DOES IT UPSET YOU?

by Mariam Saidan

After Audre Lorde’s “A Woman Speaks”

 

I have been woman

for a long time

youth was fragile

scary at times

most of the times

nonadjustable to 

the shape I was becoming.

Misunderstood I was.

Out of mind, troubled

when I didn’t quite like 

the safety of home, 

control or harassment. 

I died many deaths  

each time returning

with a new survivor in me.

Fear no longer suited me. 

I’ve grown into a 

thousand-year-old tree.

They cut a branch,

take a leaf,

it grows back.

It always grows back.

Try and take the sun out

of day. 

There are birds living in me,

one always sings,

and a fox curled up on the shed

just a stone’s throw away in 

my garden, looks at me.

Under my living room where 

I keep vases in different shapes 

and colours, painted and 

filled with wildflowers, 

there’s a cellar

and below that,

an ocean,

pounding.

With every tide 

I become water.

Offending waves.

Dramatic drops.

Vast freedom.

Bewildering imagination.

There’s no end to this thirst.

I’m not scared of pain,

it makes things interesting.

My eyes sometimes

look into yours,

but no, not asking to be

touched.

I’m here

to live this life

like no one but

the woman I have

become. 

I’m not ashamed to

drown in this sea.

Mariam Saidan is a Specialist Advocate for Women’s Rights and has worked as a Children’s Rights Advocate, studied Human Rights Law at Nottingham University (LLM) and Creative Writing at Kent University. She is Iranian, based in London, and has lived in Iran, France, and the UK. She wrote her first journal at 8 years old while living through the Iran-Iraq war.

JUST ONE WORD... PLASTICS

by Steven Kent

The plastic Trump straws being sold at $15 for a 10-pack. Photograph: Official Donald J Trump Store

Trump signs order to bring back plastic straws, claiming paper ones ‘explode’ —The Guardian, February 10, 2025

Exploding straws? A liberal joke!
   The Prez says with emotion--
More plastic now for Diet Coke,
   More plastic for the ocean.
Ecology's a Commie plot,
   An antiquated notion—
More plastic now for stuff we've got,
   More plastic for the ocean.
The EPA, the Silent Spring—
   Abandoned, our devotion.
More plastic now for everything,
   More plastic for the ocean.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer and musician Kent Burnside. His work appears in 251, Asses of Parnassus, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, New Verse News, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Philosophy Now, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry, Snakeskin, and Well Read. His collection I Tried (And Other Poems, Too) was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books.

MASSACHUSETTS MAN BUYS $395,000 HOUSE DESPITE WARNINGS IT WILL ‘FALL INTO OCEAN’

haibun by Jerome Berglund

with found prose quotations from headlines for the September 11, 2024 Guardian article by Maya Yang.

David Moot…

 

smoking with

the windows up

ball lightning

 

…nabs ‘dream’ Cape Cod home…

 

intelligent 

design 

splitting adam

 

…next to eroding cliff…

 

overcast 

a hot spot 

in the blues

 

…in imminent danger of crumbling…

 

we buy 

neglected properties 

skeleton key

 

“A man who says life’s too short…

 

under 

the rock 

hard fast rules 

 

…to resist buying a home that might fall 

off a cliff in a few years…

 

bible belt 

center 

mass

 

…has taken ownership of a house with a beautiful view…

 

stroke 

of luck 

arching back

 

…of the slowly encroaching ocean.”

 

three fingers 

the trees dropped are removed 

in the night

Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, Kingfisher, and Presence. His first full-length collections of poetry were released by Setu, Meat For Tea, Mōtus Audāx press, and a mixed media chapbook showcasing his fine art photography is available now from Yavanika.

NO SEATS AND ONE TOILET

by Susan Cossette

Challenger Deep, Hades Zone—

There are better maps of the moon and Mars.

 

Humans like superlatives—

Highest, lowest, longest.

Hubris.

 

We sit cross legged, barefoot—

watching for golden pocketwatches,

chipped china and worn shoes, 

footprints sunk in silent ocean sand.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

BLESSING THE ANIMALS

by David Chorlton

On and around The Feast of St. Francis, October 4 this year, many churches organize a Blessing of the Animals to which dogs, cats, bird, bunnies, ponies, chickens, and all creatures great and small are welcome.

Here’s a cat who’d take

the dinner from a china plate but bless

her anyway; she doesn’t know

the rules of etiquette. Consider the coyote

blessed when he stops in the middle of the street

and looks back at a pedestrian

his wildness has touched. Bless the starlings

who were fruitful and

multiplied from coast to coast, and bless

the common pigeon for

turning waste lots into food. Bless

the rattlesnake who curls up at a trail’s edge

by stepping carefully around him,

and save

for the jaguar who returns to

ancient hunting grounds

a special blessing that will follow him through

darkness. Shall we dare

to shower favor on the rats who climb the final

daylight and cavort

in yards and vegetable beds? Or spare

an extra prayer for the Great horned owl

when he is done with ferrying souls

to comfort and a resting place?

When the Cooper’s hawk is waiting

for a mourning dove, be generous as this world

in which an ocean is the predator

and a river is the prey.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and has shared home with many cats, birds, and occasionally dogs. The creatures who visit his yard appear frequently in his new book Poetry Mountain from Cholla Needles in Joshua Tree, CA., who also published the poems his white cat Raissa wrote in the late Clinton years (of a very concrete nature) in a little book called Gilded Snow along with her owner's commentary.

REFUGE SEASON

Art: Banksy, Mediterranean Sea View 2017, detail of a triptych. Photo courtesy of Sotheby's London via artnet news.

Adam Day is the the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

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.

ABBOTTS LAGOON, PT. REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

We lean our backs against
A bleached driftwood log
While we eat our simple lunch
And watch the Pacific
Approach and fall back
Approach and fall back
Like a shy teenager
Trying to work up the courage
To ask for a dance.
After our meal
We lie down on the sand
Our small packs pillowing our heads
Our sun hats covering our faces
And fall asleep
For a half-hour or so
Then awaken stiffly and reluctantly
Peering out from under our hat brims
At the glinting ocean,
Listening to the soft splashing
Of gently breaking waves.
As we yawn and stretch
Watching a plastic bottle
Wash up onto the beach
Our sleep-scattered thoughts
Slowly pull themselves together
And we feel the return of grief
For all that is being done
To our wracked and battered Earth,
Our fears for us all
Flooding our hearts once more.
We stand up, hoist our packs,
Brush off the sand,
Take a few deep breaths of sea air
For the road,
Then head out across dunes and pastures
Back to our car
And back to the global struggle
To repair a world out of whack.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesdayand others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

MY MOTHER’S OCEAN

by Bill Meissner

vis Giphy

I can never take just one photograph of
the ocean. The cerulean waves are too
lovely, too graceful, tumbling gently over themselves,
then turning to foam that kisses
the sandy lip of the world.
There are no other words for it—this
huge and endless ocean’s rise and fall, this
rocking back and forth, back
and forth, the way my mother used to

hold me when I was a small child, afraid
of the oncoming storm.
The brittle window glass rattled, but
she rocked me, and replaced the thunder
with a humming, a lullaby
that rose and fell.
It’s a melody I would,
as the years passed, remember,
then forget, then
remember again. There are no words

for this song my mother sang, her liquid voice
small, but still filling the room,
overpowering the fists of wind and stabs of lightning
with a language I couldn’t understand

at the time.
One single photograph
is never enough. I know now
that there is beauty in the things that are
closest to us, and beauty in the things
that we lose. She

is gone now.
But as a wave lifts itself and rolls
toward me, then bows down and becomes
a wing of bright diamonds,
I stand again on this shore, without words,
my bare feet sinking into
the hourglass sand,
and wait for that song to wash over me.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry.  His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.

MIGRATIONS #1

by Judith Partin Nielsen

Shifting Perception, painting by Jay Alders

                                                                                                  In Memoriam
                                                                                                  José Angel Alfano Solana


We crossed over the border
I won’t say how
and what can I say of
freezing desert nights
black sky blazing stars
then searing, burning sun
tearing into flesh
relentless, relentless
the walking, and fear
then- - - - - - -running, running
as sand clouds appear
against the far sky
running, running- - -and then
I lost you and Juan and
the girl running, running
and falling face down
breathing sand and
dreaming, dreaming of naranjas and
water, rain falling and
phantoms unfurling like giant
sails across the desert floor
and the pounding, pounding of
ocean waves in my ears
and then- - - - -the face, the face
of El Senõr

                                                                                                 

Following a trail of words, mountains, spirit and tears, Judith Partin Nielsen, writer, mother, wife and eventually psychoanalyst left Texas for Colorado in 1985. "Freud said 'everywhere I go, the poet has gone before me.'  May we keep following those footsteps on our paths thru the worlds."

THE LAST BRIGHT MOTES

by Devon Balwit

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real and that he is “studying” whether the United States should withdraw from the global warming agreement struck in Paris a year ago. —Washington Post, December 11, 2016

The feather star unfolds itself forward, frond
            after frond, like an Escher stairway,

impossible, yet in perpetual motion, somewhere deep
            off the coast of Thailand, unaware

that protection of its ocean has been handed
            to the oil-hungry, who will crack

the sea floor until it oozes black, until such creatures
            dance only as bright motes in memory,

those who love them too weak to halt the juggernauts
            of greed and indifference.

Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. She has a chapbook Forms Most Marvelous forthcoming from dancing girl press (summer 2017). Her recent poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News before as well as in numerous print/on-line journals, among them: Oyez, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, The Cincinnati Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Timberline Review, Trailhead Magazine VCFA, The Prick of the Spindle, and Permafrost.

DONALD TRUMP, KATE MCKINNON, LEONARD COHEN

by Jaimee Hills





Are people safe? You've struck a chord
as we become an angry horde.
Appreciate the optics, now you’ve stopped her.
With painted signs, they chant, they sing,
the minor crowd, assembling,
as cloudy skies compose a helicopter.

A vote inside a vote machine
meaningless but for what it could mean
felt like gambling in a bankrupted casino.
The votes rolled in, in waves like water;
the careless don’t care about my daughter,
heat rising like the shock of jalapeño.

Though someone else's dream is you,
dream on we do, dream on we do,
hardy as the gardens of Pompeiians.
The flowers find the seasons strange,
there’s a changing to their change,
squalled shorelines and the stooping Himalayans.

It’s not illegal just to breathe.
We’ve always struggled. Always seethe.
It feels the wind is howling, blowing through you.
Within the ocean's current form
a shifting rage, a stirring storm,
the bitter burning tongue of Hallelujah.


Jaimee Hills is the author of How to Avoid Speaking, winner of the 2014 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She has been a featured reader in the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She teaches at Marquette University and lives in Milwaukee, WI.

THE BLOODIED BOY AND THE GAMES

by Jay Sizemore





Can you hit the water like a knife,
so sharp and so quiet
it remains oblivious to the stabbing?
          No somersaults by choice.
          Every building a potential grave,
          a rubble of tombstones disarrayed.

Can you run faster than death,
with a nation of gasps
riding your shoulders and spine?
           Here, a gold medal for a sunrise.
           We wipe the blood from our eyes.
           We dig our children free of debris
           and carry them like bombs.

Are you sure you picked the right God?
Has the arrow loosed itself
from behind your ear
and found the center of the universe?
Doesn’t the ocean sound like applause?
           There are so many that are lost.
           Their names vanish like landscape details
           pulled further and further away.
           This fog makes blind strangers of us all
           bruised bodies hurting to be touched.

Is the world watching?
I’ve balanced my entire life
upon a beam no wider
than the average human foot.
I’ve turned myself into a compass,
a needle floating inside a leaf.
I’ve conditioned my frame,
hardened my senses
through repetition,
becoming an instrument
of precision
lifting fighter jets
up over my head.
Will you fold my indiscretions into a flag,
while a black man bites the curb,
and forgive me for being great?
             Stare into his eyes.
             Dark as polished stone,
             the blank gaze
             of a shell-shocked child,
             his blood dried to his cheek
             like an unwanted birthmark
             not given at birth.
             It’s no mistake that the human heart
             is larger than a grenade.
             Are you sure you picked the right God?


Jay Sizemore writes poetry and fiction. He has been  published in places such as Rattle, McNeese Review, Jabberwock, and Crab Orchard Review. He lives in Nashville, TN.

PREDICTION

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Coral reef scientists estimate that mass bleaching has killed 35% of corals on the northern and central Great Barrier Reef. After months of intensive aerial and underwater surveys, researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies have released an initial estimate of the death toll from coral bleaching. The impact, which is still unfolding, changes dramatically from north to south along the 2300km length of the Reef. “We found on average, that 35% of the corals are now dead or dying on 84 reefs that we surveyed along the northern and central sections of the Great Barrier Reef, between Townsville and Papua New Guinea,” says Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (JCU). “Some reefs are in much better shape, especially from Cairns southwards, where the average mortality is estimated at only 5%. —ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, May 30, 2016

A child, I dreamed of a metropolis of no kind I knew.
I can figure it out later, I said. Then came the boutique shoes.
What did I understand about those except to say no?
Over the tulle, I turned up my nose.

I spoke from the temple of childhood, from the fever-dream of growing up,
predicted no water to drink, more lost land, moaned, it will all
be gone soon—Saks Fifth, the city pool, the Port O’ Call, ousted
like Clyde Beatty's circus and its lions--to make room for other recreations.

In my first home, they taught fashion which is disguised prejudice
and manners which are mostly separation and meanness.
But what is my recollection? I was all mouth and adolescence.
I had yet to learn only compassion with gravy on its chin will sustain us.

And could I have dreamed an ocean stilled by its freight of CO2,
its islands of plastic? No. I could never imagine saltwater
stretched over  uncountable suffocated lives could not
foretell the piled and boundless bones of coral ravaged by a yacht.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and write in the Ozarks. She is the author of two books and three chapbooks, most recently Persephone on the Metro. See her work in Concis, Rat’s Ass Review, Mom Egg Review and upcoming in the Kentucky Review.  

VILLANGHAZALLE WITH FAUNA

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    at brilliancy of colors bleached to white;
    rage, rage against the dying of the coral reef.
 
elkhorn, staghorn, pineapple, red cauliflower, mushroom, precious red, blue, organpipe, star, brain, torch, cup, sun, bubble, cactus, column, finger, flowerpot, pillar, table, tube, stone, fire

    Before we've even plumbed the trove of life
    that shelters there, prey to manmade blight,
    we rampage, rampage, killing off the coral reef.

purple stovepipe sponge, striped cleaner wrasse, batwing coral crab, slipper sea cucumber, tomato clownfish, yellow nudibranch, magnificent feather duster, nurse shark, marine iguana

    At last we claim the ocean as our fief;
    ours is the absolute, God-given right
    to wage, wage war against the coral reef.

blue spotted sting ray, saddleback butterflyfish, sea whip, chambered nautilus, variable boring sponge, regal tang, purple sea urchin, olive ridley sea turtle, acropora crab, sharpnosed puffer

    When Gaia bore us, she produced a thief
    who, armed with outsize trawls and dynamite,
    would stage, stage the dying of the coral reef.

harlequin shrimp, reticulate brittle star, somber sweetlips, blue-ringed octopus, loggerhead turtle, minifin parrotfish, brown volcano carpet sponge, orange fireworm, flamingo tongue cowrie

    our legacies (and may our time be brief)
    of plastic scum and seas acidified
    presage, presage the dying of the coral reef.

deceiver fangblenny, chicken liver sponge, Christmas tree worm, yellow-bellied sea snake, zebra shark, flying gurnard, sunflower starfish, leafy sea dragon, spiny lobster, zooxanthellae

    The news continues dire, with no relief,
    no end to blind rapacity in sight.
    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    but rage, rage against the killing of the coral reef.


Esther Greenleaf Murer is a relic of the 20th century.  She was brought up on Thornton Burgess's Seashore Book for Children and has a lifelong interest in invertebrate paleontology. 

A MAN BURNED ALIVE IS REINCARNATED AS A FIREFIGHTER

by Jay Sizemore

Ocean of Fire by Gate to Nowhere at DeviantArt

Kinship with ash,
he once wept smoking a cigarette.
Why do my tears smell like gasoline?

Nightmares in orange,
he’s sweat enough to saturate cities.
Sometimes, he dreams he is Joan of Arc.

Skin charred like paper,
blood still escapes
through the cracks, a dark syrup.

His armor gets heavy,
breath shallow in the smoke,
searching for survivors,

he loses his voice,
feels his ashen jaw come unhinged,
remembers the prayer he muttered

before first touching the flame:
Let me live again
as an ocean avenging an effigy.


Jay Sizemore brought the high-five out of retirement. He did not graduate from college, and is personal foot masseuse to his lovely wife. He knows the words to almost every Ryan Adams song. You can find his work in places online and in print. He lives in Nashville, TN, where music goes to die. His chapbook Father Figures is available on Amazon.

SHUTDOWN

by Sara Berkeley

Image source: nationalparks.org

The day the government shut down
the ocean showed up for work.
They put some barricades up
but waves kept coming in, unfazed.
The toilets were locked
and the barricades went up
to stop the people coming in to the park
but we went early, before they closed
the National Seashore, and I can attest
that the seals and the pelicans
and the small fish and the birds that eat them
kept coming back for more.

The waves were giving it their all,
rending the heart of the beach in two,
throwing their violent weight around
while Congress ran aground;
the rush of foam and fuming toil
of the wind blowing spume back
from the crests as loud as the silence
along the corridors of power,
the sand hot beneath our feet,
the water silvery gold, the gulls
laughing and crying as we were
laughing and crying too.

Pelicans flew as low as they dared
we reckoned they hadn't heard
that the government was hung -
hoist by its own petard -
that they'd put some wooden barriers up
to stop the tourist cars
from visiting the National Seashore
while well beneath the roar of the breakers
tearing up the shale
and the keening wail of the gulls
the day was a good day, ungoverned,
lovely, full of miracles.


Sara Berkeley was born and raised in Ireland. She has had five collections of poetry published, one of short stories, and a novel. She has been widely anthologized, including in the Harvard University Press An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter, dog, cat, guinea pig, and varying numbers of fish. When she is not writing poetry, she is a nurse for traumatic brain injured patients. She is well ready for the shutdown to end.