WILDFIRE SMOKE AND A WALK IN THE WOODS

by Katy Z. Allen

“What the Newest Research on Wildfire Smoke Tells Us.” —The New York Times, August 16, 2026 

people are exposed to more toxins…damaging lungs…brains…other organs

entering the woods wondering about teshuvah–return, repair, restart,

welcomed by a tufted titmouse repeating peter-peter-peter

and two great blue herons with 6-foot wing spans taking flight

 

PM2.5…measured by air quality indexes…other substances…lead, mercury, formaldehyde

walking steadily, trees newly fallen join so many already decaying

quickly replaced by new growth vying for space

away from the road, the woods quiet save for a steady hum of crickets,

the call of a nuthatch, the squeal of a catbird, the hammering of a woodpecker

sounds of machinery in the distance

in populated areas…especially toxic…fires…consume…buildings, vehicles, electronics

suddenly a patch of blackberries, but I walk on, for I didn’t come to the woods to pick,

but irrepressible desire overcomes, I turn around and pick enough for my granola,

until the loss of my lid’s container and my memory of what I did with it

pierce my delight and set me to questioning and despairing of myself

wildfire smoke and …cardiovascular hospitalizations, diabetes complications, preterm birth, cancer, impaired cognition, respiratory effects

the steady rhythm of my walking restores my wellbeing

as I think of ancient sages meditating an hour before prayer,

focusing so intently, even a snake crawling up their leg would go unnoticed,

and far that I am from that degree of connection, still I stop for prayer, 

accompanied by the chirping of a chipmunk and the chattering of distant birds

no amount of smoke exposure …isn’t harmful…using masks and air filters more frequently

rising from prayer ready to complete my walk and enter the day, 

I carry with me new understanding of the potential pitfalls 

of physical desire and action taken too soon,

as I continue to contemplate teshuvah in the face of global crisis

best way to mitigate risks…to prevent catastrophic fires…addressing the root cause:…climate change

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, poet, retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, former healthcare chaplain, and co-founder of a Jewish climate organization. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as The New Verse News, Amethyst Review, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, The Soliloquist Journal and Art on the Trails: Number 9. She was awarded Honorable Mention in The Prose Poem’s 2025 Prose Poetry Competition, and her book, A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text was published by Strong Voices Publishing. 

ONCE AGAIN REALITY

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Source: Puzzle Warehouse

Once again reality

Has collided with fantasy.

Once again the truth

About America

Has crashed into 

Our pretty beliefs

About the basic goodness

Of our nation under God.

And once again 

All the old cliches

Will be hauled out—

“Sure, we’re not perfect,

We make mistakes sometimes,

But at the end of the day

We’re still lucky to be living

In the Land of the Free

The Home of the Brave

From Sea to Shining Sea

Amen.”

And little by little

Memory of the latest grotesque injustice

Will fade.

We will go to the movies,

Watch the Super Bowl,

Have dinner with friends,

Take our kids to the park,

And recede back into 

The collective dream

Of America the Good.

And we will be shocked 

All over again

The next time a cop murders a black kid,

The next time a governor

Poisons a whole city with contaminated water,

The next time a hospital 

Throws an indigent patient 

Out onto the street,

The next time

A vigilante gets away with murder.

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals.  His most recent book is At the Driveway Guitar Sale: Poems on Aging, Memory, Mortality, from Main Street Rag Publishers.  He podcasts poems on aging at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife, Cynthia, in northern California.

HOURS OF LEAD

by Susan Gubernat

                                                            This is the Hour of Lead –

                                                            Remembered, if outlived… Emily Dickinson

Lead that grazes the mouth of a child, bloodies her.

Lead she drinks down from her little cup of water.

Lead spewed at one another instead of spit

(though the spit too finds its target).

Lead they load, reload, load, reload

Lead soaring like an earthbound bird emboldened

by flight. Lead sinking to the bottom of a pan

boiling away on a kitchen fire. But can

a mother ever make the bath safe again?

As lead rains hard, can she throw her body in 

the path of the boy being eyed by lead,

stalked by lead, prey to the beast of lead?

The lead in the man’s pockets weighs him 

down like coins he thinks he must spend

to grow lighter. He pans the river for lead,

curses crowds with his shower of lead.

Underground, the dark pipes groan with lead.

Above, the air clamps shut with a seam of lead.

O lead, where is thy sting? There

and there and there.            Here. 

Susan Gubernat’s latest book The Zoo at Night won the Prairie Schooner Book Award from the University of Nebraska Press. Her work has appeared in many publications. She lives and works in the SF Bay Area.

RETURNING AMERICA TO GREATNESS: A TRUE STORY ABOUT GIRLS IN EARLY 1970s DETROIT

by Sue Reed Crouse

Image source: bOiNGbOiNG

One summer afternoon, L walked alone to the party store and bought a few ropes of Bubs Daddy Sour Apple gum. Past tiny houses, owned by the UAW dads, Mustangs on blocks in the garages; her world of city-wide curfews and cars. The Boys from the next block, armed with sticks, rounded the corner whipping leaves from low-hanging branches. They were old enemies from the Worm Wars, which had tapered off when the girls lost their fear of worms. At the height of The Wars, The Boys had ambushed them, tied them to the fence behind Mr. Taylor’s garage, and doused them with transmission fluid pumped from a tank he kept on hand. The girls hid their red, oily clothes from their mothers who would likely scold, boys will be boys. They were older now, yet she could still smell the oil, like scorched plastic, and taste it. Hey, The Boys mumbled, wanna see something cool? Toward the alley, behind the hardware, L followed. As she offered gum, Frank, grease under his fingernails, reached for the neck of her blue-flowered top and ripped, leaving her half naked in shadow with a scratch down her chest. L crouched against the cold wall of the hardware and worried about being grounded. There was M, back speckled with bruises which the girls saw when Miss G made her change into gym clothes. Attempting a smirk, M said that her boyfriend Ryan had gone all the way on her in the gravel behind the strip mall. Some of the girls were impressed because Ryan was in high school; others called M a slut. No one thought victim. There was C who was beautiful and didn’t care about The Boys. One day, she came to school with bruised arms and scratches on her face. A group of jocks, led by Chuck, knocked her off her high horse. They had held her down and scratched her face with open safety pins. Everyone said they did more, too, but C stopped talking that year and walked with her arms crossed and head down. T was playing the new record, Cherokee People for Larry when he shoved his hand down the front of her jeans. N was held down in the back of the school bus while The Boys took turns groping under her blouse. All the girls had their bra straps snapped. Are you a turtle? No? Then why do you snap! Back then, the girls knew that boys would be boys. Back then, the girls knew that The Boys needed to fuel their locker-room talk. Back then, girls learned that humiliation came with their gender, just like their monthly periods and sometimes, it seemed, more frequently. Back then, is where half of the electorate wishes to return. Back then, promises the president-elect, king of locker-room talk, sexual molester, voyeur, fan of violence, now on his third (and ever younger) beauty-queen wife, is where he will lead us.

Sue Reed Crouse is a 2011 graduate of the Foreword Program, a two-year poetry apprenticeship at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Much of her work is elegiac in nature, exploring themes of grief and loss after losing Laura, her 20 year-old daughter in 2008. Finding fresh ways to explore this universal theme through image-driven poetry helps her navigate the sorrow and, hopefully, help others who grieve. Crouse’s work appears in Verse Wisconsin, The Aurorean (Showcase Poet), The Talking Stick (First Prize, Honorable Mention), Grey Sparrow, Earth’s Daughters, Damselfly Press, Midway Journal, Sleet Magazine, Unhinged, Little Lantern Press and a chapbook entitled Gatherings: A Foreword Anthology. Her manuscript One Black Shoe was a finalist for the Backwaters Prize last year.

DREAM SONGS FOR THE GOVERNOR OF MICHIGAN

by Ned Balbo

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) is accusing his staffers of lying to him about lead and other contaminants in Flint’s drinking water supply. Snyder has long accused state environmental and health regulators of giving him incorrect information about the safety of the Michigan city's water after its switch to using the Flint River in April 2014 until late last year. But on Monday, he accused employees at the state agencies of lying to him. —The Hill, April 11, 2016

1.

Why is our boiled water brown?

Our bottled water’s running out. 

Will it be safe to drink again?

Why shouldn’t water touch our skin?

The water mains still underground

belong to a forgotten age—

The records we’ve retrieved so far

don’t always point to where they are,

and, yes, we have a deficit—

which means we can’t repair them yet.

But rest assured: your water’s safe.

True, there are problems with its taste,

color, and smell, but samples show

lead levels are extremely low.

We hear you. We’ve conducted tests.

The wheels of government are slow.

2.

When water from the tap won’t clear—

When families forced to cook with it

get sicker, do we share their rage?

Or do we share in their defeat

when hydrants flush the streets metallic

orange—one more tainted purge?

When residents desperate to sell

are turned away by realtors?  

Water, once thought a public good,

is now one more commodity:

expendable, like those who live

in devastated neighborhoods.

3.

Why change a city’s water source

to one inarguably worse?

You know why: it was cheaper. Summer

days, pools fill with teenage swimmers,

laughter, lead. How soon will daughters,

showering, watch hair fall out

in clumps that catch in rusted drains?

How will the elderly, the poor

assured it’s safe, protect themselves?

Stop washing when their rashes burn?

Or let caregivers sponge their flesh—

the toxic river’s toxic touch.

We know this water’s poisonous.

Who’ll stop or redirect its course?

We’re told we have to wait. How long?

Who’s listening, if anyone?

4.

Hair white, startled from sleep, a man

who should have known pads down the stairs,

thirsty. What does he see at night?

Iced-over windows, mandalas

of frost on glass. He pours and drinks—

fresh water from the faucet, cool

and clear: the least that he deserves.

What do the least of Michigan

deserve from those responsible?

If citizens are customers

and nothing more, then, yes, they’re lost.

What should they ask this Governor,

and others like him? Shouldn’t water

wash us clean and nourish life?

Who sent this poison to our homes,

as if to kill or scatter us?

Don’t turn your back in disbelief.

Ned Balbo's The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems received the Poets' Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. His previous books are Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize; ForeWord Book of the Year gold medal), and Galileo's Banquet (Towson University Prize). A new book, Upcycling Paumanok, is due out soon from Measure Press. He currently teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University.

DOUBLE CROSS STITCHES

by James Penha

'The Discovery of King Tut,’ an exhibition that recreates the discover of King Tut's tomb in 1922 with over 1,000 reproductions of the tomb's original artifacts 'The Discovery of King Tut,' opened May 16, 2015, at the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

In the burial vault Carter unearthed embroidery
as bright after 3000 years as Tutankhamen’s gold
displayed last Spring in Grand Rapids only
two hours from a Flint entombed in lead
by pipes buried and buried again to hide
the hands that corrode the threads of civility
and undo woven black braids beaded brown
with more warp than weft and very petit point.




James Penha edits The New Verse News.

CONTAMINATED

by Howard Winn

Image source: International Marine Salvage

 
Men in space suits are removing
lead and asbestos
from a house down our street.
Begun in the twenties,
this house remained from when innocence
prevailed as did cancer the crab,
moving sideways into the lungs
and other vital organs, both male and female,
from room paint, hot air ducts and shingles
covering innocent Cape Cod cottages,
moon walkers in airtight costumes
earn a healthy living from the fear of death,
this summer house is  now year round.
It holds an angular blonde mother
who runs along Shore Road with like wives,
a sinewy square-jawed father who drives
his hefty SUV to work and to his health club,
and coaches his vigorous son for little league fame
in the weekly mowed large side lawn
cared for by a landscape service that comes
in substantial truck and trailer to haul away
the unwanted grass.
across the street from our front windows.
In the mist of life, death by carcinogens lurks
in the up-scale décor and in the pipes of necessity.
Running, running, running,
they cannot run away.
Running, running, running,
they cannot run away.
Nes est certain, vita est non


Most recently Howard Winn had poems and fiction published in The Dalhousie Review, Descant (Canada), Cactus Heart, Main Street Rag, Caduceus, Burning Word,  Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Southern Humanities Review, Cutting Edgz and Borderlands. His B. A. is from Vassar College. His graduate degree is from the Writing Program at Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at New York University. He is a State University of New York faculty member.