORM NUMBER 9: IDA, 2021

by Rose M. Smith

Sun., Aug. 29: Hurricane Ida is seen in this image taken aboard the International Space Station. The image was shared on European Space Agency astronaut and Expedition 65 crew member Thomas Pesquet's Twitter account, as the storm churned in the Gulf of Mexico ahead of its landfall. ESA/NASA

Mother, they say you are the hurricane

bearing down on our Gulf Coast this weekend

whirling      mad      anomaly full of rain and wind

scream a long assault against any who list

attendant fury tearing down light post    tree    wall

drowning masses who fail to heed your warning

I became a cistern full of tears    wretched 

war torn      homeless      arms outstretched

when I heard them call you Ida

as though    so quiet in your living

you found in death freedom to be whirlwind

demand your choices known

Rose M. Smith lives in Central Ohio near a short stretch of woods.  Her work has appeared in Blood and Thunder, Origins Journal, Passager, The Examined Life, Snapdragon, and other journals and anthologies. She is author of Unearthing Ida (Glass Lyre Press, 2019) which won the 2018 Lyrebird Prize. She is an Editor with Pudding Magazine, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Cave Canem fellow.