NEW YEAR'S OWLS

by Buff Whitman-Bradley




In the first hours of the new year
After the midnight explosions have ceased
And no more revelers
In clutches of three and four
Go stumbling by the house
Happily jabbering away
I lie in bed with the window open
To the freezing night air
Listening to two owls
Speaking to each other
From nearby treetops.
Hu-hoo, hu-hoo says one
In a deep and quiet voice
Hoo-hu-hoo, hoo-hu-hoo
Responds the other
In a higher pitch.
I picture the baritone as an elder
Complimenting the young alto
On not panicking
During the booms and bangs and kapows
They had just endured,
On staying put in its tree
Until the onslaught of flash and bam had subsided.
It’s safe to go out now
The old one says
But be mindful of the humans,
They are loud and messy
And really have no idea
What they are doing.
And of course the old hoot is right.
We are a cacophonous, lurching,
Bumbling, bungling bunch
Making a fine shambles of things
And we’d be a whole lot better off
If we resolved in the coming year
To cultivate a little quiescence
And pay closer attention to owls.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California. He podcasts at: thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

STEALTHY BOMBERS MIGRATING TO VERMONT IN FALL 2019

by Tricia Knoll

A federal report on the noise impact of F-35 jets on the area surrounding the Burlington International Airport is delayed again. Noise exposure information due from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding the F-35A Lightning II stealth fighter jets was due in December, then February. Now, according to airport officials, the information will be publicly available—tentatively—next month. —Burlington Free Press, March 14, 2019

The cemetery and the dairy face off against each other
on the winter-potholed two-lane road that runs
between two towns that aren’t really very big.

The F-35s are coming to the most populated part
of the state with the politicians’ blessings. On those wings
hang jobs, a possibly spotty safety record, and cost over-runs

that bring the war machine to where
the cemetery and the dairy face each other
on a first warm spring day.  The flags

in the cemetery reflect winter tatter
and the pasture grass for the cows
is brown. Someone on the radio

states that the new planes are four times
louder than the F-15s that left town
on Saturday, but whose brain can multiply

sound and decibels well enough to imagine that?
Suspicious why the FAA hasn’t issued
those sound maps, where the four times

as loud will be suffered. One man half-heartedly
blames the government shut down. The kids
in the school haven’t had their exercises yet

for when the noise terrifies them. They are
busy having their regular old active-shooter
drills. Even when the pasture grass is brown

and the flags on the cemetery are winter torn.

Tricia Knoll lives directly in the flight path of the F35s that will be stationed at the Vermont Air National Guard. She is a poet who is very tired of war machines, bellicose wall builders and those who seek to jail young children. 

BREAKING POINT

by David Chorlton

He was there to play, not to party. The night before the shooting, Mr. Paddock made two complaints to the hotel about noise coming from his downstairs neighbors: Albert Garzon, a restaurant owner visiting from San Diego, and his wife and friends. Mr. Garzon, who was staying in 31-135, directly beneath Mr. Paddock, said security guards knocked on his door around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday and asked him to turn down his music, country songs. When he asked where the complaint was coming from, pointing out that the nearest rooms on either side were far away, the security guard said, “It’s the guest above you.” —The New York Times, October 4, 2017

He was a quiet man, a man
who worked with numbers and amassed
more money than he had use for
so he spent some on guns
which made him feel bigger
than he was, but still quiet.
No known affiliations
to a cause or a religion
whose god ordered him to kill.
He liked to play against machines, to watch
the cards and count the winnings.
Otherwise, he kept
to himself.
He needed to sleep to concentrate next time
around.
      Suppose
it wasn’t the sense of a mission
that made him stack
his weapons in the room, suppose
he simply liked to carry them around
just in case
he ever needed them, you know,
for some spontaneous and banal reason
such as the noise
rising from the concert stage thirty-two floors down
and when it went on too, too
long, he smashed the window
and didn’t have to aim.

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems have appeared in many publications online and in print, and reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. His newest collection of poems is Bird on a Wire from Presa Press, and late in 2017 The Bitter Oleander Press will publish Shatter the Bell in my Ear, his translations of poems by Austrian poet Christine Lavant.

A CACOPHONY OF CRANES

by Janet Leahy




Sandhill cranes prance the fields
of the Necedah Wildlife Refuge.
They relentlessly clear their throats.
Is this an attempt to find a softer song
to replace the rough ratcheting
that is their call—an attempt to fine-tune
the echo chambers in long necks
to find a kinder music for sky travel.

It is fall of 2016
politics of the season reverberates
with ratcheting calls.
The election draws near
there is no gentle music
air waves guzzle with discordant
degrading language.
Sandhill cranes whisk away,

we rush out to cast an early ballot.

Janet Leahy‘s poems have been published in print and online journals.  Most recently her poems have won second place and honorable mention in the 2016 People and Ideas Poetry Contest.  She has published two collections of poetry, The Storm, Poems of War, Iraq, and Not My Mother’s Classroom. 

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE ON INDEPENDENCE DAY

by Michael Mark

"Oh, Say, Can You See (but Not Hear) Those Fireworks?"

—The New York Times, June 30, 2016

We are jamming ourselves under the couch,
far as we can. Until another blast and Jessie
crawls even deeper; her massive paws scar
the wood floor. I don’t care. Jessie’s square
head is twice as big as mine; she’s a hundred
and forty pound Newfoundland. And because
she hates fireworks I hate them more. I’d ban
the Roman candles’ machine gun bursts, wipe
out the whistle and bang of bottle rockets, defuse
all firecrackers: they celebrate war, children blow
fingers off, their stringy guts leave a mess over
our trees and lawns. Truthfully, I could live with
all of these if their noise didn’t upset Jess. I’m
with the dogs in every corner of our country tonight,
beneath dining room tables, behind winter coats
in closets, tails between our legs in hot toxic
garages. Even a juicy burger couldn’t bribe us out.
Jess hears the onslaught before me – her dozen
extra doggy ear bones picking up the frequency
of the matchsticks’ phosphorus red heads scraping
three blocks down, the flares’ whooshes, flames
climbing filaments to the climatic celebration
that makes the rest of my family, her family, ooh
and ahh and my BFF whine, burrow towards dust
bunnies, my daughter’s missing sock, MIA potato
chips. I lean into her furry heaviness, kiss her silky
ear, apologize, It’s a human thing. Her giant breed’s
heart is near bursting now—M80s shaking windows—
our quiet cul-de-sac life is under attack by enemy
artillery but I do nothing to stop it. Don’t even hush
my own kids’ screaming racket. Won’t take on the
neighborhood dads in about-faced ball caps, flag t-shirts—
grab their bics, rip their match books. I’m not as brave
as any dog, that includes yappy lap puppets—nowhere
near courageous as Jess. She’d tear into anyone who
bared their teeth at me, take apart a pack of circling
coyotes, and if a Ford F-150 was turning the corner
faster than the15mph speed limit, radio pounding kick-
ass hillbilly, she’d hurl herself between me and that All
American made in Mexico truck, leave it a smoking heap,
sidle up beside my leg and waddle me back home. No big
bad bragging bark. Just a fluffy tail in the air, like a flag, kinda.

Michael Mark is a hospice volunteer. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Cutthroat Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Rattle, Spillway, Sugar House Review and TheNewVerse.News. His poetry has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. 

SING LIKE A PLANET

by Rose Mary Boehm





Our earth is humming.
Enormous, swirling loops of sound.
Very low key. Not for our ears.

The water churns against stone,
rocks move against rock. A potpourri
of vibrations--not concerned with the golden rules
of tonal phrasing--are echoed between mountains,
are bowled across oceans and penetrate tectonic plates.

Male humpback whales, the ‘inveterate composers’
of songs 'strikingly similar to human musical traditions’.
They sing only on calving grounds.
Very low key. Not for our ears.

We have organized sound and called it music.
Made it less daunting; ‘civilized’ what would otherwise
overwhelm. Millions of years of the planet's pulse
corseted into meter and tempo, pitch, melody,
harmony… an attempt to control our apprehensions.

Still, I turn my stereo to full volume. Vivaldi's concerto
for mandolin, strings and basso continuo
in C major will soon bring the neighbor
to my door complaining about that awful noise.


A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and a poetry collection (TANGENTS) published in 2011 in the UK, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a good two dozen US poetry reviews as well as some print anthologies, and Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet. She won third price in in the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (US), was semi-finalist in the Naugatuck poetry contest 2012/13 and has been a finalist in several GR contests, winning it in October 2014.

PYROTECHNICS

by Martin Elster
 

 
The heavens effervesced with smoke and noise
as spiders, peonies, and palms enthralled
the mobs of men and women, girls and boys,

but shocked the foxes, rabbits, deer, and mauled
the air like ack-ack fire. It spooked the bats
while coons abandoned kits and field mice crawled

down burrows. Even butterflies and gnats
behaved as if huge bolides overhead
were quaking space-time. Humans have their spats,

but this seemed more like war. Some birds dropped dead,
some lost their hearing; dogs were hit by cars
or disappeared, while other creatures bled,

pulled through and lived, disfigured, etched with scars
to face anew this fête beneath the stars.


Martin Elster lives in West Hartford, CT. His poems have appeared in journals including Eye to the Telescope, The Flea, Mindflights, The Speculative Edge, Thema, Victorian Violet Press, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere and New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Poetry Award.