ODE TO PROGRESS

by Tim Walker

Where are the mayflies of years past?
Or their descendants for that matter,
missed for many a May? But hey, at least
our windshield’s free of bug splatter.

Are night-blooming plants bereft of pollination
by moths confused by light pollution?
Praise be to LED lights, so productive,
we splurge on ever greater wattage!

And how does the little busy bee
keep up morale in its collapsing colony?
Being a social insect is overrated, vastly,
like being a seed-dispersing beasty.

The plants will learn to do without them.
We’re all tightening our belts. In the long run
we’ll concoct “honey” from sorghum
and petroleum byproducts, Amen.

Tim Walker read, for pleasure, the complete novels of Charles Dickens while earning a BA in Environmental Studies, and the complete novels of Anthony Trollope while earning a PhD in Geological Sciences, and has worked as a computer programmer, healthcare data analyst, used book seller, and pet sitter. He lives largely in his own head, while he corporeally resides in Santa Barbara with his son Dana and their cat Cassiopeia. His essays and poems most recently appeared in Harpy Hybrid Review, 3:AM, Fatal Flaw, Rock Salt Journal, and are forthcoming in Sneaker Wave Magazine and TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes.

HEALTH ALERT BULLETIN CONCERNING CAPITOL CLIMATE CHANGE

by Lynne Barnes

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Be advised:

 

Now is a time of high stress.

It’s in the air like smoke and ash.

You must mask while you’re out

and get inside as soon as you can.

 

Get inside circles of humans who see, know

who you are, circles of people who allow you

to share your emotions and thoughts.

 

Sharing inside circles of trust

can boost your immune system,

help neutralize the pollution

of this air we are breathing now,

 

air hazy with particulate matter of fear

that has come upon us suddenly

in this last half of

the month of January, 2025.

 

Take care.

Lynne Barnes is a retired psychiatric nurse and librarian who has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Her poetry memoir, Falling into Flowers (Blue Light Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

TO THE PLASTIC I SHARE THIS BODY WITH

by Laura Grace Weldon

Microplastic Pollution Is Everywhere, Even in the Exhaled Breath of Dolphins —Discover, October 28, 2024

You and your kind have been with me since 

my teething toy days. Since doll faces kissed

and freeze pops squeezed from clear cold tubes. 

 

Since hand-me-down raincoats and Halloween masks. 

Since yogurt cups and zippered sandwich bags.  

You’re in my clothes, my water, my breakfast. 

 

I now know you’re in my blood. 

In everyone's blood. 

In our breast milk, brains, muscle, hearts. 

 

You are carried in the bodies of snowy owls and orcas,

bonobos and brown bears and baobab trees.  

You are exhaled in dolphin breath. 

 

You ride through air and oceans, ride through us. 

When we die, you will persist

for thousands of years.

 

We humans dream of leaving a legacy  

but not like this. 

Not like this.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Wayeditor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. 

MEAL FROM HELL

by Kay White Drew

AI-generated graphic from Shutterstock for The New Verse News

Mash together lies and conspiracy theories,
minced fine. Knead graft and greed
until soft and pliant. Chop bodily autonomy
with the knife of corrupt judgment
on the devil’s cutting board. Peel
rights and freedoms inexorably,
till only slivers remain,
then boil what’s left in oil.

Serve on a platter made of microplastics,
fossil fuels, and radioactive waste,
to all those white supremacists who dare
to call themselves Christians.

Pour the dish, still piping hot,
over their heads.

Kay White Drew, a.k.a. Katherine White, M.D., is a retired neonatal physician. Her essays, poems, and short stories appear in several anthologies and online journals; an essay in the Loch Raven Review was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her memoir Stress Test came out on 6/4/24. She lives in Rockville, MD, with her husband.

DEAR JASON ALDEAN

by Laurie Rosen

In my little town there were

moms at home doing laundry,

schools we could walk to,

one car in every driveway, sometimes two. 

Our neighborhoods teemed with children —

kick ball or wiffle ball in the middle of the street.

There was a bowling alley, ice cream parlor

and golf driving range, 

In my little town there were teachers 

who required us to memorize poems, 

write haikus, read Icarus, Hiroshima,

Shakespeare and the Bible. 

And in my little town, a football coach taught 

health class. A young teacher who spoke

openly on the VietNam war, civil rights 

and the slaughter of indigenous people

was disappeared, replaced

by an elderly retired teacher who bored us 

with dates and white washed facts,

screamed at us to pay attention. 

Our only lake, once a summer retreat, 

was declared a Superfund waste site. 

There was rampant drug and alcohol abuse, 

breast cancer, brain tumors, overdoses and suicides. 

In my little town, mostly white and Christian,

we sang China Town is Burning down, 

during recess, to the tune of ring-around-the-rosy 

at the one Chinese American boy 

in our third grade class, who stood

off to the side, while we held hands 

and skipped round and round.

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in The Muddy River Poetry Review, Peregrine, Oddball Magazine, Gyroscope Review, The New Verse News, The Inquisitive Eater: a journal of  The New School, One Art, and elsewhere.

WHAT TO DO WITH MY DEAD BODY

by Lois Wickstrom

At his funeral, CJ looked as if he would sit up and laugh when he thought we had grieved enough. He wore his best suit and his best grin. But he never ate a bite of the food we brought. Nobody alive could have resisted that long. Nobody is that good at playing dead.

The casket, the rented hall. It’s all theater. Being dead doesn’t require props or an audience. When I’m dead I don’t want anybody to doubt it.

My mother was cremated, at the lowest priced place she could find in the yellow pages. My brother sprinkled her ashes beside one of her favorite mountain streams.

The smoke from cooking her dead body turned the air gray. I do not want my last act to be pollution.

At the green burial grounds, each corpse is wrapped in a shroud of cotton, and buried six feet under.

I like the idea of being eaten by worms. My corpse does not need a room of its own.

During the yellow fever, more than 10,000 bodies were piled up and buried together in what is now the parking lot where I worship. Being dead has not changed. Being buried means the same.

After embalming wears off, caskets corrode, and worms eat us, we will all become fertilizer.

Why wait?

As soon as I’m dead, throw my remains in the composter. Twirl the knob and spread my loam in the nearby woods. When all my organic parts have been consumed by new growth, layer new dead above me. And let them rot.

Lois is a former science teacher. She has written a series of science-based folktales, and turned some of them into plays. In each modernized tale, the protagonist achieves a better ending because of learning scientific principles. Lois likes to garden, ride her bike with her husband, cook, and she votes in every election.

LIGHTS OUT

by Alejandro Escudé

In 2014, Los Angeles cut its annual carbon emissions by 43% and saved $9 million in energy costs by replacing the bulbs in more than half of the city's street lamps with light-emitting diodes. That year, the Nobel Prize in physics went to three scientists whose work made those LEDs possible. "As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources," the Nobel committee explained when it announced the award.... But that's not how Ruskin Hartley sees it. "The drive for efficient fixtures has come at the expense of a rapid increase in light pollution," he said. Hartley would know. He's the executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association, or IDA, and he's one of a growing number of people who say the dark sky is an undervalued and underappreciated natural resource. Its loss has detrimental consequences for wildlife and human health…. "We've taken a lot of the energy savings and just lit additional places," Hartley said. It's a classic example of the Jevons paradox, in which efficiency gains (such as better automobile gas mileage) are countered by an increase in consumption (people driving more often). —Phys.org, September 23, 2022. Photo Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

There is nowhere on the Earth left for the human being.

We’re too blue and too bright, we (how to put this?)

destroy the night. It comes to me now, the cruise ship

I was on, northern Mediterranean, lightning-streaks

across the dining room windows as we ate, Titanic scene,

the ship listing to and fro. I went out to see it, to take in 

the storm and the ship’s lights were laying like a mermaid’s

gauzy hair across the tossing waves. I’d be shamed

by many others simply for recounting this trip, mocked

for excursions, games, scheduled meals. I’d think 

of Odysseus in Sicily, duping the Cyclops, hiding his 

men beneath the curly warmth of sheep. Sometimes, 

I also want to hide that way from the weaponizing shame

humanity turns against itself—more lethal than nuclear

weapons, toxic as a leaky oil tanker. We recognize

the firelight and so does the snake, the shoreline plover, 

but we choose the incandescence of daylight at night.

I have been in the center of my worldly city, lost in

absolute darkness, unable to walk my dog, a block

away the foraging lights of shark-like airliners taking

off into the gridded coordinates of the briny sky.

Shall I leap back into my Neanderthal skin yet eschew

the Sahara rat for the naked leaf? Shall I bore into

the ground, further and further, as the rich climb 

diamond-encrusted staircases into Olympus-sized

homes? My children are not guilty of the bright light!

My planet is not above me, and it isn’t below me,

and it’s certainly not flat. I eat LED light bulbs for 

a midnight snack, looking out over the shellshocked 

tapestry, basking in the sky glow, so I may light

the places within me that don’t need to be seen.

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.

MY HEART GOES OUT

by Joan Mazza

The morning after the storm. Photo tweeted by @miguelmarquez.

to those many people who lost

their homes, flattened and inundated

by Hurricane Ian’s smack down.

To people sifting through mud

and debris to salvage what’s useful,

from homes without roofs.

The videos and photos are published

of houses floating away, smashed.

Pets gone. My heart goes out

to the people of Pakistan weeks

after one third of their country

was flooded and now their children

are dying of cholera. Swathes

of forests have burned all over

the world. Whales are eating

plastic because the ocean is full

of it. Covid isn’t over. People

are dying every day, gasping

for breath. My heart goes out

to those too cold or too hot, breathing

mold or dust or smoke and ash.

For my friends Shaun and Karen

in a marathon to outrun cancer.

For Charlotte who said goodbye to her

beloved hound Maggie after sixteen

years. For everyone suffering

as humans always have in a world

that throws us beauty and abundance,

love, pleasure, and plush comforts,

leaves us anticipating, eager for more,

and then snatches it all away.

My heart goes out to you, to us. 

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops  on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self, and her poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Poet Lore, Slant, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia and writes every day.

THE GREAT PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH

a mirror poem

by Elise Kazanjian

What were we all thinking?

An abandoned fishing boat  toothbrushes

six tons of gill nets   toys   lawn chairs   plastic

containers   a three and a half ton  mysterious object twenty

feet wide six feet high   shoes    millions miniscule plastic waste bits    trawling

booms   plastic rods  tires   huge foam buoys  stewing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch three 

times the size of France  growing every day    in 2009 the non-profit Ocean Voyages

Institute’s 132-foot sailing cargo ship begins removing plastics from the ocean    

many of us move mouths    jaw about oceans     threatened oceans that give

life to all creatures    oceans once polluted can not be salvaged   

What were we all thinking?

 

What are we all thinking?

The oceans once polluted can not be salvaged      so many creatures

humans    given life    many of   us move mouths        jaw about oceans     threatened    

in 2009 the  non-profit Ocean Voyages Institute’s132-foot sailing cargo ship

begins removing plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch three times

the size of France   growing every day   millions miniscule plastic waste bits     trawling

booms   plastic rods    tires   marine debris  stewing with lawn chairs    

plastic containers   a three and a half ton mysterious object twenty

feet wide six feet high    shoes   toothbrushes    six tons

of gill nets    toys   an abandoned fishing boat  

What were we all thinking?

Elise Kazanjian’s poems have appeared in Fog & Light: San Francisco Seen Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here 2021; the Marin Poetry Center Anthology 2022, and others. She was Foreign Editor, CCTV, Beijing; has been a San Francisco pawnbroker; and is Co-Judge, Prose Poem, Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition.

COWS WHO DIDN'T JUMP OVER THE MOON

by Dick Altman

Jason Grostic's cows are tame and relaxed on his small Michigan farm. But after repeatedly testing his farm for PFAS chemicals in biosolids applied to his fields, state officials stopped Grostic from selling any meat or cattle from his farm. Feed grown on his farm is contaminated as well, and he's having to buy feed for the herd he can no longer sell. (DTN photo by Chris Clayton) —Progressive Farmer, May 9, 2022

After euthanizing several thousand contaminated cows, Art Schaap is losing not only a once-thriving dairy farm but a place where he and his family have lived for a quarter-century. He has no choice, he said, because the polluted runoff from Cannon Air Force Base that tainted the groundwater, soil and his livestock with cancer-causing chemicals has left Highland Dairy in Clovis [New Mexico] an empty shell… Schaap euthanized 3,665 dairy cows in phases over the past four years, when he first learned they’d become contaminated with PFAS from drinking polluted groundwater. PFAS is short for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Dubbed “forever chemicals” because they last indefinitely in the bloodstream, PFAS can cause increased cholesterol, reproductive problems, impaired immunity and cancer. Highland Dairy, a 3,500-acre farm, is a casualty in an ever-growing environmental and health issue as PFAS increasingly turn up in public drinking water, private wells and food. —Santa Fe New Mexican, May 19, 2022

Hey, diddle, diddle.

The cat and the fiddle.

The cow jumped over the moon.

Except the bovines,

all thirty-six hundred,

who couldn’t overcome

pollution’s deadly gravity.

Who weren’t invited

to your last barbecue.

Whose cream didn’t fortify

yesterday’s Frappuccino.

 

Hey, diddle, diddle.

The cat and the fiddle.

The cows who didn’t

jump over the moon,

died rife with PFAS,

“forever chemicals” etched

into their bloodstreams.

Cholesterol/reproduction/

immunity all impacted.

Cancer lurking.

 

Hey, diddle, diddle.

The cat and the fiddle.

The cows who tanked up

on PFAS-ed groundwater.

Who drank the brew/runoff

of airbase firefighters practicing

with PFAS-laced foam.

The entire herd euthanized/

farm closed/soil toxic.

PFAS showing up

in public drinking water,

wells and food.

 

Hey, diddle, diddle.

The cat and the fiddle.

The cows’re all dead.

No place to rest/exit.

Oh, just this once.

change the flight plan.

Let them jump on the moon—

rather than over it.

 

Dick Altman writes in Santa Fe’s high, thin, magical air, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. The Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Haunted Waters Press, and many others have published his work in the U.S. and abroad.  A poetry winner of the Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems, Voices in the Heart of Stones and Telling the Broken Sky.

MICRO-PLASTIC CURRENTS

by Virginia Aronson

Autumn sky unfurls a white cloud balm

between the splash of forget-me-not blues;

the sea's hand welcomes us to calm,

her salt tang warming as it soothes.

Fish chew our feet, nibbling dead skin,

crabs' little pincers that make us laugh;

we wade out, sink, rise up deeper in

the lap of our mother, her womb a bath.

Wide-winged osprey dive down to warn us

over and over their sharp, bitter cry:

destruction from that which will soon engulf us—

ill nature, yes; and we too shall die.

What is so small we know not its weight

building up, amassing—until it's too late?

 

Virginia Aronson is the Director of Food and Nutrition Resources Foundation. Her novel about food and climate change, A Garden on Top of the World, was published by activist press Dixi Books in 2019. Dixi also published Mottainai: A Journey in Search of the Zero Waste Life.

GOODNIGHT EARTH

a cautionary tale, a cry from the heart,

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

after Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

“Goodbye Earth” by Satovi at Deviant Art.

The fires, floods and extreme weather seen around the world in recent months are just a foretaste of what can be expected if global heating takes hold, scientists say, as the world’s leading authority on climate change prepares to warn of an imminent and dire risk to the global climate system. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will on Monday publish a landmark report, the most comprehensive assessment yet, less than three months before vital UN talks that will determine the future course of life on Earth. —The Guardian, August 8, 2021

Goodnight Earth

So blue and white

We’re sad to leave

Your days so bright

And starlit nights

Goodnight Earth

We cannot say

We did our best,

Now there’s no way

That we can stay

Goodnight raging forest fires

Goodnight rising seas

Goodnight melting glaciers

Goodnight honey bees

And so much more than these

Goodnight to the children

Who never breathed clean air

Who ate contaminated food

And didn’t have a prayer

Of a world that was fair

Goodnight to those who fought

For justice and equality

A return to wiser ways

Of diversity and sanity

And universal community

Goodnight friends and loved ones

Goodnight plants and beasts

Of our little planet 

That we caused to overheat

And otherwise mistreat

We won’t be coming back

We had our chance and blew it

Our story has a moral

But no one left to listen to it

(Or again to misconstrue it?)

So goodnight creek

Good night birds

Goodnight music

Goodnight words

Goodnight window

Goodnight door

Goodnight slippers

On the floor

Goodnight games

Goodnight toys

Goodnight girls

And goodnight boys

Goodnight chair

Goodnight spoon

Goodnight stars

And goodnight moon

Goodnight lark

And owl and thrush

Goodnight old lady

Whisphering Hush

Goodnight Earth

Buff Whitman-Bradley’s poetry has appeared in many print and online journals.  His new book is At the Driveway Guitar Sale from Main Street Rag Publishing.  He podcasts poems on again, memory, and mortality at thirdactpoems.podbean.com and lives with his wife, Cynthia, in northern California.

HERE WE ARE

by Dan Brook 

here we are

we must do

what is difficult

we must do

what is necessary

we must be

we must be

the bay

polluted & pissed in

used, abused

trying to support life

we must sustain

we must be

the rainforest

slashed & burned

choking, smoking

trying to breathe

we must regenerate

we must be

the ocean

jumped in & dumped in

crashing, thrashing

trying to wash

we must cleanse

we must be

the Earth

ridden roughshod

quaking, spinning

trying to survive

we must live

we must be

the worm

stepped over & on

wiggling, wriggling

trying to burrow

we must be humble

we must be

the other

feared & hated

mistaken, misunderstood

trying to communicate

we must be compassionate

we must be

democracy

inefficient & empowering

attacked, defended

trying to survive

we must act

we must be

ourselves

proud & vibrant

scarred, scared

trying to be

we must be better

we must be

who we are

together & alone

all of us, together

trying to thrive

we must be the best us

Dan Brook teaches in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at San Jose State University and is, most recently, the author of Sweet Nothings (Hekate Publishing).

GAIAN LAMENT

 by Catherine Gonick

Source: The Washington Post

            after the hypotheses of James Lovelock

 

The world is broken, the body of the single, gigantic animal

we have become is breaking, we don’t have much time.

The ancient organs and elements hold—

earth is still surface, water deeps, fire burns

in the center, and black space is encircled

by a ribbon of air—but it’s all sick

with wildfire fever, the atmosphere fills

with phlegm, the oceans with pharma,

indigestible soil starves and infects

flora and fauna, both wild and domestic,

our hearts ache, livers swell, lungs become fibrotic,

oxygen fails. Our science was too romantic,

our technology too rude. We looked out

as far as we were able but forgot

the unexpected we couldn’t measure.

The earth would do just fine without us,

and the other animals won’t care, unless perhaps

our dogs. Some of us always knew

we’d end badly, at the end of some endless

kalpa, the death of the last of five suns

carried by snakes of fire. But we expected

a respectable cosmic decline, not this mess

we designed. And yes, science has been

a disappointment. Who wanted to know

the limits of our filtering senses? How much further

we’d have to take our tools, if we can? Intelligence

would be better if purely artificial. Upright posture

and hands made us always want to leave home.

 

Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly,  Lightwood, Forge, Sukoon, and PoetsArtists, and in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, and forthcoming, Poemas Antivirus. She was awarded the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the National Ten-Minute Play Contest with the Actors Theatre of Louisville. She is part of a company that fights the effects of climate change.

YOU SHOULD WRITE A POEM, YIAYIA—MY GRANDCHILDREN TEXT ME

by Pamela Devereaux Wilson

our well stopped working five days ago
i hand-pump water from storage containers
boil for cleaning, food prep and drinking
flush toilet with a pail

the physical work, breathing hazardous wildfire ash
that coats and clogs my mask as temperatures reach 80
advised to stay indoors but i pray best under the old apple tree
today we are told we have the worst air quality in the world

500,000 people, a tenth of Oregon's population, evacuated
when they go home, will they find piles of smoldering ash
where their lives were once lived and fulfilled
22 missing at least 10 dead

millions of acres of Oregon's Cascades blackened for years
i may never see it green again nor walk forests of wade rivers
when rains come, hillsides will flow into rivers—crisis within crisis

many are water insecure - travel miles for water
dwindling or polluted sources
greed, corruption—survive every day without potable water

drenched in this heat, breathing ash-filled air
my dog won't go outside
my head aches constantly—i don't have water—I can't breathe

in tears i rage—i can't fix anything for anyone right now
do you know how much five gallons of Costco water costs

so i haul, pump, boil, cool and pour water
write this poem for my hopeful grandchildren
full of spunk, promise and joy yet I shall not
share the despair this poem sings --
                                                                                             without clean water
                                                                                          without breathable air life
                                                                                              stutters stumbles dies

Pamela Devereaux Wilson lives on acreage north of Corvallis in the Luckimute Watershed. There she gardens, continues to learn about herbal medicine and writes. As she ages, changes, uninvited and unforeseen have begun to shape her writing but the influence of her grandchildren has been a steady force.

A NIGHT AT THE RNC

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

Oh, say can you see, by dusk’s dimming light, fake news spewing from the worst on the right, from the Senate’s blind mice, ignoring all vice, the children in cages, the jobless... no wages, federal troops, crushing protest groups, voters’ hopes flailing, domestic terror prevailing.  Oh say, can you see, by dawn’s angry red glare, pollution and hatred on the air, in praise of T***p’s props and photo ops, truth denying, the sick and dying, our worst fears rearing, Kent State reappearing.

Aging rapidly, alternately sad, and depressed, Lucille Gang Shulklapper is at other times the fortunate author of numerous poems (a dozen or so published in TheNewVerse.News since 2008)and stories, as well as five poetry chapbooks and a picture book. She recently started a program in her residential community titled Edgewater Poets, giving seniors a voice on a community channel as well as the staff employed there. 

BETWEEN THE LINES

by Paul Smith

The Trump administration last Thursday announced the repeal of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other bodies of water. The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past two and a half years. … An immediate effect of the clean water repeal is that polluters will no longer need a permit to discharge potentially harmful substances into many streams and wetlands. Photo: An oil rig docked in Sabine Pass, Tex. The repeal means industrial pollution will be able to flow more freely into waterways. Credit: Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times, September 12, 2019

Overturning the US Waters rule of 2015
Betrays our country’s best instincts to preserve our
Assets – streams, creeks, rivers, waterways, but
Many of us believe this is a smokescreen, a hidden
Agenda to repeal everything that came before 2016

Paul Smith is a civil engineer who has worked in the construction racket for many years. He has traveled all over the place and met lots of people. Some have enriched his life. Others made him wish he or they were all dead. He likes writing poetry and fiction. He also likes Newcastle Brown Ale. If you see him, buy him one. His poetry and fiction have been published in Convergence, Packingtown Review, Literary Orphans, TheNewVerse.News, and other lit mags.

AWOKE

by Lauren Haynes

Masks for everyone!
The tycoon flatters with free gifts
and they applaud his charity, a champion
of the working class.
Silk blindfolds for sleep
to lull leaky minds
that would spill ideas
and bleed tears of a dream blinked free
to see
the man licking the doorbell
of someone else’s home
a distraction, the war of words
forged to subvert the fact that
over there, the water runs radioactive
and there will be no food on the table
no books for learning—no, call me fantastic/look at the snow,
battles waged with flags waved by hands that will never know
the meaning of their colors,
hands held up by bodies that tremble with hunger, with fear.
Tomorrow is here, but we look away from the mirror.
So much unexplored universe out there . . .
we starve. we starve. we starve.

Lauren Haynes is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. She worked as an English school teacher for years and seeks to contribute to a better world.

CALIFORNIA STATEWIDE FIRE MAP, AUGUST 2018

by Ron Riekki

Source: CAL FIRE

for Zachary Schomburg and Nick Flynn

“Where the hell is global warming?” —DJT

“The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” —DJ Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three


I used to sit on the shore and watch the waves,
but now the shore is closed and the heat waves

and I’m seeing death in the woods and feeling
death in the air and hearing death on the radio

and knowing death is lurking next to Death so
that there are two deaths everywhere that I look

at all times and the death is the death of booths,
the death of voting booths, the death of all

of the animals near the voting booths and in
the voting booths, except there are no voting

booths anymore, just the rigor mortis of these
electoral colleges that are universities with no

freedom of speech unless you count death
speech, the threats to countries, when we don’t

want to concentrate on the fires, on the air
outside of my apartment right now with its 154

red listing of unhealthy and main pollutant:
atmospheric particulate matter, which really

means death but we can’t say death when we
mean death, and what I mean is the newspapers

are having the headlines of California Ablaze
except that we’re told all media is fake that

death is fake, although here we’ve had more deaths
from forest fires in the last year than in the last

decade combined and we are becoming the last,
with the death taste in my mouth—can you

taste it?—The cereal I had this morning was death
brand.  And the milk was death.  And the bowl

was made out of death and I ran after my death-
bus but missed it so I walked through the forest,

a shortcut, except the deer were on fire and my
head was filled with the particles of death

because death is made up of the little things,
the smallest moments of ignorance, the tiniest

bits of hate, until they pile up and I just read
the graffiti near my apartment: CALIFIRENIA

with dotted capitalized Is in cartoonish flames
and 1.4 million acres is burning in thirteen

states with the third-degree burns of the earth’s
crust, the earth’s nerve endings being destroyed,

its skin swelling, the way these wounds tend to heal
poorly, and the heat is a death and the death is a heat

and this is not theater but rather our lives, my life, your
life

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

OUR FAR-FLUNG FOOTSTEPS

by Devon Balwit




I came for the beaches but stayed for the O rings,
for the liter bottles, tooth brushes, buoys and bags,
for the shush of takeout boxes at dusk.

I came for the palm fronds shivering like dancers’
fingers but stayed for the orange-pinafored crews,
rubber-booted, working against the tides.

I came for the frigate birds and brown pelicans
but stayed for the seals strangled in rope,
for the whales, gullets splitting with PCBs.

I came for the once-in-a-lifetime memories,
the honeymoon and anniversary, but stayed
for the imprint of kin, our far-flung footprint.



Devon Balwit lives scarily close to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. She has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.