OIL COUNTRY

by Pepper Trail

 

 

 

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.  

STANDING UP, POURING OUT

by L. Lois

Vancouverites rallied at the U.S. Consulate [last month] to protest the imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports. —City News, March 4, 2025

runways paved through city
blocks for us to walk
places to put our protest
cars stopped
by the coupling of bodies
massing to chant
the poison must be choked
 
texting the message
email chains binding keyboard wrists
worn raw by tyranny
feet shuffling out the door
marching down
cement plazas giving way
to anger echoing between the buildings
 
hubris weights its own downfall
compassion and arrogance
feel the same in a cold heart
the court jester turns to inform
sacred trust scattered across ballots
gathered by the greedy
presumes civility requires passivity
 
voices lift
to swing their signs
feet pound
freedom's patience
taxed and thin
hydrants knock open
spewing cleansing

Author’s note: As a Canadian, I will be joining the April 5th mass movement by gathering with other concerned global citizens outside the US Consulate in Vancouver, British Columbia.

L. Lois lives in an urban hermitage where trauma-informed themes flow during walks by the ocean. She is pivoting through her grandmother-era, figuring out why her bevy of adult children don’t have babies. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Breakfast, Open JA&L, Fictional Cafe, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Washington Square Review, Sparks of Calliope, and other literary publications.

REQUIEM FOR THE CANADA WELL

by Tricia Knoll

in memory of Rachel Corrie

Lying semi-conscious… is nine-year-old Yunis Jumaa, who has cerebral palsy… His mother Ghanima says eight months of war have dramatically worsened his health. "When he developed this malnutrition and dehydration, he became as you see him now," she says. "There is no bottled water. The children walk a long distance—when they get water it reaches us contaminated," she adds. —BBC, June 21, 2024

On Friday, I discovered a video posted on Instagram by an Israeli soldier from the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, showing the calculated demolition of a chief water facility in Rafah…The water facility, also known as the Canada Well, is situated in Tel Sultan Neighborhood, in the western part of Rafah city. U.S. human rights activist Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer while attempting to prevent demolitions in the city, spent much of her time during the last month of her life helping to protect the municipality workers at the Canada Well. The workers were repairing damage done to the well due to the Israeli military bulldozers in the area, according to Gordon Murray, one of her fellow activists. —Younis Tirawi, Portside, July 29, 2024

To know the land, dig for water.
An angel found Hagar at the well.
Stories told of Rebekah and the women
coming together where the pool stills,
the well fills in slow rising. To find
stillness and life. Safe haven. Give me
something cool to drink. I will love you.
Be my oasis. Honor the flow of vows. 
This is the spirit of life. 
 
And now, quiet municipal services:
no sirens. No flashing lights. Backhoes
attending to unanticipated main breaks,
diggers repairing the aftermath 
of earthquakes. Repair. Filter. Deliver. 
 
Villains poison the well.
Cruelty blows it up—
we are told from old times
women gather
to carry water home
again and again
going to the well. 

Tricia Knoll worked for a municipal water utility for fifteen years, including emergency response to New Orleans following Katrina to help restore drinking water service. In 2024, two new poetry books were published: Wild Apples (poems of downsizing and moving 3,000 miles to Vermont) and The Unknown Daughter (27 poems of voiced personas responding to a Tomb of the Unknown Daughter).

DATA AIN’T WISDOM

 by Anita S Pulier

Project 538, July 10, 2024

Even a perfect census will not put out the fire
burning in the Nationalist heart.

Nooses, confederate flags,
swastikas

stoke a malicious wind,
tease stray embers ablaze,

decency, fairness torched,
the dead mourned in time

to welcome
the next batch of flatliners,

school children hiding from bullets,
dead folk in synagogues, movies or concerts,

and caravans of the desperate who
wonder how close to an embryo

must one be to claim the right to life?
America, dear,

our once noble experiment
is choking on the foul air

in the autocratic wastebin of
greed and bigotry.

Sure, we will count heads,
tally up racial ancestry,

count votes,
count the dead, but will we learn

why, oh why, are so many
sucking the poison

from the orange beast’s burning breast
while Momma’s milk curdles and dries up?

Anita S Pulier’s chapbooks Perfect Diet, The Lovely Mundane and Sounds of Morning and her books The Butchers Diamond and Toast were published by Finishing Line Press.  Paradise Reexamined came out in 2023 (Kelsay Books). Her new book Leaving Brooklyn is due in Jan '25 from Kelsay Books  Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and her work is included in nine print anthologies. Anita has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily.

THE CONVENIENT WIFE

by Elisabeth Frischauf

cartoon by Bill Bramhill

Pockets strife

Shoulders the blame

Picks up the stain

For anyone

Fanning the flame

Against husband’s fame

Deep in her bosom

Buries misdeeds

Twitter poison feed

Lucky this man

Justice of our land

Whose wife

With bravura and passion

Hangs

Our stripes and stars

Upside down

Elisabeth Frischauf is a psychiatrist, grandmother, and visual artist in many media: ceramics, collage, mobiles. Poetry is intimately bound up with her art.  Being multilingual and anchored in two cultures—the family homeland in Austria and New York City— enriches all her work. Her epic narrative memoir poem, They Clasp My Hand, short-listed for the Austria Literary Prize, was published in April 2022 by the Theodor Kramer Verlag, Vienna, Austria. This book is in process for on demand, English only, by She Writes Press.  Two more memoir verse books are in the publication pipeline.  She publishes poems in various on-line magazines. She lives with her husband, playwright Richard France by a lake in Putnam County, New York.

REQUIEM FOR PABLO NERUDA

by Donna Katzin

Fifty years on, the true cause of death of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, in the wake of the country’s 1973 coup d’état, has remained in doubt across the world… On the evening of Sept. 23, 1973, the [Santa Maria] clinic reported that Mr. Neruda died of heart failure. Earlier that day, he had called his wife saying he was feeling ill after receiving some form of medication. In 2011, Manuel Araya, Mr. Neruda’s driver at the time, publicly claimed that the doctors at the clinic poisoned him by injecting an unknown substance into his stomach, saying Mr. Neruda told him this before he died… On Wednesday, The New York Times reviewed the summary of findings compiled by international forensic experts who had examined Mr. Neruda’s exhumed remains and identified bacteria that can be deadly. In a one-page summary of their report, shared with The New York Times, the scientists confirmed that the bacteria was in his body when he died, but said they could not distinguish whether it was a toxic strain of the bacteria nor whether he was injected with it or instead ate contaminated food. The findings once again leave open the question of whether Mr. Neruda was murdered. —The New York Times, February 15, 2023

“Mi deber es vivir, morir, vivir.”

My duty is to live, to die, to live.

—Pablo Neruda

At your home Isla Negra,                                              

guides showed us your collections

of sea shells, butterflies and poems,

shared that when, in your hospital bed,

you heard the comrade president had died,

you closed your eyes for the last time  

as the waves wept.

 

 

Half a century later, your comrades

in the science of life and search for truth

exhumed your body from the sleeping earth,

discovered the poison injected in your stomach

by doctors of the dictators—

a burning serpent sent

to seal your lips.

 

 

But, comrade poet, your words

carry us on wings of awe—

beyond despots, toxins,

solitude and silence—

to liberated zones of our

imagination, hope and love                                 

as tireless as an ocean of stars.

Author's note: Isla Negra, today a museum, is a seaside former home of Pablo Neruda, where for years staff had quietly shared with visitors the popular belief that the poet had died of grief when he overheard the news that General Pinochet had taken power and that his friend President Salvador Allende had died.

Donna Katzin is the founding and former executive director of Shared Interest which facilitates access to credit for low-income Black Southern Africans. She co-coordinates Tipitapa Partners which helps feed and empower impoverished mothers and children in Nicaragua, and she serves on the board of Community Change in the U.S.  She is also a contributor to The New Verse News and author of With These Hands, poems about the "new" South Africa giving birth to itself.

PLEASE

by William Aarnes

poetry makes nothing happen 

          —W.H. Auden 

 

poetry is never really part of anything 

          —John Koethe 

 

It can kill a man. 

          —Wallace Stevens 

 

                         It is difficult

to get the news from poems

          yet men die miserably every day

                                            for lack

of what is found there. 

          —William Carlos Williams 

 

Of course, there are other ways 

to kill—a knee pressed down 

on a neck; a quick, hard shove 

 

off a subway platform; a swerve 

onto a sidewalk; a brick 

dropped from a roof; the slow, 

 

sure work of something tasteless 

stirred into a sauce; a knife  

stuck through a partner’s heart... 

 

—but guns are so easy to have  

on hand they’ve help us fall  

into the habit of reaching for them 

 

to win lost arguments  

or end marriages or conclude 

our own lives by aimless firing 

 

into crowds.  Having guns around, 

has moved us to elect whoever  

will pass and keep in force  

 

permissive laws meant to insure  

we’ll need guns to defend each other  

from gunfire.   

 

                       So can someone  

 

please post the poem everyone 

(even readers who prefer 

firing guns to reading)  

 

will want to share with friends  

because the poem’s so compelling  

about how we need justices 

 

who think laws must meet 

standards suggested by the phrase  

“well regulated militia” 

 

and (in a brilliant burst  

of well-targeted words)    

about how it’s criminal  

 

not to make crimes committed  

with guns the responsibility  

of not only the culprits but also  

 

the weapons’ makers and dealers? 

 

Please, someone, that poem.  

 

Stop me from buying a gun. 

William Aarnes lives in New York.

THE SUPREME ABORTION

by Lavinia Kumar 

Supreme Court says it can’t determine who leaked draft Dobbs opinion. 

—The Washington Post, January 20, 2023

No one

Confessed or squealed

The babe was dripped, not leaked.

Did the French letter have a hole?

Don’t tell.

 

In Court,

No leak of Roe—

No trust in settled law.

Was the IUD aborted?

Don’t tell.

 

The pill’s

Bitter poison

Sure to gag young women.

The law’s cold still-birth not controlled?

Don’t tell.

Lavinia Kumar’s latest book is Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists—very short prose of near 90 amazing women writers, poets, publishers, painters, artists, abolitionists, early suffragettes, and activists.

INSURRECTION MALAISE

by Tricia Knoll

Image via Getty Images.

I watched that mob with confederate flags 

use their poles as stabbers. I thought we could never

get beyond this, never heal, and their coiled timbersnake

curled all too ready to deliver poison. Threat 

on glaucous yellow background. 

 

I thought we would never get beyond this.  

My stomach seized. Like when the towers fell. 

How tear gas billows as if the theater director

called for high-tone smoke and no going home

with a program in my pocket because warplay 

has no script apparent to the watchers 

even if the actors think it does, yell

bad dialogue in murder tones. 

 

I thought we would never get beyond that. 

The next morning’s coffee bittered as if exposed

to air too long and even the cream wasn’t enough

to settle me. Then sugar dumped from a big spoon,

and more sugar from the same spoon, same mug.

It was not the same as getting through this. 

One minute of sweetness at the bottom. After 

in the morning joe. One at a time. 

Tricia Knoll is busy writing letters to Republican Senators about why they should vote to impeach. The fear on insurrection day was built on lies.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE?

by Joan Mazza

If you were raised by and/or married to an abuser,

I know you are suffering tonight. I see you. I feel you.

We are going to rise up and take the mf down.

      —Pam Houston, public Facebook post, Sept. 29, 2020

Didn’t watch, didn’t listen. I went to bed early,

held on to the clarity earned by a day of writing,

reading, an online poetry class. I drank a lot

of water, pondered what I’ll eat for my next meal,

folded clean sheets, made notes for poems. I wasn’t

online during the chaos and shouting, refuse to expose

myself to a bully’s tactics of distraction and lies—

dominance devices with attacks on the other’s

character that show the lack of dignity and inability

to reason. In the morning, I watch one clip before

I’m fully awake, read Facebook full of horror

at this clown of hokum who signals to racists, white

supremacists, and the Proud Boys to be ready to foment

a civil war. Sometimes it takes only one morsel of food

to know it’s poison. Sometimes one sentence makes you

back away and lock the doors of your heart and head. 

In peace and security, ten days ago I voted.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist and psychotherapist, and has taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her poetry appears in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The MacGuffin, and The Nation. She lives and isolates in rural central Virginia.

GOODBYE, CHARON

 by David Spicer

Charon, no converted souls await you on this side 

of the river. Guided by your two ugly thugs,

Klaus the Klansman and Hector the Hell’s Angel,

you frighten the depressed night with amber hair,

its illicit brilliance shining for your devoted

minions with the dull transience of a caution light.

Charon, no new naive souls clamor for you on this

river side. Your boat collects water every time you                      

row down its waves, long ago bereft of their blue,

now shadowed by our despair. We hear your entreaties,

Charon, but your words are empty as our dead skies.

We see your eyes shine with the chaos of conflict,

but we tire of them: no more limber sycamores

bloom in the daytime. We know when the darkness

appears that you are here, your loud presence deaf

to our ears at this late date. Each of us dies, Charon,

but, if we see our end near, we want a fresh ferryman     

to steer us to our side of the stormy river that rises:

Your speeches are lies, you have cheated the taxman,

we do not need your worthless coins to hide our eyes.

Soon morning will wake and we shall demand you

depart our banks, leave with your henchmen, and veer

near the poison side of this river, where your fate awaits:

your reckoning, your trials that you have forever evaded.

David Spicer has published poems in The American Poetry Review, CircleStreet, Gargoyle, Moria, Oyster River Pages, Ploughshares, Remington Review, Santa Clara Review, The Sheepshead Review, Steam Ticket, Synaeresis, Third Wednesday, The New Verse News, Yellow Mama, and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart twice, he is author of six chapbooks and four full-length collections, the latest two being American Maniac (Hekate Publishing) and Confessional (Cyberwit.net). His fifth, Mad Sestina King, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press.

TRUMPNACHT

by Sonya Groves

Residents gathered this month on a corner in Coquille, Ore., in anticipation of rumored (nonexistent) busloads of antifa activists.—“When Anifa Hysteria Sweeps America” by Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 17, 2020. Photo Credit: Amy Moss Strong/The World

And when shall Kristallnacht occur and whose bodies will he pull into the street...black, brown, bilingual, dual citizen, naturalized citizen, undocumented, Democrat, liberal, atheist, poor...how shall he kill us, with the good book in his hand, with the poison on his tongue, with the chaos that follows him, snaking through our fiber pipes dumping hate, candy from a dispenser? When shall our night of terror begin or has it come and gone and we dying in our walled ghetto from tear gas, spittle from his unmasked minions, and ignorance on how to turn it off, turn it all off, walk into the light and reach for a hand out of the pit and onto the surface of compassion. Because we are dying down here, I am dying down here and the bodies are piling up, up so high he never has to see anything, anymore.

Sonya Groves is a teacher in San Antonio. She has poetry publications in over 20 journals, including  TheNewVerse.News, La Noria, The Voices Project, Aries, Carbon Culture Review, and FLARE: The Flagler Review.  Currently she is pursuing her PhD at The University of Texas San Antonio.

HOURS OF LEAD

by Susan Gubernat

                                                            This is the Hour of Lead –

                                                            Remembered, if outlived… Emily Dickinson

Lead that grazes the mouth of a child, bloodies her.

Lead she drinks down from her little cup of water.

Lead spewed at one another instead of spit

(though the spit too finds its target).

Lead they load, reload, load, reload

Lead soaring like an earthbound bird emboldened

by flight. Lead sinking to the bottom of a pan

boiling away on a kitchen fire. But can

a mother ever make the bath safe again?

As lead rains hard, can she throw her body in 

the path of the boy being eyed by lead,

stalked by lead, prey to the beast of lead?

The lead in the man’s pockets weighs him 

down like coins he thinks he must spend

to grow lighter. He pans the river for lead,

curses crowds with his shower of lead.

Underground, the dark pipes groan with lead.

Above, the air clamps shut with a seam of lead.

O lead, where is thy sting? There

and there and there.            Here. 

Susan Gubernat’s latest book The Zoo at Night won the Prairie Schooner Book Award from the University of Nebraska Press. Her work has appeared in many publications. She lives and works in the SF Bay Area.

IN THE NEW CLIMATE

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

This is what it looks like when national parks are sacrificed for a #borderwall. Footage at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument via Kevin Dahl, NPCA Arizona Senior Program Manager pic.twitter.com/VE9UKziPzl

— National Parks Conservation Association (@NPCA) October 4, 2019

no need to migrate, so geese fly laps around the county
lake to lake at dawn, louder than garbage trucks.

A friend makes a demon cozy, so she doesn’t always have to face it.
She can know where it is even if she doesn’t know what it is

unlike mosquitos with valises full of Eastern equine encephalitis
come to visit. Swatting lunchmates, even on the face, becomes socially acceptable.

A friend draws stories with her own language of shapes not everyone can read.
That’s okay. Lilacs do not bloom this year; there is a mid-April blizzard.

Fawns come to the door wanting the cat to play.  Children holding hands
walk across a lake of grass. Yard lights never let the trees sleep, not deeply.

A friend grieves deeply and with laughter, at once. She raises monarchs
and tonight the government will poison them as well as mosquitos.

On her balcony flickers and doves fight squirrels and raccoons for seeds
and a little honey.  Tomorrow the butterfly rain.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske most recent book is Art Speaks with painter Mary Hatch. She tries to live outside as much as possible while owning a house.