FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION

by Rachel Landrum Crumble

It’s easy to pull weeds from damp soil, 
to power down my front steps and break
a spider’s web and not know the little guy
is hanging on me like a kid grasping 
a kite string, trying not to blow away
on a windy day. 

My point is: we should have done more,
sooner. The weeds have taken over,
yet we topple lesser kingdoms without knowing
by just walking around in the world.

In one neighbor’s house, the TV news
frets the play-by-play of a trial
that’s just concluded. In another house,
the camera’s eye bears witness to the same event, 
except the one on trial is the opposing party.
We have fashioned the media into our own ugly image. 

Truth is on trial, and must sequester
for the duration. We can’t remember whether or not
this is standard fare. We gulp the wind from giant goblets,
still parched. We are too discombobulated to know
we are lost. 

Let’s huddle together. Let’s find communion.
Sure, the wafer is thin and tasteless, but it symbolizes
something we can’t do for ourselves.

Rachel Landrum Crumble retired from twenty years of teaching high school, having previously taught kindergarten through college. She has published in The Porterhouse Review, Typishly, among others, and recently Poetry Breakfast, Humans of the World, and forthcoming in Euphony Journal. Her first poetry collection, Sister Sorrow, was published by Finishing Line Press in January 2022. She lives with her husband of 43 years, a jazz drummer, and near 2 of their 3 adult children, and two adorable grand twins with another on the way.

KINESIS

by Andrés Castro

For Julian Assange

Under a falling red sun, 

     in the stench of decomposing

leaves and muddy 

dark earth,

     He turns over a stone. See!

     Circling white centipede—

Dancing black spider—

     Tangle of worms

 scrambling.

 

Andrés Castro, a PEN member, is listed in the Directory of Poets and Writers. His work appears in the recently released anthology We are Antifa: Expressions Against Fascism, Racism and Police Violence in The United States and Beyond and he keeps a personal blog, The Practicing Poet: Dialogue to Creativity, Poetry, and Liberation. 

PERSPECTIVE

by José A. Alcántara

The bud, newly broken,
does not care.

The virus, freely spreading,
does not care.

Each of them opens
into blossom,

trying to replicate,
as we do.

What is crisis to us,
is to them being.

The black spider
on the pale rock

hunts for blood.
That is what it does.

José A. Alcántara lives in Western Colorado. He has worked as a bookseller, mailman, commercial fisherman, baker, carpenter, studio photographer, door-to-door salesman, and math teacher. His poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Rattle, and the anthologies, 99 Poems for the 99%, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience.

SPIDER CAUGHT IN THE ASH WEB

by Tricia Knoll

Image source: Hiveminer

Ash flakes into the new fall spider’s web
on the corn stalks. Wind ferried specks
from the wildfires raging on the cliffs,
smoke hazard on the east-west freeway,
a breathing caution. Ash on the rose petals,
fading ones facing diminishing blooms.

The Dreamers’ frail web tears,
dragged down under ash, victim
of fires hundreds of miles away.
An urge to struggle free of this
drift acknowledges the flames
of hope that kindled the work,
the time of learning to weather
seasons, grow up in storms,
and pursue the road of their lives.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet watching the ashes of burning trees fall on Portland, Oregon. Ash coating the garden flowers, tomato plants, mucking up windshields. At the same time, the news on DACA and its impact on hundreds of thousands of young people seems overwhelming.

TRAP DOOR SPIDER

by Devon Balwit

Image: windowlicker by M0L0D0Y at Deviant Art

Distraught at the news of machetes and truck bombs,
shooters and hostage-takers, scrolling through death tolls,

searching out agency, this man mutters, kill them all,
mutters round them up.  He curses and bangs, yet

flees the first splash of film carnage, protests I am too
tender, faints at the needle tugging blood.  He looks

no different than any other man, sleeps with his feet
tucked beneath his dog, goes any distance for a friend,

caresses his wife, hugs his children.  He’s a man as
ordinary as the leaf litter around the den of a trapdoor

spider, but trespass there, even lightly, and out he snaps.
What darkness in him awaits its trigger, what holds him,

palps at the ready?  He swears it isn’t bluster, but I
deny it, hoping that the humanness of his prey would

disarm him, that compassion would leave him hungry.
Surely, the cunning of his design was not made for this.

Devon Balwit wears many hats in Portland, Oregon.  Her poetry does likewise. Some homes it has found: TheNewVerse.News, Leveler, drylandlit, Birds Piled Loosely, The Fog Machine, The Fem, Dying Dahlia Review, The Yellow Chair, The Cape Rock, The Prick of the Spindle, Of(f) Course, txt objx, and 3 Elements.

TO THE SPIDER

by Jonel Abellanosa






              For Edward Snowden


In our culture of constantly buying
evolving fear greed for control sells,
you’ve been demonized.
Who doesn’t imagine
the searing bite, the poison?
Whose skin doesn’t bristle
at your absent tiptoes?
I’m in time to watch
you weave your mandala’s
inner circles counterclockwise.
You’ve more to share:
not to overreach,
to take only what strays
in your space,
to listen only to your surroundings.
As you still,
the peace-laureled dictator’s
lies echo:
More innocent men, women, children dying
as unmanned aerial warfare
perfecting technology
and doctrine won’t drone
as pesky mosquitoes into your web.

 
Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, the Philippines.  His poetry is forthcoming in Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature, Anglican Theological Review, the PEN Peace Mindanao anthology, Dirtcakes journal, and has appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Qarrtsiluni, Red River Review, Fox Chase Review, Burning Word, Barefoot Review, Philippines Free Press and Philippine Graphic magazine.