WHO WANTS TO FIND AMELIA EARHART?

by Barbara Simmons

Since Amelia Earhart disappeared more than 85 years ago while attempting to fly around the world, people have been searching for her plane with hopes of solving the mystery behind her final flight. Now, an underwater exploration company says they may have found it about 15,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Deep Sea Vision says it captured a sonar image [above] of a plane that matches the dimensions of the Lockheed Electra aircraft Earhart was flying on July 2, 1937. —The Washington Post, January 31, 2024

We love the story, her setting off
to circle the globe, her route 
marked cleanly on the map, 
as is her disappearing point.  
 
We’ve loved the stories since, scenarios
not yielding happy endings, 
but ways to keep Amelia alive, perhaps
as prisoner, spy, or living out a secret life.
 
We’ve climbed with those aboard Itasca, 
signaling hope along with charts,
shedding tears enough to fill the oceans,
not knowing where she lay, nor why.
 
The sonar image we see now, sent from
a depth much deeper than full fathom five,
resembles what she flew, now resting
far below, scant hundred miles from where
 
she’d chosen to refuel.  And if this proves
to be the place her coral bones and pearl eyes rest,
her story has its ending.  We’re left with answers,
not with mystery. We miss the question
 
we maybe wish unanswered, embedded
forever as you’ve been, still flying,
seeking wide and open and free, beyond
a world of narrow, closed, and occupied.

Barbara Simmons, is a Boston-born Californian, a Wellesley College and The Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins) alumna, a retired educator. She savors life with words to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, and understand. Publications include Boston Accent, The NewVerse News,  DoubleSpeak, Soul-Lit, Capsule Stories, Journal of  Expressive Writing, and Writing it Real publications.  She was recognized with First Place in the last two annual San Jose Library Spring into Poetry contests, and has published a book of poetry, Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums (Friesen Press), 2022.

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.

THE MUZZLING

by Devon Balwit

From this week's New Yorker.

Human-generated underwater noise doubled every 10 years during the last half of the 20th century, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Program. That cacophony is having a huge impact on life under the waves. Dr. Baumgartner compared it to a cocktail party at which everyone is talking at once and you can’t hear the person next to you. . . . “The cumulative noise is making it difficult for the animals to hear each other most of the time, not just once in a while,” Dr. Clark said. “Over a month on average, whales are losing approximately 85 percent of their opportunities to communicate.” That’s devastating, he added, for creatures who vocalize to find mates, to forge friendships and to share information about food sources. —"The Great New York Whale Census," The New York Times, July 7, 2016

Once there was silence
            in which we swam

long tendril trails,
            vocalizing.  With moans,

clicks, bubbles’ bright
            jewel boxes, we

welcomed mates, celebrated
            reunions, warned

of danger.  For lazy stretches,
            we made no sound.

Now, you are noisy, and
            we are deaf.  We

hear only motor roar, the rage
            of gears, your sonar,

your soundings.  To speak, to hear,
            we press against each other

like the blind.  Some promise
            a future once again silent.

Until then, we call to no one but ourselves,
            darkness within darkness.

Devon Balwit is a teacher and educator in Portland, Oregon.  Her poems have appeared or will in TheNewVerse.News, The Fog Machine, Of(f) Course, Birds Piled Loosely, The Cape Rock, The Fem, The Prick of the Spindle, Dying Dahlia Review, drylandlit_press, 3 Elements, and Leveler.