ONE EYE, ALWAYS

by Paula J. Lambert

Dame Maggie Smith died
the same night Hurricane Helene swept through
the American South, which means nothing
except that our hearts can be broken
so many different ways. Eight people died
in Acapulco from Hurricane John.
Eric Adams pleaded not guilty
while the still-rushing waters flooded 
through Asheville, North Carolina. It’s a break 
from all the news elsewhere. That’s how we roll, 
unable to keep more than three or four or five 
catastrophes foremost in our minds. Breaking news 
splinters our brains by the second: Gaza, Ukraine, 
the guy who wants to be president again 
finagling himself into the worst of it,
one outrageous claim after another
designed to keep our tail lights spinning: 
T-boned by the news. Whiplashed 
while so many suffer the slings and arrows 
of the most benign living: sprained wrists, 
a broken tooth, kids not doing their homework, 
pot roast simmered dry when Mother forgot, again, 
she had something on the stove. Who’s taking her in—
or shouldering the blame for sending her away?
When the flood waters rise (they’re always rising)
we tend to what we must. When the waters recede,
we turn to the Dames, the Denzels,
to Sandra Bullock and the Great British bakers
to keep ourselves going, one step at a time,
one eye, always, toward the drought.

Paula J. Lambert of Columbus, Ohio, has published several collections of poetry including As If This Did Not Happen Every Day (Sheila-Na-Gig 2024) and Uncertainty (The Only Hope We Have) (Bottlecap 2023). Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

PAEAN TO AUTUMN

by Earl J. Wilcox

Whitman manuscript at Duke University Libraries.

None would have believed last fall—

a serene, simple season of coolish

weather, baseball season winding

down, tailgating, leaf peeping,

early frosts all—sublime memories

of a time before now: wildfires, 

hurricanes, Covid deaths, floods, 

earthquakes, melting ice caps, 

hummingbirds astray and lost,

migrant camps afire, baseball

season so bizarre even umpires

get the blues. We need more

Whitmans, fewer Plaths, a couple

of Frosts, a seashore Oliver. 

Even an old-fashioned Wordsworth

or Shelley might spirit us away

toward winter already on its way

on this first week of autumn.

Earl J. Wilcox has sung his share of September songs.

DOTS OF TOWNS MONTHS AFTER HURRICANES HARVEY AND IRMA

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

Storm-damaged Rockport, Texas homes are seen in this Sunday, Aug. 25, 2017 aerial photo. Mortgage delinquency rates soared in September and October in many of the coastal and other cities flooded by Harvey, including Houston, Beaumont and Corpus Christi, according to new data from real estate analytics company CoreLogic. —San Antonio Express-News, January 15, 2018

of course, there will be long, massive work
for big names like
houston and miami    however rubble
is also rubble in the dots of towns
with their downed trees and power lines
roofs sheared off   walls that caved
these are the invisible ones living between and around bigness
dots of towns in a litany of counties
               that lost schools, citrus groves, hole in the wall cafes
               that didn’t make the news
               the question now
               will the police officers, librarians, butchers, teachers and bakers  go elsewhere
               or will they like some of the volunteer firemen decide to stay
               after all, this is where we grew up
               our children were born
               and where we go to church
               the dots of town must dig deep
               among the rubble for their just reason for staying

Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a poet, writer, and spiritual director. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News. Her first book of poetry was entitled she: robed and wordless. Sister Lou Ella lives 45 minutes from Rockport, Texas, one of the small towns devastated by Hurricane Harvey that may never recover.

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.

A STORM IN A TEACUP

by Alina Rios

Storm by Juliana Coutinho

Darkness dances
at the bottom of my tea cup,
darker than my Earl Grey amber—
a storm if you read the signs.

The Getty shuts its eyes to the fire-
and-smoke-breathing beast
awakened by Santa Anas.

A man on a bridge in Kentucky
takes his life to the chorus of #metoos
kept silent too long.

A madman at the wheel
of my adopted country’s beat-up bus
drives through hurricanes
and political theater, losing people,
as if the bus’s bottom were his hands,
child’s clumsy hands,
and we’re sand flowing through
into the anonymous
forever of the beach.

Nobody sleeps. Or
nobody sleeps well.
We wake in the night
from dreams of buildings falling,
weapon-wielding children, dead-ends.

The air is electric, Christmas cheer
not a match for it.
If you’re awake, you know. The crows know.
They gather murders over the Capitol.

My tea is cold and darker now.
I drink it up.


Alina Rios is an immigrant and a dreamer. She spent the first part of her life in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now lives in Seattle with her 9-year old son and a ghost-cat. Her poetry has appeared in CrossWinds Poetry Journal, Camroc Press Review, Rust and Moth, and other fine places. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Bracken Magazine.

SWAMP POEM

a sonnet by Cindy Hochman

Add caption

Throw your old comb & hairbrush into the swamp.
Throw your hamper full of dirty laundry into the swamp.
Throw that bad poem you wrote this morning into the swamp.
Throw your shattered-after-the-breakup heart into the swamp.
Throw your mother-in-law into the swamp.
Throw your cataracts, your ulcers, your tumors into the swamp.
Throw war and all its symbols into the swamp.
Throw all Rebel statues, from Virginia to Alabama, into the swamp.
Throw the lawyers, the bailiffs, the judges, and the guilty defendants into the swamp.
Throw the press secretary and her podium of mendacity into the swamp.
Throw the rolled heads of recently departed staffers into the swamp.
Throw the hurricanes’ fallen branches, and the West Wing’s executive branch,
  and the Great Lawn with its Easter Egg Roll and pardoned turkeys into the swamp.
And the president, that no-goodnik, into the fetid, putrid, malodorous, stinking swamp.


Cindy Hochman is the president of "100 Proof" Copyediting Services and the editor-in-chief of the online poetry journal First Literary Review-East. She is on the book review staffs of Pedestal magazine and Clockwise Cat. Her latest chapbook is Habeas Corpus (Glass Lyre Press).

MOTHER EARTH

by Scot Siegel

Image source: America By the Numbers

Record snowfall in Australia.
Record wildfires across the west.
Record hurricanes and floods
Batter the Gulf, and bear down
On the Eastern Seaboard. In Texas
A preacher locks a door. Loss of
Permafrost in the Arctic, and don't
Ignore that rift across Antarctica.
105° in San Francisco. Smoke
On the coast so thick you can't breathe.
The president wants a wall. No,
He wants a garbage chute. Dreamers
Have no place in this country. Christ,
They have no place at all. Who are
The Dreamers? What does it mean
To dream? God, it makes me want to stop
Cursing, and get some religion.
The real kind. God, anytime now.


Scot Siegel, Oregon poet and city planner, is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems (2016) and Thousands Flee California Wildflowers (2012), both from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. His poetry is part of the permanent art installation along the Portland, Oregon Light Rail Transit ‘Orange Line.’