EVERYWHERE FRACTURED BONE/IT SEEMS

by Al Ortolani

los angeles is in the air/a few

acres of protest within five hundred 

 

miles of city/stretched/tendons

in the streets/now

 

muscled by federal policy/bent 

to hyperextension/bone

 

in socket grinding: a home

for some/a charnel house

 

for others/this America 

not the America we learned

 

to love/the disruption/

the disunity/the distemper/

 

troops in riot gear/rubber bullets

a bicep flex/

 

the fist/well-knuckled

in the face of the weak:

 

this new scapegoat of migration

is shaken in our faces/blinding us

 

to the Samaritan within:

all the while/a sleight of hand

 

finger tipping through the

streets as planned

Al Ortolani, a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize, has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and George Bilgere’s Poetry Town. He was the recipient of the Bill Hickok Humor Award from I-70 Review. He’s a contributing editor to the Chiron Review.

INAUGURATION DAY 2025, THE PELICANS ARRIVE

by Catherine Arra

White grace floats the lake, rippling in icy torrents

of another Trump tirade.

 

A stopover in migration, a congregation

of reacquaintance-feeding-reuniting in purpose.

 

They paddle in silent choreography, know nothing

of deportations, hate-vengeance-greed.

 

Know to stay clear of marsh grass, where alligators

nest-hunt-eat more than needed.

 

Their long-bowed faces remember loss—how easy

to destroy a nest than to build one.

 

They glide into flight formation. Broad webbed feet

flapflapflap in domino percussion.

 

Snowy wings underscore the black of mourning.

They fly away. 

Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter, when she migrates to the Space Coast of Florida. Arra teaches part-time and facilitates local writing groups. She is the author of four full-length collections and four chapbooks. Recent work appears in Unleash Lit., Eclectica Magazine, LitBreak Magazine, Poem Alone, and The Ekphrastic Review.

THE UNNAMED FIRE

by Alejandro Escudé

Dozens of beachfront homes in Malibu were destroyed overnight in the Palisades Fire on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025 (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

The hills were there, lichen green, and I felt the small 

ferocious animals scurrying inside of it. The coyote ever-present, 

ready to pounce on the owners’ three Shih Tzu. Sometimes, we’d 

housesit, and I’d lounge on the front yard overlooking the Pacific Ocean. 

It was as if I could dip a toe in the sea from that cliff, the ruffled white curve

as it wound north toward Malibu, an emerald land too close to call distant.

Now that street has turned ash gray, only the outlines of the lots remain,

that same coast like the edge of a puddle of spilled black ink. I recognize

the people who were caught in their cars, cars that were later plowed

to make way for fire engines and ambulances. The wind spoke in vowels

the night before last across my humble balcony that faces those smoky hills.

The sudden clanks. Buffering curtains. The canyons siphoning destruction.

One could imagine the homes as graves. Ash-people holding on to one another.

In ancient times no machine could whisk them away to safety. A volcano

of wind, torrent of melted metal. What powers do the digital towers have?

What future awaits those of us who traverse this playground of film and filth

and indifference, negotiating the enchanted brutality of this hardened city? 

One can read the scroll of the flames; they speak a crackling language,

letters made of embers. It rages on, the unnamed fire, it wraps itself 

in the gales. A migration begins along an avenue of burning palm fronds.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

BIRDCAST

by David Chorlton

World Migratory Bird Day May 11, 2024
BirdCast

Two million birds crossed the county last night

moving to where starlight

lands. It’s springtime in the sky, two thousand

four hundred feet at midnight high,

feather bright and quiet

along the true path north. It’s dark enough

 

up there to feel

the pull of a remembered place

while down here the sleeping mountains roll

to one side or the other, and the creeks

keep flowing on the way

to being rivers. Forests sparkle

with the sounds of insects,

the desert exhales, radios are tuned

 

to the secrets only darkness knows

and they play softly while

the count begins. Orioles, flycatchers

and chats; there they go, a million, a thousand,

a hundred and the one

grosbeak who already knows

the tree she will nest in.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix, now living close to an extensive desert preserve that runs through the city. His neighbors include coyotes and the hawk families that nest between the human and natural worlds. They often make their way into his painting and writing life.

DRONE SHOW, NEW YORK CITY

by Jennifer Phillips

River in flood, night flocks flickering

among the skyscrapers, down canyoned glass
and concrete tunnels, southing,
all their stars obscured. Even at sunset, brass
reverberation highlighting the ledges,
zigzagging a maze like the airport lighting
flashing along their pattern's edges,
splash of solar panel panes squaring 
off on rooftops, while all the unseen soft bodies
steer, or smack and ricochet to paving,
losing their way, losing their lives.
 
In Central Park, the artist paints the same skies,
that glow with missed comets and  lunar eclipses,
with a flock of drones, loose from their hives,
cruising and folding the black air, like a fizz
of fireflies the news compares to starlings'
wondrous convolutions—of all the ironies—
iron substitutions for the flesh and song and wings
belonging even here, city-center, ground zero
for terrors we make in every size. The crows,
tough and wise, don't migrate much. Sad that we do
not notice, or speak of a murder of swallows.

Jennifer M Phillips is a  bi-national immigrant, painter, gardener, Bonsai-grower. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). A poem is like a little brass pan to carry fire's coals through the winter weather, and so she writes. 

COLLECTIVE NOUNS FOR BIRDS

by Katherine Page

Workers at the Field Museum in Chicago inspecting birds that were killed when they flew into the windows of the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. Credit: Lauren Nassef/Chicago Field Museum, via Associated Press, via The New York Times, October 8, 2023

There’s a circumference of concrete paths 
around earth’s freshwater body
down which you ride your bike.
Cold flutters sharp on pink knuckles,
evening cicadas once a deafening scream,
the size of a hummingbird with a tymbal spring
now ghosts gripping tree bark shells.
Some people have bells or shout
on your left but you pedal gently
around clumps of walking friends,
air cupping October leaves as they twirl
petals and click to the asphalt below. 

You can’t stop looking at the telephone wires,
the gray space of sky between intersecting lines,
the softest eruptions of birds blooming into flight,
their punctuations of gravitational ease—
comma comma question—
a cote, a murder, a brood, 
a flock, a worm, a quarrel, 
a charm, a scold,
a trembling. 

Nearly a thousand died last night,
warblers, waterthrush, yellowthroats
slamming warm, flapping bodies into the brightness 
of a shoreline Chicago glass. 
It’s impossible to see where one things starts
and another one ends.
Now even in a first floor apartment
you can still imagine the pattering
of rain on the roof. The maple hands are turning,
neighborhood cats waul through the dark.
In the morning, 
a dove coos in the evergreen 
outside your tiny window.


Katherine Page is an elementary school teacher and writer living in Chicago. She is working on a manuscript about teaching and learning. She has poems published in Beyond Queer Words, Awakened Voices, Evocations Review, Green Linden Press, Open Minds Quarterly, Wingless Dreamer Press, Rough Cut Press, and Passengers Journal. She is a graduate of the 2022–23 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective in Denver, CO.

NORTH AMERICAN MIGRATION

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Canadian wildfire smoke created a hazy red-orange sky over Lake Michigan on June 23 at the Michigan-Huron watershed. Wildfire smoke is causing poor air quality in the Great Lakes this week. —Fox Weather

Just a whiff of Armageddon seems worse
than a year of Covid precautions. Canadian fires.
Some jet stream sending a radar plume of it 
like a purple hot dog cuddled up to the blue bun 
of Lake Michigan. Thinner but more toxic
than mountain fog, smoke blurs horizons
and pulls a gray film over every noun,
smothered in adjectives. Diluted sun thins
the smoke like cream into soup, a color
variation, same raw taste. Ash residue
floats on bird baths. Only the crows sing. 
It’s a song they learned on their migration
from Hell. Not long ago. North of Thunder Bay.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske is a Michigan native. She is a poet, visual artist, and mother of three. Her publications include dozens of print and online journals, five books of poetry, and inclusion in several anthologies. She would never live anywhere else.

HUMANITARIAN PAROLE

by Jerrice J. Baptiste

Gone, morsels of light from the island 
       flickering in silent eyes.

 

He waved goodbye last Tuesday
      to the turquoise sea, mid-day sun 

 

choking on tears. His welcome meal

 

sliced papaya, crescent plantains, 

      conch in creole sauce. Smiles. 

My cousin’s soft lashes
       brush American stars. Glow reflects

 

on forehead, cheek bones, bridge of nose.

       Lips speak freedom, a new language.

 

My uncle hears his son’s voice 

       migrated among birds of the white season. 

Night churns slow. How can he keep still?

      One has left his cocoon.

       

Even from gunfire.  

Author’s note: Humanitarian Parole offers an opportunity for people arriving in the U.S to feel like humans. Approved non-residents landing for the first time are welcomed appropriately and can adapt under the right conditions of housing, employment, education, etc. They can be happy even if their family members left behind—in Haiti, in the case of the speaker’s uncle in this poem—miss them terribly. 

Jerrice J. Baptiste is an author of eight books and a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center & Residency in NY.  She is extensively published in journals and magazines. She has been nominated as  Best of The Net by Blue Stem for  2022.

THE CHILENO VALLEY NEWT BRIGADE

by Martin Elster

For the past four years, volunteers have spent their winter nights shepherding newts across a one-mile stretch of Chileno Valley Road, a winding country road in the hills of Petaluma. They call themselves the Chileno Valley Newt Brigade, and their founder, Sally Gale, says they will keep showing up until the newts no longer need them. —The New York Times, January 24, 2023

Chileno Valley Road cuts smack across

their migratory path, nestled between

forests and farms and ranches, yet the loss

of newts (small, slender creatures rarely seen

at night) can be acute. It’s time to breed.

Downpours have deluged rivers, ponds, and lakes.

Amphibians wake. They feel an urgent need.

Drivers don’t heed them, nor apply their brakes.  

Dozens of orange forms (wheels can’t dissuade them,

for genes in their amphibian marrow bade them)

slither to the blacktop, blind to dangers.

Yet here’s the noble Newt Brigade to aid them

to reach the primal waters which have made them,

now clinging to the fingers of kind strangers.

The winner of the 2022 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, Martin Elster comes from Hartford, CT, where he studied percussion and composition at the Hartt School of Music and performed with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Martin, whose poetry has been strongly influenced by his musical sensibilities, has written two books, the latest of which is Celestial Euphony (Plum White Press, 2019).

A STRENGTH & BEAUTY RARE

by Dick Altman

Flying jewels I thought they were

as a child.  To entice one onto

a finger, to bring it up to the nose,

as the black-bordered tangerine

wings slowly opened and closed—

could a little boy be any more

smitten?

                        *

Thirty-five years later, on a lake

in upstate New York, I rediscover

Monarchs—beguiling not of fragile

sweetness, but ferocity almost beyond

the syntax of belief.  I’m transfixed

at how they tilt against late summer’s

gusting head winds.  As if they had

no choice.  As if wings were oars—

as if boats launched from shore

into raging tidal seas—as they press

forward, only to be repulsed—again

and again.  As they fight, tirelessly,

to stay aloft above the aqueous grave

awaiting any that falter.  Fight as if

drowning in air, frantic to surface

in northern Mexico’s Mil Cumbres hills. 

Frantic to give birth, after voyaging

twenty-five hundred hectoring miles,

until they all but drop.

                        *

The vision of embattled, desperate

fleets returns, when I drive into

the Cumbres, dumbstruck by forests

black and orange, pulsing, folding,

unfolding, eager after winter to create

a new generation. One destined

to traverse, like their forbears, lake’s

grueling flyways north to Canada.

                          *

I pee as a kid on a log bordering

our cabin’s path to the water.  What

of my essences lures Monarchs

to the spot in droves, I’ll never know. 

Part of me evolves into part of them.

An entwining of winged and bipedal,

one bound to earth, the other to air—

a lifetime ago, and I behold it yet

with a child’s wonder un-frayed.

                            *      

Days of Monarchs’ madness pass.

The lake’s autumnal transit

a fragment of memory.  Gales black

and orange out-fought, out-flew

the winds.  When Milkweed,

their caterpillars’ favorite food,

their only food, succumbs to man’s

punishment of earth, winged courage

proves no match.  But when

imagination wanders back to those

bejeweled days on the water, I conjure

soaring, gliding gems of fortitude. 

Pray for the day skies confetti again

with their dancing fury. Odysseus

takes twenty years to sail home.

Monarchs, but a few months.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where,at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.

JUST AS THE BIRDS, DISTRACTED

by Paula J. Lambert

Most nights this week, there will be more birds in the air above

this country than people in beds down below.” —Josh Sokol

 

Just as the birds, distracted by light

that splits the star they follow into sparks

and mirrors so they never see the towers

that reach out to kill them, just as the birds,

 

so entranced by needs they cannot explain

that they propel themselves steadfastly

forward through all the wildfires we set 

for them (if they recognize their own 

plummeting numbers when they emerge 

from the smoke, they don’t show it, 

they keep flying) just as the birds 

soar even through their own sleep as, 

one by one by one, they die of thirst 

or starvation or exhaustion, falling into fields 

and ditches and sidewalks, mountain peaks

and seldom-seen valleys, just as they 

keep going, season after season, year after 

year, eon after unfathomable eon, so we 

sleep through it all in our beds below, 

writhing maybe through tangles of sheets 

and the existential threat we’ve made

of our lives—we who’ve lived long enough 

to multiply every problem we inherited, 

who’ve ignored or angrily explained away 

the desperate patterns of our own migration—

but sleeping, blithely unwilling to do more

than worry while, awake, we grab our keys 

and cameras and binoculars and go,

 

to the marshes, waterways and wild places

still left, still untrampled, still—unbeknownst

to us—part of the twisted dreams and difficult

truths we rarely remember, come morning. 

Paula J. Lambert has authored several collections of poetry including The Ghost of Every Feathered Thing (FutureCycle 2022) and How to See the World (Bottom Dog 2020). Awarded PEN America's L'Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, Lambert's poetry and prose has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes.

MIGRANT

by Matt Witt

Green-Tailed Towhee Taking Bath by Matt Witt

This green-tailed towhee

that weighs about an ounce

migrated more than 1,000 miles

from its wintering home in Mexico

to its annual nesting ground

in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument,

where I watched it taking a bath at a tiny spring.

 

It migrates every year,

eluding hawks and falcons,

braving snowstorms and lightning,

never losing its way.

 

This bird is a lot stronger

than I’ll ever be.

Matt Witt is a writer and photographer from Talent, Oregon. His website is MattWittPhotography.com.

BEFORE AND AFTER

by Judy Juanita

before

We stood on garbage cans to watch the assembly line

at the Chevrolet manufacturing plant on 73rd ave

See the USA in your Chevrolet

America is asking you to call

Drive your Chevrolet through the USA

America’s the greatest land of all

We paid our parents no mind at all

when they said Dinah Shore was passing for white

Oakland had white-only garden apts. on 66th ave

housing UC Berkeley grad students

young dads in Bermuda shorts 

moms in capri pants

a 99 year covenant kept us out

the little children called us niggers

if we took the shortcut home

Those apts. became the site of the 1980s drug wars

The would-be Coliseum was a swamp

BART was a developer’s dream 

to bring suburban commuters to SF

Oakland be damned

We had to fight to get Oakland stops added

The boys across the street were from Georgia 

Their mother welcomed my brother to peepee 

in their bathroom but insisted he poopoo at home

I thought white people pooped white poops

And we pooped brown 

Wave after wave of Ohlones, Mexicans, Chinese, Portuguese

Oakies and Arkies from the Oklahoma and Arkansas dust bowls

coloreds and whites from Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma 

migrated for munitions and troop movement work during WWI

Our parents and grandparents came in droves

planting their families and dreams 

in the fertile soil called California 

after

We’re all Panthers now

The Black Panther Party did not backfire

It was an early warning system 

for this entire country/world 

about U.S. oppression

the ravages of imperialism 

the rampant police-as-occupying-force 

in the black community

As the vanguard it did exactly 

what 

it was historically tasked to do

it woke people up 

What people choose to do now

under this near totalitarianism

is up to individuals and groups

We don’t need Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Denmark Vesey

Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Fannie Lou Hamer

MLK, John Lewis, Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver

Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, all our people

who fought to the finish

They came, they saw, they served

It’s up to the living to stand up and be counted

Judy Juanita’s poetry has been published widely. Her poem “Bling” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012. Her semi-autobiographical novel Virgin Soul is about a young woman who joins the Black Panther Party in the 60s (Viking, 2013). She appears in Netflix’s Last Chance U: Season 5, Laney College where she teaches.

CONTINUOUS MIGRATION

by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds 

“[At McAllen TX detention center on July 12, 2019] VP saw 384 men sleeping inside fences, on concrete w/no pillows or mats. They said they hadn’t showered in weeks, wanted toothbrushes, food. Stench was overwhelming. CBP said they were fed regularly, could brush daily & recently got access to shower (many hadn’t for 10-20 days.) Facility we saw earlier in the day with children was new & relatively clean and empty. There were cots & medical supplies & snacks. Children watched TV and told Pence through translator they were being taken care of. But at least two said they’d walked for months to get here.” —Josh Dawsey @jdawsey1 White House @WashingtonPost

The species depends on the freedom of movement
It's in the DNA
Wings of the fathers and fathers and of the mothers and mothers too
All come for one milk
Metabolizing a weed's poison to foil enemies
Five generations to complete the journey
Butterflies like bees tell the harvest

The species depends on the freedom of movement
It's in the DNA
Baja or ports of call or the Bering Strait
All come for one milk
Who knows the many generations to complete the journey
Fear a poison to a nation's people
Children like blossoms tell the harvest


Joanne DeSimone Reynolds is the author of a chapbook, Comes A Blossom published by Main Street Rag in 2014.

CASAS SEGURAS: A MESSAGE FROM THE CARAVAN

by Sarah Edwards

Elvira Choc, 59, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal's grandmother, rests her head on her hand in front of her house in Raxruha, Guatemala, on Saturday 15 December 2018.) Jakelin was the first of two Guatemalan children detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection who died in government custody this month. Felipe Alonzo Gomez died in custody on Christmas Eve. (AP Photo/Oliver de Ros via The Independent [UK])

You live in safe houses,
get mail in a box outside your door.
You walk on streets, paved and lit.
Your homes have walls and roofs,
bedrooms to wrap babies in blankets,
kitchens that smell like clean.

We live in no houses.
Our address is the same for all,
Pueblo San Fronteras
Village Without Borders.
Streets are numbered by how far
we can push them ahead each day,
by what work we find
for money to eat,
buy space to sleep.

We travel on paths worn down
as thin as our sandals,
carry barefoot children on our backs.
We make a caravan together
because it is fearful to walk alone,
speak and not be heard.
We seek what you call asylum.
To us, it is asilo, a home safer
than we have ever known.

Step after step, day after day,
hope of welcome paves our way.
Then we will get mail,
build walls and roofs,
bedrooms to wrap babies in blankets,
kitchens that smell like clean.

Sarah Edwards is a retired pastor in the United Church of Christ with many publication credits, including two books of poetry, Pandora, Let's Talk and the newly-released What the Sun Sees. She is outraged at the treatment and disregard for people who want to find safety and make a life in the United States. The so-called freedoms that we espouse are only figments of our egocentric imagination unless we understand them to belong to everyone.