DEATH OF A FRIEND

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

The death of the orangutan named Sampurna was confirmed Thursday by the West Kalimantan Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) in Borneo. 

Sampurna the orangutan has died

You may not have known him in life

But you will perhaps 

Know him in death

 

A male orangutan who was being monitored

By a wildlife rescue organization

He was at home in an Indonesian rainforest

When it caught fire

 

As the fire raged on and on

It filled with toxic smoke

Which Sampurna and all his neighbors

Could not help but breathe

 

After several days of poisonous inhalations

Sampunrna was found wheezing and choking

In a dry roadside ditch

Unable to stand

 

Rescue workers tried to help

They lifted him from the ditch

Gave him oxygen 

Told him he was going to get better

 

But he did not get better

The struggle for each labored breath

Grew more and more difficult until

Sampurna died

 

Of course his death was emblematic

Of the deadly effects of the climate catastrophe

That is wreaking havoc with life

On planet Earth

 

But his death was also the death

Of a singular being, 

A fellow creature, a unique self 

A brother to all of us, a friend

Buff Whitman-Bradley podcasts his poetry at thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

LIVING WITH MA NATURE

by Lenora Rain-Lee Good

Wildfires surround my town

air quality goes from green to red

 

my sister’s town is burning

her air quality is purple

 

I wear mask when outside

would wear it inside, but 

 

they are paper and dissolve 

in my cup of coffee, so I run

 

my air cleaner. Perfumes, smoke,

pollen, dust, anything to irritate

 

my larynx and my voice goes

or I sound like a pubescent boy

 

either was fine when my kids 

were young and full of laughter

 

they have more sympathy now

I wish Ma Nature did.

 

Lenora Rain-Lee Good lives near the Columbia River in Kennewick, WA. Her latest chapbook is Saying Goodbye to Thomas published by Finishing Line Press. She writes fiction, radio dramas, and poetry. Her words have appeared in online and print magazines and anthologies, including Quill and Parchment, Ekphrastic Review, and Notes of Light and Dark: Southwestern Aubades and Nocturnes. Her favorite poetical quote: “A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.” —Robert Heinlein

BORDERS

by Howie Good

Nature abhors borders. A smoky haze from Canadian wildfires blots out the sun in Columbus, Ohio. An earthquake under the Sea of Japan shakes skyscrapers in LA. The Earth shares one skin. Borders are human constructs, a kind of illusion, lines that appear on maps without appearing on corresponding landscapes. Governments speak of the sanctity of borders. The smoke from far up north has turned daylight where I live a ghostly amber. There are no borders, really, only fences and patrols and checkpoints as if there were. Men have died by the millions defending what doesn’t exist.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection True Crime was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

FROM THE HIDEOUSLY SMOKY MIDWEST

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

I love my Canadian neighbors but…

 

At least during Covid we could step outside.

I resurrect my masks and wear them now

to water the puzzled garden, get the mail,

drag in the dumpster. Ash on squash leaves

ages them as surely as gray hair. My throat hurts.

Eyes sting and I’m breathing filtered air.

Exhausted squirrels lay in bird baths.

Deer stagger through the yard.

We keep water out for them,

not to breed mosquitos, nosy neighbor!

Sun a muffled peach pit in both skies.

Moon, overcome with particulate matter,

hides her face, throws scarves of stars

over her mouth to filter pernicious smoke.

Just guessing, since we no longer see her.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

AN UNDESIRABLE SILENCE

by Katy Z. Allen

I first noticed it early in the morning, isolated orange rays of light passing between the trees, the unusual color catching my eye, and so I went looking for the Sun, hidden from sight, and stopped abruptly when I saw it, not far above the horizon, a deep orange disc in the foggy, hazy, cloudy sky. Later, stepping outside for a second time, the light was so strange and eerie it gave me the shivers. I thought a storm was coming, maybe even a tornado, for the feel of the air was foreboding, so I checked all three weather apps on my phone, but none said anything about rain. The unease remained with me as I journeyed from errand to errand, wondering why I had heard nothing, although to be honest I hadn’t gone searching beyond my weather apps, but each time I stepped out of the car I felt that unease and when at last I arrived home and checked my email I saw a subject line, “The sky looks ominous and the air quality is bad. When will it end?” and that was when I learned—perhaps having had my head in the sand for longer than I should have—about the latest wildfires across Canada and Minnesota and the smoke from those fires arriving on our doorstep, so to speak, here in New England, and at last I understood, but all day I’d been feeling the silence of an explanation and only when it was so bad that everyone would notice did some brief and insufficient explanation arrive. I don’t have my head so far into the sand to be fully unaware that as long as we’re not seeing it, we’re not hearing it, we’re not experiencing it, the fact that the world is on fire is greeted with silence, even though it is a deep, dark  heaviness that breaks our hearts and weighs us down, no matter what the color of the Sun as it rises above the horizon in the morning.

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, poet, retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, former healthcare chaplain, and co-founder of a Jewish climate organization. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as The New Verse News, Amethyst Review, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, The Soliloquist Journal and Art on the Trails: Number 9. She was awarded Honorable Mention in The Prose Poem’s 2025 Prose Poetry Competition, and her book, A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text was published by Strong Voices Publishing. 

MAJOR OAK

by Matthew Murrey

‘Most famous tree in the world’: Sherwood Forest’s 1,000-year-old Major oak dies —The Guardian, June 18, 2026. Photo by Mark Chelu via Shutterstock.

I hold a thousand years of rings—

laws turned crimes, outlaws

heroes: Robin Hood to Mangione.

I have remained here

as posts were sunk, fences strung,

and commons turned to cost.

I have known the sadness of air

heavy with smoke and all the burnings:

coal, humans, forests, oil and gas.

I know there are limits,

only so much time,

and all of us must perish.

I am stark. You can see

every gnarl, burr, split, and break

in the bark, scar in the wood.

I have not put forth one leaf

in this heat of twenty twenty-six.

You and I stand bare beneath the sky.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026) and Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019). He can be found on Bluesky and Instagram under the handle @mytwords.  

THE 7TH DAY

by Adam J. Scarborough

The day

misplaces the sun.
Somewhere
a sky still burns blue
but not here.
Here—
a black noon.

The maps keep shedding people.
Five hundred thousand
coats and shoes—missing from their hallways;
names folded into cars, trucks, 
onto motorcycles and buses,
heading north from Lebanon.
 
A child carries a key
to a pile of ash.
—
Missiles write their brief alphabets
over Abu Dhabi—
two hundred thirty-eight
steel sentences
falling through prayer. 
Most of them
erased mid-air.
Even the sky now
has editors.
—
Control of the air,
they say.
The sky is a throat
they have learned
to close.
Jets move there
like indifferent saints.
—
Smoke remembers the night.
Tehran wakes
with black in its mouth.
Balconies gather soot
like winter birds.
Cars wear the same dark coat.
The street
a long finger,
dragged through ash.
—
Oil depots
burn through the hours
when sleep should hold the city.
Ten million lungs
turn quietly
in their beds.
Above them
the sky writes in smoke—
language without vowels.
—
Morning arrives
as rain.
Not mercy.
A rain that stings the eyes,
touches the throat
with a thin metal hand.
Acid falling softly
on bread
on figs left in bowls
on the open skin
of the city.
—
The doctors speak
from distant rooms.
Particles,
they say.
Invisible dust
entering the small, naked doors of the body.
Asthma remembers.
The heart
tightens its fist.
Even the air
now carries
a slow instruction.
—
Do not open the window.
Do not turn the fan.
Cover the food.
Wait.
As if waiting
could rinse the sky.
—
A special relationship
spits across red neckties 
tied like telephone wires,
fizzing with foreign cries.
 
Night keeps arriving early.
Lebanon counts its dead
in the hundreds—
three hundred ninety-four
and still the number
breathes.  
 
Dust enters the lungs
of the city.
Beirut
a broken bell.
—
Elsewhere the world practices
this same dark grammar:
Sudan
South Sudan
Ukraine—
where the ground
remembers fire
longer than people do.
—
And somewhere a man
with a borrowed crown
waits in a golden room
for the door
to open.
 
Another country
dragged forward
by the nose of a name.
—
Still
someone lights a stove.
Someone boils water.
 
Someone somewhere
opens a window
to see
 
if the sun
has been returned.

Adam J. Scarborough is a Scottish writer and social practice artist based in Minnesota. His work has been presented across Europe and New York. His poetry has appeared in Gutter Magazine.

NO ONE SEES THE SUNRISE

by Sharon Neubauer

AI-generated image by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

One of the oddest UN resolutions in history seeks to solidify shaky Gaza ceasefire into an enduring peace: The hazy UN resolution dictates that Trump’s ‘board of peace’ will supervise an International Stabilisation Force, whose membership is as yet undetermined. —The Guardian, November 18, 2025

I

I do not want to live

in a kill or be killed world.

It is not refreshing

 

that for once

my people are killers

and not just killed

 

and if they stop killing

they will once again

be killed, and if 

 

they keep killing

they may kill the current killers

only to create new killers.

 

II

 

I want to live

in a love and be loved world

in a forgive and move on world

 

that makes space 

for my people

and in which my people 

 

make space for all.

There is no pathway 

to this world

 

that I can see

and many who have tried

to pave that path have been killed.

 

III

 

The sun comes up through the smog.

The killers and the killed

don’t stop to say good morning

 

Sunlight tries to enter

their eyes, ears and hearts

through closed portals

 

and trauma blocks the path

over and over, as it has

always.

 

IV

 

The grieving mothers remember 

God is the power 

to see, hear, and listen 

 

with all our might, soul and being.

But as the sun rises 

both sides toil at their killing

 

and the babies starve 

and the girls are raped

and the world picks sides 

 

and accusations abound

and no one sees the sun rise

shining its sweet rays through the smoke,

and no one lets in the light 

that burns off hatred and sorrow

and tries every day to clean the world.

Sharon Neubauer is a poet, singer, Yoga teacher, and skier. Her poetry chapbook A Work of Body: A Body of Work was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press.

THE ART OF WHAT’S LEFT

by Matthew Murrey

 

Banksy confirmed he was responsible for the work with a post on Instagram, showing the graffiti before it was covered over. It has been interpreted by some as a comment on the arrest of hundreds of people for supporting Palestine Action by holding up placards at protests. Palestine Action was banned by the government as a terrorist group in July after activists damaged RAF planes. --BBC, September 10, 2025

What was just one raging judge 

bludgeoning one poor bloke 
lying helpless on his back 
has now been scrubbed 
into anyone, anywhere where 
faceless power hammers 
the harmless: families asleep 
in wrecked schools and sad tents, 
thousands on foot, on donkey carts, 
and in cars fleeing their flattened 
neighborhoods, starving hundreds 
shot while crowding for food, 
the badly wounded and bleeding
on their backs begging for mercy.
A gray afterimage of the mural 
remains on the courthouse wall 
like a blast shadow in Hiroshima, 
like a black-gray pall of smoke 
above human beings being burned, 
like some relentless nightmare ghost 
that ought to haunt us night and day.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in Dissident Voice, Escape Into Life, Tiny Wren Lit, and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for more than 20 years and lives in Urbana, IL with his partner. He can be found on Bluesky and Instagram under the handle @mytwords.

AIR QUALITY ALERT

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

The National Weather Service has issued an air quality alert for Aug. 11-12 for multiple northern Michigan counties because of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. —Lansing State Journal, August 10, 2025

We’re in charge of so little. Less than an acre; a cat. Clearing debris from the street drain. The few things we control are so inconsequential, no one cares. Not even us. Take my lungs. Please. Take Canadian wildfire smoke. Their wilderness makes civilization  hard. Even deer here in Michigan wear masks. How do they get them on?  Last week, we found out we were made of plastic. Today particulate matter is coating our lungs with Teflon. Silver Beach is like the bottom of an ashtray half full of gin. Haze, the weather man says, trying to fool the tourists. Maple/bacon smoke rolls in, a plague from the Northwest, but we are so far gone, its smell only makes us hungry.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

TWELVE DAYS

by Shirrin Jabalameli

There was no sound.

But the walls struggled to breathe,

and flecks of plaster rained down like strands of an old woman’s hair who could no longer sleep.

 

The woman came up from the basement.

Not out of fear,

but to see a sky that could no longer be seen.

 

She was a painter.

There was no paint.

No coffee left.

A voice in her head whispered: Paint. Even with ash.

 

The calendar flipped forward,

like an endless explosion bursting through seconds.

And the clock froze 

at 3:20 AM.

 

Day One

 

A dragon leapt out of a painting.

A dome cracked open.

Silently.

With a tremor only she felt.

Something broke beneath her feet,

and she polished the shoes she hadn’t worn.

 

Day Two

 

A message arrived.

The number wasn't saved.

It read: “Are you alive?”

She didn’t reply.

She just sat there, stared at the cracked photo frame, and said:

“How did you know I should be dead?”

The city emptied.

 

Day Three

 

No smell of bread.

No scent of blood either.

Only the thud of words pounding the walls.

The tiles recorded the blast.

She wrote: “We are still words.”

Then she drew the letter “N” backwards,

added two diacritics beneath the “K.”

A man saw it,

and ran.

 

Day Four

 

A child found a seashell on the ground.

He asked his mother: “Is this the sea?”

She said nothing.

The woman picked up the shell and answered:

“No. It’s the last remnant of listening.”

An old man’s cane began to calligraph across the stones.

 

Day Five

 

The mirror cracked.

But its reflection didn’t cry.

The woman inside the mirror was no longer her.

One of them was asleep.

The other,

awake and fighting.

And in that same dawn,

a verse trembled.

 

Day Six

 

The phone rang.

No name saved.

A voice said: “Remember that mountain you climbed as a kid?”

She laughed: “You saw me?”

The voice replied: “Still stubborn. Still painting.”

 

Chopin’s notes tangled with the roar of an explosion.

 

Day Seven

 

The alleyways had fallen asleep.

In their dreams,

they swallowed the lead.

A crow asked: “Why are you still awake?”

Sejjil interpreted the dream.

  

Day Eight

 

Someone on the other side of the wall was talking to himself.

Half of his words were Persian.

The other half—screams.

She didn’t hear it through the window.

She heard it through the wall’s skin

in the precise place where sound no longer existed.

But her skin did.

 

Day Nine

 

A man shouted: “Enough!”

His voice echoed back into him.

The painter woman said:

“No. We’re not there yet. You must go all the way.”

 

Day Ten

 

Rain didn’t fall,

but the ground was wet.

The air had wept.

Someone wrote:

“You’re alive. Do it.”

 

Day Eleven

 

She painted a piece that smelled of burned coffee.

The one-legged goat said:

“I’m not the way back?”

 

She replied:

“You’re the reason I stayed, though you may never understand.”

 

Day Twelve

 

Everything was just as it had always been.

But nothing was in its place.

She looked at the word she had written on the wall.

It hadn't been erased.

Just slightly more ... upside-down.

 

The End?

No.

These were just twelve chapters

of a book not written in blood,

but in the color of resistance, 

resistance that could still be seen,

even through smoke.

Shirrin Jabalameli is an Iranian writer, painter, photographer, and storyteller. She is currently working on a poetry-photo hybrid collection reflecting on memory and witness.There was no sound.