WINTER 2045

by Steve Deutsch

We bought the corner place

on Burroughs Street—

I’m sure you know it—

a stately two story

built when the neighborhood

was only good for grazing cows.

 

It took two years of construction

now that the summer restrictions 

are in force. We replaced the windows,

added insulation and central air—

two bathrooms and a kitchen.

 

Only this week, we found our way 

to the attic. It’s a wonderland.

Skis and snow shovels

and sleds for children and adults.

And in two huge chests

clothing for a winter fashion show

on an air-conditioned stage.

 

It was cold here once—

although the children refuse

to believe it.

It was cold here once—

although I hardly remember.

Ice hung from the trees—

the snow so high

we could barely open our back doors.

 

My parents would go 

south for the winter—

to Florida or coastal Carolina.

To places first scorched then drowned—

to places now as bare 

as the surface of the Moon. 

 

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and is poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook Perhaps You Can was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length books Persistence of Memory; Going, Going, Gone; and Slipping Away were published by Kelsay. His book Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press and published in 2023.

UNNATURAL DISASTER

by Dick Altman

The U.S. Forest Service failed to consider how a changing climate could make the landscape more flammable, didn’t adequately estimate the risk of a controlled fire escaping and used incomplete weather information as a prescribed burn went awry and later formed the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, the agency said in a report released Tuesday. The 85-page report describes how federal fire managers, who felt under pressure to complete the prescribed burn while they had the available personnel, made miscalculations and overlooked warning signs—including low humidity, the potential for erratic winds on complex terrain and the heavy, dry fuel loads that could stoke a runaway fire. Although crews followed the burn plan, it contained flawed and incomplete analyses, and some guidelines were out of date amid a prolonged drought, the report said. The result: The prescribed burn ignited a wildfire that later merged with another prescribed burn to create the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, scorching 341,746 acres as of Tuesday and destroying hundreds of homes in a 500-square-mile area. Santa Fe New Mexican, June 21, 2022. Photo: Hot shot crew members keep an eye on a blaze June 15 as fire crews ignite the underbrush in an effort to contain the Pipeline Fire near Flagstaff, Ariz. (Rachel Gibbons/Arizona Daily Sun/AP via The Washington Post)

Northern New Mexico

Sixty days of flame—

and I watch the sky

as a sailor watches the sea—

for signs in color and wind

and heading—to tell me

how even the air tires

of hefting its load of ash—

of remains of homestead

and livestock—tall-pine

forest—tractor and pickup

 

Until you’ve seen

a high plains landscape

scorched into a nightscape—

a contagion of char—

blackness wherever you look—

you don’t realize what a task

to bend language

into a portrait of asteroidal

extinction—a voided canvas

of negative space that may

take nature forever—if ever—

to paint over and fill in

For friends who’ve lost all—

out of fire simmers the future

in a boil of uncertainty—

a rage smoldering in the mind—

no dream fully smothers

 

How can I with words reseed

generations of struggle—

sow trust that morning ignites yet

with sun’s benign fury—perhaps

not tomorrow—or the next—

but one day—amid sapling

of needle and leaf—short

grass prairie fed upon

by mother and calf—fields

you begin again to recognize

as the only soil you’ve worked—

and wept over—since you were

born

 

 

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad.  A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry forthcoming from the New Mexico Museum Press.