A REQUIEM FOR ZOMBIE FIRES DEVOURING THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

by Daniel Brennan

While most wildfires burn out in the open, another form of Arctic fire is more difficult to detect. So-called zombie fires can smoulder in peat beneath the Arctic’s icy surface, throughout the winter months. When spring comes, the fires reignite surface vegetation, emitting carbon dioxide from both the vegetation and the peat, which is a natural carbon dioxide store. A report by climate scientists concluded that the increase in the number of these overwintering wildfires is directly linked to climate change. —World Economic Forum, January 11, 2023. Photo: The Bogus Creek Fire in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a state where the vast majority of carbon emissions from fires come from burning soil.Credit: Matt Snyder/Alaska Division of Forestry, via Associated Press via The New York Times.

We should have guessed by the gray, curled perfume

reaching up from a temporary grave that all good things

stay hungry. A terrible beauty; keeping one eye open

in the coldest sleep, keeping an eye on God himself. 

Blessed be the land that cracks like old skin under 

our sun, the land that shivers off its frost to be eaten

alive by a boiling stomach. Blessed be the earth that

houses the black-nailed hand reaching toward heaven

as the soil softens, as it splits open its breast to reveal

every fiery jewel we thought lost to winter. 

The disbelievers, they will tell you it cannot be this way. 

They will tell you that these new gods, burning just

below the lips, the foils and folds of the mind, should

extinguish in the night as they have for a millennia. 

But the most famished deities find the sky. These,

my sinner’s hands, hands which have held dirt in the shape

of lonely men and men crawling deep back down into

their graveyard dirt, hands which have found every other aspiring 

angel in the dark corridors of night between body high

and exaltation, these hands must clasp in a bent prayer

for someone, for something. Find meaning in the revelations,

the peeling snowfall that has blanketed a red mask of death. 

Find God in the furious inferno creeping up through nutrient-

rich soil, screaming to the heavens, making us believe

in an eternal life, for these flames do not die, only slumber. 

Blessed be this new generation of disciples, apostles, apotheosis 

in freeze-frame. They must learn to worship the earth that

cannot keep its fiery dreams beneath a dark shawl

of rock and root and snow and seed. We inherit the 

land that devours itself, the endless eulogy below our funeral pyre. 

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a resident of New York City, but grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania (ultimately serving as a focused source of ecology-based inspiration). As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Brennan’s work aims to capture both the vastness we feel in the face of our ever-changing planet, while confronting our own bodies and the daunting elements of intimacy we feel every day. His work has appeared in CP Quarterly, Grand Little Things, Feral Poetry, with upcoming work in the Garfield Lake Review. He currently lives in Manhattan, and works full-time in advertising.

IT IS THE CLOUDS

by Lindsay Adkins

As soon as I’ve said it I think—

No, that is wrong.

We are eating dinner at the pub, outside

(because COVID)

while rain pelts the tent over our heads,

rushes down the open sides in small rivers,

and thunder stomps across the horizon.

All the things I would gather in my arms

and shove back into the barrel if I could.

My daughter is afraid of the thunder

and asks for a hug. “Demands”

might be a better word choice.

She isn’t yet two, doesn’t know

the different shades of language.

I explain to her it is just the clouds

banging into one another

like legos in her little fists.

Bang bang, she says.

Bang bang.

Everyone at the table laughs.

 

But even as I am saying the words

I think no, that isn’t quite right.

Something to do with lightning,

the sound of air cooling,

counting the seconds

from flash to boom

to find the distance between you

and the bolt.

I have oversimplified it.

You should ask your uncle sometime, I say.

The one who’s a meteorologist.

Bang bang, she says, pounding

her hands together,

already sure in her understanding.

 

My husband’s sister looks at her phone

and sighs.

Another shooting, she says.

In Tulsa. Not a school, a medical building.

 

I wonder if, when I write this poem,

as I know I will,

the rain will be small coins,

or bullets.

Or just rain.

Rain is, after all, rain—

Any good meteorologist will tell you so.

Having spent all our metaphors and similes

for guns and their blooms already,

we go back to our fries and beers.

Bang, my daughter whispers. Bang.

The lightning flashes, and I begin counting:

How long until this word

means something else to her?

Lindsay Adkins is a writer from Western MA whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, Narrative, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, great weather for MEDIA, Frontier Poetry, and So to Speak Journal, among others. She is a recipient of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers, the Phyllis B. Abrahms Award in Poetry, and an Author Fellowship from the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton. 

THE FLAG OUTSIDE A NEIGHBOR'S DOOR

by Jean L. Kreiling

Just down the street, outside a neighbor’s door, 
it reaches up and out, as if for hope 
or heaven, in an effort to restore 
its honor and resist the downward slope 
traversed by those who lied, who followed liars, 
who beat a man with those same stripes and stars, 
who lit and fanned and spread murderous fires 
that left some dead, the rest of us with scars. 
I see Old Glory fluttering in the breeze— 
but elsewhere, desecrated by a gang 
of thugs, it symbolized not liberties 
and laws, but rage, and justice by flash-bang. 
I miss the days when I was confident 
about what flags by neighbors’ front doors meant. 
 

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of two collections of poetry: Arts & Letters & Love (2018) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014).  Her work has been honored with the Able Muse Write Prize, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Prize, the Kelsay Books Metrical Poetry Prize, a Laureates’ Prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, three New England Poetry Club prizes, the Plymouth Poetry Contest prize, and the String Poet Prize. 

SERVE

by Akua Lezli Hope

via GIPHY

Her smirk

not a quirk

an expressive face that moves

knows the dance in a glance

an intellectual twerk

displays the staunch resilience

of the endowed but denied

civility’s proprieties

resistance to a jerk

who made exchange real work

those demeaned, those denied

who manage but won’t hide

constraints placed on contempt

silence endless drumbeats to genuflect

accommodate, excuse, cow-tow

duck and shamble, indulge the ruse —

all ignored in the arch of her brow

skew of her lips, pursed

and parsed along the narrow band

of behavior deemed seemly

she could not unmean what she meant

nor unintend the message sent, she would

proffer her passion extolling another

yet not relent and we, her many

cousins laugh and apprehend this

semiotic vent, who know well

the sly, deliberate tell

 

 

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music,  sculpture, and peace.  A third generation New Yorker, her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, SFPA, Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations.

LEGAL ARGUMENTS

by David Chorlton

Tucson, AZ  -- The Arizona Department of Water Resources has approved a massive groundwater pumping project that will drain the Upper San Pedro River in Southern Arizona. This decision comes despite opposition from the property owners along the river and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and ignores the project’s impact on the birds, wildlife, and local residents and businesses that are dependent on a healthy river. --Earth Justice, April 16, 2013

A river soaks slowly into statutes
piled upon it by way
of the arguments
that a hundred year supply
of illusions is guaranteed.

By paragraph and case law
the current is diverted
while promises are laid
instead of foundations
for houses for whom

the weather forecast is running
dry. With cufflinks shining
like spring runoff
a developer listens closely
to his counsel say

that taking away the water
will have no adverse impact
on the river, begging
the question whether language
can outlast meaning.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and still sees his surroundings with an outsider's eye. This helps his writing projects, which include a new poetry collection,"The Devil's Sonata," from FutureCycle Press.