ON THE ARRIVAL OF MOSQUITOES IN ICELAND

by Pepper Trail

Iceland reports the presence of mosquitoes for the first time, as climate warms —NPR, October 22, 2026

The ice is going, the ice of Iceland

Gone are the herring and the codfish

What we harvest now are tourists, so many

They fill the high tower of the Hallgrímskirkja 

They fill the restaurants, avid for puffin and whale

For bits of fermented shark, all those bygone tastes

And following them, now the mosquitoes have come

Carried north on the world’s sickly southern breath 

Bringing us a different misery than those we loved

Thirsting for a taste of our unmoved Nordic blood

Yet still, we are given our island’s dark comedy

The earth opening and closing beneath our feet

And above, through our unbroken nights

Wavering curtains of unearthly light

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.

INTIMIDATION AND BLACKMAIL FOR THE PURPOSE OF TAKING OVER THE WORLD

by Terese Coe

Watch for the multiple rows of replacement teeth,

the not-unfair comparison to sharks,

the antipathies that betray the territorial,

the sonar for the nascent dictatorial.

 

Terese Coe’s poems, prose, and translations appear in The New Verse News, Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Classical Outlook, Cyphers, Hopkins Review, Metamorphoses, The Moth, New American Writing, New Scotland Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Stone Canoe, Threepenny Review, the TLS, and many other international publications. Her book Shot Silk was short-listed for the 2017 Poets Prize, and her poem “More” was heli-dropped across London in the 2012 Olympics Rain of Poems. Giorno Poetry Systems, West Chester Poetry Conference, Barnstone Translation Award, and others have awarded her prizes or honors and scholarships.

COUNTERFACTUAL WISHING

by Sarah Dickenson Snyder





Pleated in every human minute
is the second of someone’s death—
the way a mother and daughter leap
from a warm wooden dock
into the Maine coast sea
and the mother is taken
in the sharpness of a second—
the shark’s desire to clench
what looked like seal skin. What if
she had not worn the wet suit, what if
they had decided to eat lunch before
the swim—sandwiches
& iced tea on the deck, what if
clouds obscured the sun & they hadn’t
needed relief from heat, what if
we knew the second of our leaving,
could stop ourselves
from diving in.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections: The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.