HELL

by Clyde Always

Eight measly months remain until
the climate summit’s here.
So, highway builders of Brazil,
we’ve got a path to clear!
 
Go raze that swath of jungle there!
Knock down that açai!
How deeply, for the Earth, we care
the summiteers shall see.
 
We’ll labor on it, night and day—
our dying world be saved!
This road will be, it’s safe to say,
with good intentions paved.

Clyde Always is an accomplished cartoonist, poet, painter, novelist and entertainer. His writings and/or illustrations have been featured in Light Poetry Magazine, Freaky, Jokes Review, etc.  Visitors to Bay City are invited to enjoy his carnavalesque sidewalk show: a tall tale extravaganza known as the Surreal San Francisco Walking Tour.

ON EDGE

by Beth Paulson

NYT, January 14, 2025

It always was where urban met the wild
hilly interface of forest land and city
where on a clear day you could see the sea, 
where roads rose up or meandered into
the steeper, southern side of the San Gabriels. 
 
Today smoky air hangs heavy, sun’s blotted out
where avenues lined with old deodar cedars
grown tall, a firebreak for lucky residents
where we walk uphill from our saved home 
amid downed branches, dangling power lines.
 
The fireman on one corner let us pass
if we promised to head back to our car
down the next road. We don’t talk much,
know sirens in the distance signal fires
still spark and smolder east of Lake Avenue. 
 
Our block of Santa Anita escaped the fire
where this morning knots of neighbors gather
who surely know the line is thin and tenuous
between being a victim or survivor.
We bend to scoop up embers from the grass
 
yet around the corner a home burned to the ground.
A plume of burning gas marks the backyard,
ash pile with charred beams, blackened bricks,
twisted metal, a chimney all that’s standing,
a concrete driveway leading in and out.

Beth Paulson moved recently to Altadena, California from Ouray County, Colorado where she founded the Poetica Workshop, directed Poetry at the Tavern, and served as Poet Laureate. Her poems have been published nationally in over 200 journals and have four times been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.  Luminous (Kelsay Books, 2021) is her sixth collection.  

ON THE ROAD WITH MY GRANDDAUGHTER BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION

by Susan Vespoli

~Dedicated to the man who just macheted Trump signs in Yuma and then drove his car over them

Feeling cranky about mean election signs

along Phoenix streets that tell lies or say F**k 

one candidate’s prayers, (paid for by his Republican

opponent for Senate) yet finding myself laughing 

at the Hitler mustaches graffitied onto the upper lip 

of Trump and Kari Lake, I tell myself to breathe, 

ask my granddaughter about Addy, 

the 4th grade friend she calls talented. How so? I ask, 

and Molly replies, well, she can suck in her breath 

so hard her nostrils seal shut, and she can stand  on her head 

and balance her water bottle on the sole of one of her shoes. 

Did you see her do it? I ask. Yes, she nods. I exhale.

Susan Vespoli believes in the power of writing to heal. Her poems have been published in NVN, Rattle, ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other cool spots.

IN TIME

by Christopher Woods

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. His monologue show Twelve from Texas was performed recently in NYC by Equity Library Theatre. His poetry collection Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away is published by Kelsay Books.

DECLAIM

by Mark Svendsen

for the children

PBS, March 8, 2024

Standing at the crossroads, black with traffic

Waiting for the little green man to tell me I could go

When a child, quick as a nightmare, broke from its mother’s hand

Ran beside me, looking back at her, shrieking, into the road.

Without thought I dived, catching at the child

Bringing it to me and to its mother,

Just as you in my place would have done.

Sometimes, my people, your child becomes my child

Your love becomes my love

Your blood is mine.

But now! What are we thinking now, my people?

For years the children have played, been pushed

Into the middle of the road

And we have turned our face away.

But now, when we are forced to see them

When we are forced to see

We turn our face again?

What are we thinking my people?

Let tears wound our cheeks

For what we’ve done.

Let fear wound our minds

That we think so.

Tell me you love them my people, or I am lost.

Show me you love them my people, 

Or all we are together is gone.

Mark Svendsen prefers concrete to other more porous materials with which to pave his mind but, even then, cracks eventually appear and poems, like weeds of the mind, take root and must be dealt with summarily. He lives in Zilzie, Australia with his partner. There, she writes music, and he writes things – in an attempt to maintain homeostasis.

SONNET TO KEROUAC

on his centennial

by Bradley McIlwain

Kerouac@100: The Jack Kerouac Centennial Celebration in Lowell
The Jack Kerouac Foundation

The road narrows 

And widens again—

The horizon heroes 

Fill their flasks with zen;

Poet bums 

Seeking dharma 

In mountain slums—

Wisdom that Brahma 

Bore from the beating

Beautiful pavement of the road;

Slick syllables of sweat beading

From the body scroll:

When spirit meets sole

On the dusty paperback of the globe

Bradley McIlwain is a poet who seeks to capture the chorus and consciousness of the human experience. His work has most recently appeared in The New Verse News and the Origami Poems Project. In 2021, he edited the Arthurian literary anthology New Tales of the Round Table (2021). He is the founder of the independent  coffee project Roasted Poet Press. When not drinking coffee, he is hard at work on his first novel, an American motorcycle odyssey across the midwestern US. 

MANDATE

by Laura Rodley

My eyes see the road but my hands

steer the wheel, car ahead,

snow banks to my right,

more snow falling. It feels 

like a hundred years

now and still I have not

heard from you my daughter.

The daughter that was just a wish,

a dream, an incessant urge,

a tug to the infinite

and so I reached my hands

up and pulled you down

from clouds full of precipitation,

the month was November that

you were born, the isle of snow,

but conceived in February

on Valentine’s Day, my hands

full of the eyes of your father,

the sky filled with snowflakes.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and just off the press, As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

THE ROAD HOME

by Tricia Knoll

“Road Home Through Chaos,” Mixed Media Photo Collage with acrylic paint on museum standard stretched canvas by Kim Vergil.

Stop by the school; yellow crosswalk on the road. 

Road kill skunk. 

Stop light at the mini-mall. Squad car in the lot. 

Right turn lane to airport. Go straight. 

Over the freeway bridge, past the corn field on the left, 

  gravel pit on the right. 

Fleet of foot fox crosses the road. 

Half moon overhead. 

Up with the bright beams

to catch the RBG lace

I hung on the mailbox

to remind me

 

that going home

is not just a road, 

it’s a piece of mind. 

 

Slow for the turn 

to the gravel road

we’ll plow as needed. 

Peace of mind

in a moon cycle 

studded with stars

like the drones they flew

in the fireworks. 

 

Road home. 

Road home. 

I made it home. 

Tricia Knoll upgraded to cable news shows two months ago to watch election coverage. After a tense week post-election, the headline finally changed. A new President and Vice President. Whatever comes next, she feels at home again for the first time in years.

DAY RUNNERS

by Laura Rodley

Photo by the poet.

Graying, white foam kicked aside
snowplow’s blade scraping bottom
thrusting wave after wave aside
breaking tides over guardrail
back into the forest’s ledged shelf,
twenty miles an hour, speed of broken sleep,
catching waves solidified as snowfall,
driver dressed in buffalo plaid shirt,
no buffalo skin upon his lap,
pink salt swirling behind, above his exhaust pipe.
He must not reach his own edge,
maintain sharpness as he thrusts the blade
down Route 2, Greenfield to Williamstown,
and back again, coffee in his thermos,
another plow ahead, wave after wave,
cars in a line behind him, crawling.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner for her New Verse News poem "Resurrection," a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee, and quintuple Best of Net nominee, with work in Best Indie Lit NE.  Publisher Finishing Line Press nominated her Your Left Front Wheel Is Coming Loose for a PEN L.L.Winship Award and Mass Book Award. FLP also nominated her Rappelling Blue Light for a Mass Book Award. Former co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, Rodley teaches the As You Write It memoir class and has edited and published As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology volumes I-VI, also nominated for a Mass Book Award. She was accepted at Martha’s Vineyard’s NOEPC and has been a consecutive participant in the 30 poems in 30 days fundraiser for Literacy Project. Latest books Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing and Counter Point upcoming by Prolific Press.