FEMA AND MY DEAD PARENTS

by William Aarnes

FEMA was authorized in 1979

 

Lately, it seems raging storms have gotten worse

and the news about people hunting FEMA agents

has me thinking of my parents, my father

dead six years before FEMA got funded,

my mother dead ten years after FEMA

began helping clean up Love Canal.

My mother voted Republican.

My father voted Democrat.

                        

When our house blew away in 1957,

FEMA didn’t exist, so my parents

                              

had no thought of receiving $750

to help them recover from our loss.

The window wells filled in a millisecond.

Lifted out of the garage, the Bel Air landed in the front yard.

Somehow the piano stood alone in the living room.

Only my bedroom retained all its walls.

                              

Neighbors we barely knew and lived

—their home untouched—a block away

offered a place to sleep (as if my parents slept).

The day after a volunteer van arrived, women

dressed as nurses offering to sell

egg-salad sandwiches. I was ten

and now don’t recall how long

it took my parents to contact

their insurance agent. The tornado

left us little. Picking through debris

my parents laughed empty laughs.

They could do nothing else but rent

an apartment while having our home rebuilt.

They could have used $750

(or whatever the equivalent

might have been back then). My mother

would have hated taking a “handout”

but would have claimed a little extra

as “rightfully” ours. My father

would have diligently filled out the forms

to apply for any additional funds

a federal agency might grant

to help cover some of any shortfall.

My mother, worried about her brothers’ farms,

continued to vote Republican. My father, in favor

of teachers’ unions, kept on voting Democrat.

If alive now, my mother wouldn’t understand

the telling and repeating of hateful lies.  

If alive, my father wouldn’t mind, too much,

being told he tends to condescend.

My mother would now vote for candidates

who support tax breaks for small businesses.

My father would vote for candidates

who support improving ventilation in every school.

They’d agree to give something to Planned Parenthood.

There’s rubble and there’s rubble; they’d agree

to contribute to the children in the Ukraine and Gaza.

They’d worry about where best to donate hurricane relief.

My parents would have welcomed FEMA’s help.

But lately, it seems, raging storms have gotten worse.

William Aarnes lived in Fargo, North Dakota in 1957. He now lives in Manhattan.

EARTH QUAKE

by Joan Halperin

                                                                                                                    

To donate to Haiti Earthquake Relief via CNN, click here.

As she usually does when we dine,

when we laugh and carry on,

Margaret says “and we sit here in our bubble

while Haitians scurry around the rubble

attempting to extricate their dead.”

 

None of us wants Margaret at our table.

 

We pause. What can we do to help?

Donate clothing, food,  perhaps even toys.

Margaret says “Nothing like that will stop their strife,

will stop a boy from devouring garbage.

A toy teddy bear never saved a life."

 

None of us wants Margaret at our table.

None of us want to devour our ice cream scoops.

but deep in us a desire to save  our neighbors,

deep in us a knowledge that we own too much.

 

None of us wants Margaret at our table

but she finds the timber, lights the fire

 

flickering, that small spark,

almost available to touch.

 

 

Joan Halperin has been published in Passengers, Confrontation, Persimmon Tree, and others. She lives and continues to write at Orchard Cove, a continuing care residence in Canton Mass.

AS TIME GOES BY

by DeWitt Clinton

 "A sigh is just a sigh."    

—lyric by Herman Hupfeld

Some of us may have made it, or we at least pretend

We have made it, though all of us know we’re just

Kidding ourselves, but what else is there now that

A few of us can fill our lungs without stinging bats

That somehow did not find their way down into us.

We could also take the next hour (day) (week) (year)

To remember all those who have fallen, who did not

Know what in the world was inside of them, but it

Was inside them, and many who were nearby have

Also fallen down, some in the most hopeless places

Of the world, and as well, some in the most luxurious

Rooms not everyone could dream about, but still,

It might do us all some good to just remember what

None of us could ever imagine happening just like

That.

DeWitt Clinton taught English, Creative Writing, and World of Ideas courses for over 30 years at the University of Wisconsin—Whitewater. He is a student of Iyengar Yoga, and occasionally substitutes as a Zoom yoga instructor for seniors in The Village of Shorewood, Wisconsin. His four collections of poetry include The Conquistador Dog Texts, The Coyot. Inca Texts (New Rivers Press), At the End of the War (Kelsay Books, 2018), and By a Lake Near a Moon: Fishing with the Chinese Masters (Is A Rose Press, 2020). A fifth poetry collection has been accepted by Word Tech Communications.

LONG AWAITED

by Imogen Arate

When the day comes

news anchors will 

imbibe on air

Doves will flock

to beat their wings

to the rhythm of bells

Clocks will spontaneously

chime to the relief

of nerves wound

too tight over fourteen-

sixty-one crawling days

caked to congeal in mud

slung by the barrel

Strangers will entangle

their gaze as momentary

lovers embrace compelled

by ecstasy that words 

from celebrated bards

will fail to capture

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of the weekly poetry podcast Poets and Muses. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her work was most recently featured in dyst, The Haifa Girls, and KJZZ's (NPR's Arizona affiliate) Word podcast.

I AM PUERTO RICO

by Kathleen A. Lawrence

Click to donate!

I am not an island

surrounded by big water

but shimmering shores

lapped by the tears of my people

I am not a dirty barrio
but a street strung

with a clothesline filled
with aprons and smocks

I am not mud caked

but the color of rich clay

and sparkling amber gemstones

I am not a gray swirl of storm
but a lovely ocean breeze

I am a centipede with countless legs
moving together to make repairs

I am the evening breeze
whistling come home

I am the chartreuse fern
bowing to our emerald palms

I am the indigo sky

fluttering like a dancing petticoat

I am the contented sigh

in our silver-edged moonrise

I am the sweetness

of our plump, clementine sun

I am joyful as I play
hide and seek behind
our rolling, laughing hills

I am strong like the backs of our beetles
I am flying with rainbow wings

I am as quick as our waterfalls
I am as spirited as the acid green coqui

I am Puerto Rico



Kathleen A. Lawrence has had poems published in Rattle (Poets Respond), Eye to the Telescope, Scryptic, Silver Birch Press, haikuniverse, Silver Blade Magazine, The Wild Word Magazine (Germany), Altered Reality Magazine, Undertow Tanka Review, Silver Blade Magazine, TheNewVerse.News, and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, among others. Recently two of her poems were nominated for 2017 Best of the Net awards, and another was nominated for the 2017 Rhysling Award of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). In 2016 she won third place for “Even Happy Ghosts are Scary Ghosts When You’re Seven” in the SFPA poetry contest. She was a Poet of the Week at Poetry Super Highway in January 2017.

PILING ON

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Proud heritage pitiful anti-natural disaster

Architectonic rumbling

Daily bread no longer given

Magical dragons entrapped snowbound lairs

Looking down from isolated heights

Precarious existence smothered by ash

Votive lamps churned buttery meltdown

Trackless Sherpa trails left behind

Empty void filled with tenacity

No vacancy guest houses demolished

Children used to nothing strangely

Making do with even less

Thankless volunteers sifting contaminated rubble

Bloodhounds sniffing vital heartbeat signs

Humanitarian relief anonymous god sent

Colorful life savers myriad flavors


No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 

GOOD NEWS

by Robert M. Chute

Source: Davos 15 - Agenda - World Economic Forum

Good news — bright motes afloat in the dark
stream of evening commentary. Bite bits about
those few who work dead water eddies, weedy
margins, bring relief to the poorest, the least.
They only ask that they may give, carry water
in a sieve and yet will shame use daily.

If you're waiting for The Coming you're too late.
That event is not unique but continuous,
goodness divided as were loaves and fishes.
These crumbly bits are all that we will get.


Robert M. Chute's book of poetry based on scientific articles, Reading Nature, is available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

MAYBE SANDY IS ANOTHER NAME FOR KARMA

by Ngoma

some say they should have
named her karma
i'm not sure
if she was a conspiracy theory,
or an act of god
bible thumpers called her
a revelation
a halloween trick or treat
a politician's opportunity disguised as disaster
some claim it was punishment for sin
but churches were flooded too
steeples and oak trees in the wind
proof that global warming deniers can't ignore
we could say I told you so
and maybe this is a wake up call
as roller coaster rides are buried in the flood
and marathoners take up hotel space
while many victims have no food
or a place to lay their heads
bodies still being found
in flooded burnt out homes
with no escape by subways
filled with water like underground cesspools
as Jamie Curtis talks about survival kits on Jay Leno
and tells us to donate money to the Red Cross
yet to show up in Mount Vernon
with gas lines around the block
for gas stations that are empty
meanwhile the major news media
act as though disaster only happens in america
as the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba
are ignored by major media
and there is no FEMA to guarantee votes for Obama on election day
suddenly we see what it may be like to live in a 3rd world country
where lack of gas and electricity is an everyday experience
and half the world is a disaster area
waiting for a relief concert to raise funds
that would not be needed if the wealth was redistributed
and warnings of global warming had been heeded


Ngoma is a performance poet, multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter and paradigm shifter who for over 40 years has used culture as a tool to raise sociopolitical and spiritual consciousness through work that encourages critical thought. A former member of Amiri Baraka's Spirit House Movers and Players and of the Contemporary Freedom Song Duo, Serious Bizness, Ngoma weaves poetry and songs that raise contradictions and search for a just and peaceful world. Ngoma was the Prop Slam Winner of the 1997 National Poetry Slam Competition in Middletown, CT and has been published in African Voices Magazine, Long Shot Anthology, The Underwood Review, Signifyin' Harlem Review, Bum Rush The Page/Def Jam Anthology, Poems On The Road To Peace (Yale Press) and Let Loose On The World: Celebrating Amiri Baraka at 75. He was featured in the PBS Spoken Word Documentary "The Apro-Poets" with Allen Ginsberg. Ngoma has curated and hosted the poetry slam at the Dr.Martin Luther King Jr. Family Festival of Environmental and Social Justice (Yale University, New Haven, CT) since 1996. He was a selected participant in the Badilisha Poetry Xchange in Cape Town, South Africa in fall of 2009. In December of 2011 he was initiated as an Obatala Priest in Ibadan, Nigeria.