LIGHTNING

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Trying to make sense of lightning is about more

than science. How long should students lower

their heads, consult their books, run computer

simulations and not look outside.

 

By the time you read this message a bolt will

have struck in dozens of locations, though

you might not have registered the flash. The smell

of ozone in your nose, learning to count for thunder.

Did you know lightning can be silent. An owl.

 

Friction travels from cloud to cloud. It’s over my head

I’ve heard

told. There’s a space in the great codes for interpellations,

gnostic meanings, hidden from the rabble: debates about what’s

in plain view

 

Can someone without sight see a storm.

What if they also cannot hear.   

Lightning can be a figment of the mind:

logos. But if we cannot make observations

what is science.

 

Every one of us has dreams. There were heat storms

over my crib. I couldn’t talk but in my gut I knew some

thing was wrong.

 

Let the infants cry. For the betterment of science.

Watch them, how they respond. From the blur comes

a woman’s features. Mother? But not the storm.

 

They cry because they know she’s an electric force,

violence with the texture of milk—

Jeremy Nathan Marks knows that his own instinct to try to enucleate the problem is a self-deception. But he's stubborn. He lives and writes (stubbornly) in Canada.

DESPITE MANY EDITS, THIS POEM REMAINS A SCREED

by Devon Balwit

Martin Keep/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times

 

Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model. —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 10, 2023

 

What we can’t bear to look at, we tolerate hidden:

the living penned with the dead, vivisection,

 

infants torn from their mothers. Already, I imagine

you, reader, lamenting this poem’s wanton

 

cruelty. Or protesting that you don’t eat red

meat or chicken flesh and so aren’t implicated .

 

Unfortunately, milk and cheese also equal

death. I wish it weren’t so, for I was partial

 

to Gouda—and eggs—but the free range birds

we imagine exist mostly in our heads. Farmyards

 

would span entire states were the hens to peck

at will. Back we retreat, then, into our dark

 

ages, some fated to suffer in a preordained hierarchy.

We’d squirm if this logic were applied to our species:

 

Women, brown people, the poor—What

can one do? They just happened to draw the short

 

straw. Surely, mere appetite can be retrained

once we admit animals know pleasure and pain.

 

Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023] she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick. 

BARE FLOOR, WITH COAT HANGER

by Francesco Levato

Author’s Note: This piece dealing with Texas Senate Bill 8 is from a series I’m working on titled SCARLET, a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of Jack London’s post-apocalyptic novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life to reflect the state of a pandemic self in forced confinement.

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

INSIGNIFICANT RAMBLINGS AT MIDNIGHT

by Peter Witt

My rhetoric went a pettifogging
in the wee hours
talking ad nauseam
to tired eyes
drinking milk
to sooth their ulcers
I crafted pettifoggery
which proved inconsequential
some might say piddling
adding nothing to the dialogue
laying unabsorbed
by already made up minds

I baked a trifling roast
of picayune sour grapes
with no-account measures
of over-stuffed plums
oozing with petty wisdom

I poured an elixir
of concocted alternative truths
into two-bit beakers
considered by all
to be fine Italian whine

Until it was finally over
and I could sleep

more hairsplitting
quibbling
nitpicking
pushed off
until tomorrow

Peter Witt lives in Bryan, Texas, a former university professor, writes poetry and research family history in his retirement.

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.

BOTTLED WATER COMES FROM THE MOST DROUGHT-RIDDEN PLACES IN THE COUNTRY

by Steve Lavigne

“a state experiencing the third driest year on record . . .   this industry  has very successfully  turned a public resource into a private enterprise . . .  But still, the question remains: why Americans across the country  drink bottled water  from drought stricken  California”

—Julia Lurie, "Bottled Water Comes From the Most Drought-Ridden Places in the Country,"

Mother Jones, August 11, 2014

“a state

experiencing the third driest

year on record . . .  

this industry 

has very successfully 

turned a public resource

into a private enterprise . . . 

But still,

the question remains:

why Americans across the country 

drink bottled water 

from drought stricken 

California”

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.” --John Maynard Keynes

my mother’s milk - bless her old teats
up for private speculation and public offering
flaccid wrinkled worn - and still unregulated
best to get them - the definition of insanity
while they’re still hot

the invisible hand of the market that moves
me
always was
and was not my father’s
hand
open palm of pain directing
the way toward some fictional future goodness
or goddamn quiet
the need in his mind like a thought
too loud to be drowned out only dimmed
down
by the light of a tv in a darkened room
or the screaming complaints of self-righteous
children
demanding its their turn to choose


Steve Lavigne runs a local poetry group in Champaign Illinois. It meets weekly to discuss, create and share poetry in order to build community through the power and practice of poetry.

THE PLAN

by Daniela Gioseffi

Two weeks of United Nations climate talks ended Saturday with a pair of last-minute deals keeping alive the hope that a global effort can ward off a ruinous rise in temperatures.  . . . Mohamed Adow, an activist with Christian Aid, said the deal showed that “countries have accepted the reality” of the effects of climate change, but that “they seem unwilling to take concrete actions to reduce the severity of these impacts.” --NY Times, November 23, 2013

The plan was for butterflies,
bees and bats to suck among flowers
gathering sweetness to live
as they carried pollen, seed to ova,
to bring fruit from need.

The plan was for waters
to run freshly through
wetland deltas, filtering streams
along their way from mountain tops
quenching thirst running clear
rivers to the sea bringing life to the lips of children,
blossoming from the need for love
from parents, two different animals united
into a new being, ecstatic with rebirth.

The plan was for forests to clean the air
for children's breath in symbiotic balance
using carbon dioxide expelled from animals
to give forth oxygen,
to photosynthesize food from need,
making green leaves that leaf and leaf again
to feed women's breasts, not mere objects of sex,
but factories of milk, first link
in the food chain for children's mouths
to suckle milk from leaves of grass
come from fertile mud for need.

But sheer greed for things
of plastic, polymers from petroleum:
acrylic, polyester, lucite, biogenetics,
nuclear radiation, poisons,
greed for too much meat full of steroids,
land laid waste grazing cattle,
carcinogens, plutonium, filth and waste,
killed the plan slowly, bit
by bit, until the water trickled
with foul waste of industries' mistakes
and what was needed food, water, breath
was suffocated to a barren death.

Bats, bees and butterflies
ceased to buzz around flowers
bearing fruit from their sexual union
and children had no food.
Forests chopped to dust
gave forth no oxygen
or photosynthesis
or atmospheric balance
as fluorocarbons and fuel emissions
opened holes in the ozone
and burned the earth
to a carbon crisp
and love,
which was God itself,
no longer breathed
in the eyes of children,
but was silenced from its song
and art, books, poems,
had no feelings to speak
as all seed,
through "market engineering,"
was lost
to greed.


Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning author of 16 books of poetry and prose. She is editor/publisher/webmaster of www.Eco-Poetry.org/, a website of poetry and commentary dealing with climate crisis concerns. She has been widely published in innumerable magazines such as The Nation, The Paris Reveiw, Chelsea, Choice, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, and in anthologies from Oxford U. Press, Viking, Simon & Schuster, Harpers. Her latest book is Blood Autumn from VIA Folios / Bordighera Press. Her verse is etched in marble on a Wall of PENN Station with that of Walt Whitman and other poets.

AT LARGE

by Ana Garza G'z

Someone threw a gallon of urine in the lobby of the Fresno Housing Authority office on the Fulton Mall on Thursday morning, the Fresno Fire Department said. The office, in the 1300 block of the mall, was evacuated briefly while the Fire Department investigated the incident, which happened about 10 a.m. A man described by a witness as "homeless" tossed the container, which then broke, spilling the fluid, a Fire Department spokesman said. There were no injuries and workers returned to the building. The suspect is at large. --The Fresno Bee, Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/01/17/3137073/container-of-urine-thrown-in-fresno.html#storylink=cpy

No pride--just  a glass door, a desk,
a story, an application.
Weeks later, you’re denied
By a scowl when you check in.

You wonder what it takes
to fill a gallon with piss?
Well, first, you need a gallon.
You think you can get milk,

but for that, you need four dollars.
You also need a fridge.
to keep it in, a house,
gas and power service,

and a forty-hour job
that pays at least minimum
so you can try for Food Stamps
and low-income housing.

You have to wait on both,
despite the questions (“where do you live?”)
despite the weather (January),
despite the work you did

in that other life.
God forbid,
the people  who spend four dollars
on a cup of coffee spend

a little extra here
and there. They’ll never miss
a cent. You panhandle for
a morning to buy the milk.

You drink it in a day.
You get the massive shits.
You don’t care. You aim,
and you gather every drip,

every single drip. You take
your time. With dehydration,
it takes five days. You sit
at public computers, filling in

boxes. And then you walk
back to the glass doors and the desk
with nothing for the jobless,
but advice: those who seek find success.

You stand there, under a roof
you can’t have, and you give in
to the impulse to show them
your work, a gallon, which you spill.


Ana Garza G'z has an M. F. A. from California State University, Fresno. Forty-one of her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, most recently in The Mom Egg. She works as a community interpreter and translator.