RE-FRUITING

by Regina YC Garcia 

Nolan Wells' tragic death joins a long list of Black youth whose untimely demises have raised urgent questions about justice and accountability. —MadameNoire, July 10, 2026

This tree smells oddly familiar

as worms peer up

from disturbed ground

This water sighs in sadness

as sealife swims unabated

and dark-bodies sink

This land heaves up old hurts

as mouths protest 

“All is well!”

(the lies they tell)

Regina YC Garcia is an award winning poet, language artist, and professor from Greenville, NC. Her published work appears in NCLR, Fiyah Black Speculative Lit, Soflopojo, Amistad, Elevation Review, Charlotte Lit, and others. Her first chapbook The Firetalker's Daughter published by Finishing Line Press was released in March 2023, and her full-length book Whispers from the Multiverse published by Aquarius Press/ Willow Books was released in February 2025.

FLOOD TIDES

by Adele Evershed

Mystery surrounds the appearance of hundreds of Victorian hobnailed shoes which have washed ashore on a beach. The black leather boots, thought to date back to the 19th Century, were discovered by volunteers cleaning up rock pools on Ogmore By Sea Beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, south Wales. Emma Lamport from the Beach Academy social enterprise which found the shoes said there was speculation locally that they could be from a shipwrecked Italian cargo vessel said to have struck nearby Tusker Rock about 150 years ago. —BBC, December 24, 2025

winter sea

cresting waves

of protest

 

The dregs of December wash up a cobbler’s lot of footwear—Victorian working boots, bloated with salt and hard labor. They’ve made a pilgrimage to Ogmore-by-Sea, walking on water, to reach the wrinkled sand.

Now they rest in rock pools with winkles and sea snails. Some are as black as Dad’s Boxing Day silence, some as tiny as a mermaid’s purse, some baring hobnails like teeth—leather tongues whispering their names to the slack tide.

They came ashore from a ship snagged on Tusker Rock—a floating cargo of tar-dipped ghosts, leaving out shoes for Christmas treats. If this was a kinder time, St Nick would fill them with gold and a life begun again. Instead, they’ll be gathered in sacks, tossed on the rubbish heap like all the other shoeless souls washed up on our beaches, their names known only to the high tide.

 

cold front—


a robin’s song 


crosses the border

Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Comstock Review, Modern Haiku, Avalon Literary Review, Black Bough Poetry and The New Verse News. She is the author of Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and has a forthcoming poetry collection, In the Belly of the Wail, with Querencia Press. She has published three novellas-in-flash— Wannabe and Schooled (Alien Buddha Press), and A History of Hand Thrown Walls (Unsolicited Press). Her short story collection, Suffer/Rage, was released by Dark Myth Publications.

A RECOLLECTION ON PEARL HARBOR DAY

by Katherine Leonard

It's blotchy the past

the silent man

in his uniforms

 

the child knows his withdrawn presence

but sometimes he would play

with her    for short bursts       when she was very little

 

he lived in a world of diesel and flame

oil and water mixed on the destroyer deck

bomb dropped where he stood 5 minutes before

 

gun turret melted metal and pieces of arm

face blood leg and black smoke

his men faceless except in his memory

 

daily    weekly            yearly the men lay 

submerged in his South Pacific 

they were with him through his submarine assignment

 

in the mouth of the River Kwai          bands of broken brothers

breaks the hearts of the survivors

breaking broken like metal shards 

 

until one day

that fragile plank holding those shiny dress

officer shoes broke

 

And he with that plank and metal splinters

sank too

consumed by the black rolling sea

 

of his mind now in command

of his hand

on the rope

 

Author's Note: Poem for my father, Commander Robert E. Leonard, USN Ret. who served in the South Pacific in WWII at a time when PTSD was unknown and silent men and women were numerous and all rejoiced mightily at the fall of fascism in Germany, in Japan and in Italy.

Katherine Leonard is the author of the chapbook Requiem for the Beekeeper (Bottlecap Press 2024). Her poems have been published in Sonora Review, Querencia Press Anthologies, Hole in the Head Review, Speckled Trout Review, FERAL, Allium and Stone Canoe among other journals and anthologies. She is a graduate of the Syracuse YMCA Writer's Voice (formerly Downtown Writers Center) Pro Program in poetry. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner. Her writing has been deeply influenced by time spent in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado for space and heat and Vermont and Maine for ice and clarity and by living in Washington, DC for lies and redemption. She is married to the woman with fire in her guitar.

AI SHANTY

by Joel Glover

LA Wildfires and AI’s Data Center Water Drain: The explosion of data center demand for AI use is draining water resources. Even with efforts to mitigate cooling demands, municipalities and companies struggle to find a balance. —Information Week, January 17, 2025. 

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And soothing rain is what we lack

[Verse 1]

There’s vapour in the atmosphere

And bubbles form, that much is clear

Pyramids and Ponzi schemes

Built on algorithmic dreams

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And the cooling rain is what we lack

[Verse 2]

Profits for some, for us the loss

Ice caps melted, no more frost

Towns in rolling blackout pall

No showers, storms, or thunder squall

[Refrain]

Oh, the sea was wide, the sun is high

The land is parched, the soil is dry

And clouds swirl over cooling stacks

And the cooling rain is what we lack

Former waiter in a Love Boat themed restaurant, reformed mandarin, and extroverted accountant, Joel Glover lives in the woods of Hertfordshire with two boys, one wife, and not nearly enough coffee. His poetry has appeared in oddball magazine, Little Old Lady Comedy, Radon Journal, 5-7-5 Journal, Epistemic Literary, Pulp Lit Mag, and As It Ought To Be. He published a chapbook Untimely Poetry, taking a cockeyed view at the news of 2024.

THE UNNAMED FIRE

by Alejandro Escudé

Dozens of beachfront homes in Malibu were destroyed overnight in the Palisades Fire on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025 (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

The hills were there, lichen green, and I felt the small 

ferocious animals scurrying inside of it. The coyote ever-present, 

ready to pounce on the owners’ three Shih Tzu. Sometimes, we’d 

housesit, and I’d lounge on the front yard overlooking the Pacific Ocean. 

It was as if I could dip a toe in the sea from that cliff, the ruffled white curve

as it wound north toward Malibu, an emerald land too close to call distant.

Now that street has turned ash gray, only the outlines of the lots remain,

that same coast like the edge of a puddle of spilled black ink. I recognize

the people who were caught in their cars, cars that were later plowed

to make way for fire engines and ambulances. The wind spoke in vowels

the night before last across my humble balcony that faces those smoky hills.

The sudden clanks. Buffering curtains. The canyons siphoning destruction.

One could imagine the homes as graves. Ash-people holding on to one another.

In ancient times no machine could whisk them away to safety. A volcano

of wind, torrent of melted metal. What powers do the digital towers have?

What future awaits those of us who traverse this playground of film and filth

and indifference, negotiating the enchanted brutality of this hardened city? 

One can read the scroll of the flames; they speak a crackling language,

letters made of embers. It rages on, the unnamed fire, it wraps itself 

in the gales. A migration begins along an avenue of burning palm fronds.

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.

ICARUS AWAITS A NEW YEAR

by Mary K O'Melveny

We’ve long been warned:

don’t fly too close, 

that sun’s too hot,

your wings will melt.

Yet here we are.

A NASA probe,

blinking distance

from spitfire flames,

solar winds, flares,

light speed heat spots

radiating

fiery dust rings.

As a new year

dawns, the Sun will

speak its first words.

Or will it sing

a scorching torch

song that sizzles,

blisters, sears, scalds?

What did we think

when we strapped on

those beeswax wings, 

leapt out as if

we knew our fate,

the sea Petral blue,

sun gold-glazed red?

Soon enough we 

will learn how far

desire can fly

before it burns,

descending like

a blazing star.

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.

KLAMATH RESURRECTION

by Pepper Trail

The Largest Dam Removal Project in U.S. History Begins Final Stretch, Welcoming Salmon Home. After being impeded by dams for more than a century, the Klamath River will be restored to its historic channel this year. —Smithsonian, January 22, 2024. Photo above by Pepper Trail.

When the dams rose, the river did not die
But lost its body, became spirit
Haunting the slackwater depths of the lake
Invisible beneath the dull skin of surface
For those long years, suspended, adrift
It awaited the touch of resurrection
The returning salmon, barred behind a locked door
While a new rabble stirred the helpless warmth
Bullhead and perch and pumpkinseed
Soft-bellied and sleepy in the stillness
 
Now, just now, the iron gates broken
The river is gasping back to life
Moving again time-withered muscles
Reaching blind careful fingers
Retracing its path through the canyon of mud
Remembering, curve by curve, its body
Its purpose, to move without stopping
To dance with the shapes of the land
To keep its ancient promise
To welcome the salmon, and meet the sea

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.

WHERE DO YOU GO TO DIE?

by Adele Evershed

Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran has said that she is "deeply worried" for her extended family in Gaza. Moran's mother is Palestinian and members of her family in Gaza are sheltering in a church after an Israeli missile struck their home. Speaking to the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire, she said: "No longer are people saying, where do we go to be safe? The question they are now asking is, where do we want to be when we die?" —BBC, October 29, 2023

to the sea
already so full of salt
so you become part of the ebb and flow
governed only by the mourning moon
and any tears shed lost in the tumult of waves
or crusted in the creases of a carcass 
left to rot on a far distant shore
 
to a rowan tree
already listing from the bombardment
so you can nourish the roots
that once nourished you
and the redness of your screams
can hang like a bloody reminder
of all the things you were too young to see
 
to the mountain top
with its beguiling back story 
so your shallow breath 
can dovetail with the off white clouds
and fall as gentle soaking rain
delivering an absolution
to those who have asked for none
 
or do you simply 
pick up a stone
and say…
I will not die today

Adele Evershed is a Welsh poet living in America. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Finishing Line Press published Adele’s first poetry chapbook Turbulence in Small Places in July. Her Novella-in-Flash Wannabe was published by Alien Buddha Press in May. Her second poetry collection The Brink of Silence is available from Bottlecap Press.

MEDITERRANEAN CORRIDOR

by Joanne Kennedy Frazer

From January 2023 to August 2023, inclusive, the UNHCR records that 2,314 people have died or been declared missing at sea on Mediterranean migration routes; the IOM similarly recorded 2,324 deaths or disappearances over the same time. —Wikipedia

For these burials     at sea

   the dead      are not sewn into sail cloth

 

No ceremony     no one prays over them

 

Their boat      converts to casket

      submerges     to a mass grave

                their last refuge

Joanne Kennedy Frazer (Durham, NC) enjoys spending her silvering years writing poetry and publishing in numerous anthologies, journals, and ezines. She has written two chapbooks. Most recently, Seasonings (Kelsay Press).

UNCOMBABLE

by Melissa Balmain

Locklan Samples, diagnosed with uncombable hair syndrome (UHS), a rare genetic disorder of the hair shaft.

Uncombable hair? Well, of course it’s a thing:

we’ve arrived in uncombable times

with uncombable dangers, umcombable ills,

and uncombable thought paradigms.

 

Nuts with guns are uncombable (so we’ve been told)—

we are doomed to uncombable grief.

Piles of nukes are uncombable; superbugs too,

and decay in the Barrier Reef.

 

Our hatreds? Uncombable. Ditto our loves

of red meat, SUVs, fossil fuel,

and the systems permitting too few of our kids

to be nourished and housed and in school.

 

Yes, it’s all so uncombable: that’s what we’ll hear

as we fall and the rising sea foams—

unless our uncombable powers that be

can agree on some new fucking combs.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic poetry. Her newest book of verse is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books). @MelissaBalmain

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.

HURRICANE WATCH, NEW ORLEANS

by Gail White

Mon., Aug. 30: Children watch reporters at a building collapse scene in New Orleans. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Someday only the divers

will visit New Orleans.

The church bells will ring under water.

Kelp will encircle the rusting wrought iron

like Mardi Gras beads.

The round-eyed fish will roam free

with no one to cook them with almonds.

Drinks are not on the house now, but under the sea.

Politics cause no fights. Who wins doesn’t matter.

The artists are gone. The rich and the homeless are gone.

The old jazz musicians have shut up their instrument cases

I will be one of the few to remember the days

of white-powdered beignets and coffee at Jackson Square,

and Jackson himself on a rearing horse tipping his hat.

And the bells of St. Louis Cathedral

will ring for mass under the sea.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

by Frances Davis

What does it matter?

When lighted days 

are shingled with dread

and hullabaloos have shifted

to groans and smirks?

 

We could capture it in a teacup

time’s familiar wastage, not of the essence.

Our measurements, dots on a dial

foolish in the planetary run.

Who will count the hours

When the sea rises to cover all?

Frances Davis is a journalist living in California where sea level rise is eating away at cliffs and buttresses hauled in to stop its encroachment. Harsh realities in hard times and we're wasting time with our clocks? Her essays, poetry and short stories have been published in The New Verse News and numerous journals and anthologies. See her latest short story in the enviro journal The Hopper.

BELOVED

by Doug Bolling

North wind just off the sea
Heavy freighters out there now
Slowing toward a final turn
To harbor and rest against an
Unforgiving roil and smash of
Moon bent wave.

Rest I think rest.
What does it bring to we the
Toilers whether far out or
Crouching beside the door
Of a virus caught loved one.
No answer that holds, no
Roseate bloom out of the
Shadows of a dirt laden
Tomb.

We have buried two and soon
The third.
John in his artificial sleep
Barely visible through the
Frosted window, single
Portal between death
And life,
So narrow the difference.

Only a month ago I stood as
John the mariner of seas
Of thought in endless books
And beyond paused in a
New York street to embrace
A begging man in thin coat
And desperate mien.

I believe money passed
Between two sets of eyes
Locked in some version

Of eternity. I witnessed
Hugs and tears in those
Sudden moments and the
Brief silence that speaks
Of a more, more, some
Mystery perhaps outside
The rumble and screech
Of profit driven days.

Eternity or not an old man
Trapped in an unseeing
Wasteland holds his stance
Winter or spring and the best
Friend I will ever have waits
For his final breath below
Clang and clatter of a
Temporary grace.

Doug Bolling’s poems have appeared in Posit, Basalt, Blue Collar Review, Kestrel, The Missing Slate (with interview), and Writers Resist among others. He lives in the outlands of Chicago.

WET PROPHECY

by Gil Hoy

Image source: Politics PA

The sea is calling for you, like the Devil.
Like the father you could never best.
Like the Heavenly Father, you could
never see. Davy Jones’s locker is not
just a kid’s game. You deservith its depths.


Author’s note: My friend Devon made me do it.

Gil Hoy is a Boston poet and semi-retired trial lawyer who has studied poetry at Boston University through its Evergreen program. Hoy previously received a B.A. in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University, an M.A. in Government from Georgetown University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a Brookline, Massachusetts Selectman for four terms. Hoy’s poetry has appeared (or will be appearing) most recently in Tipton Poetry Journal, Chiron Review, Ariel Chart, Social Justice Poetry, TheNewVerse.News, Poetry24, Right Hand Pointing/One Sentence Poems, I am not a silent poet, and The Potomac. 

SONG OF WATERS RUNNING RED

by Bill Sullivan

“Spirit, help me to see

their broken stories…”

                                                                   The Wound in the Water, libretto by Euan Tait.

And the oceans, seas and rivers bled, then and now.

                                  1

So many unshackled black bodies,
hauled topside, dragged to the rail like sacks
of trash, worthless cargo when breathless or ill.
Unshrouded, unblessed, tossed to the sharks.

Lost: your freedom, your fields, family, friends,
songs and dances, your chanted village score,
your matching parts. Separated and silenced
you descend to the unknown ocean floor.

                                    2
Now a coyote says, “This far and no further;
A raft is there by the Rio Bravo.” Death threats,
and poverty marched the family north to the churning
spring waters, hoping to elude the border’s net.

“We will not be separated, will stay a family,”
Mid river, the rapids sank the raft, the dream.
Four will never know the opposite shore. Lost—
father, daughter child, and infant, swept downstream.

                                  3
The Mediterranean Sea, the reddest of borders,
graveyard for countless non-Europeans fleeing torture
and war.  First an embrace from the host, then rejection.
For a time, heroic rescues at sea, then cessation.

Thank the Turkish soldier who kindly retrieves
the lifeless body from Bodrum’s shore, who cradles
Aylan, in his arms, a three-year-old Syrian Kurd. Mother,
sister lost at sea; only the broken father left to grieve.


                                           4
Who knows who first pressed the knife’s tip in, opened
the wound? But slave trader, captain and merchant pushed
it deeper.  And despots, dealers, war lords, smugglers twisted
it more than a turn or two—then, hope and story severed.

If you don’t turn your head, you will see children confined,
crying out for their parents, drowning in a sea of abuse,
but also gaze at the perp’s or the collaborator’s eyes,
black and blank, a passageway to the dying soul’s cries.

                                          5
The spirit, the sea—eternal and universal; every creature
a part of the tale.  The sea, the womb; life’s origins.
Joined, at birth, our ties soon severed by Mammon’s legions.
Exiles and lords, cast apart, songless in a wounded sea.

Who in that sea will sing the first note of the song
that sparks the afflicted, that turns the cruel and greedy,
that invites every voice to join, that note by note stops
the bleeding, purifies the water, rewrites the wrongs?

Bill Sullivan taught English and American Studies at Keene State College. He co-authored two studies of twentieth century poetry, co-directed two documentaries.  His poems have appeared in a number of print and online publications.  His Loon Lore: In Poetry and Prose was published by Grove Street Books in 2015. He retired to Westerly, RI and turns to the ocean and gardens when times turn bleak.