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.

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. 

SONNETS LEANING LEFT, RIGHT

by Olga Livshin

Left-Leaning Sonnet

                           For Maria Gapotchenko

What can we do   WHAT CAN WE DO   We

can hide in a sonnet   Its milky worn 

warmth  You look hot in a sonnet 

Like a baby elephant  Pull the taffeta   

over your eyes  Turn off the news  

How to help from under a word comforter  

Stick out one hand   Poke the nearest sufferer

Hey fellow victim   Hola      Pryvit     How’s it all

hanging   Do you need anything

I know about tragedies  Can I write one about you

Or sing you into the velvet car of my ghazal  

Sell all my books and Venmo you a little sum

I would send a sun      or my hardy son   but 

don’t know  what am I doing   What have I done

Right-Leaning Sonnet

I say you can’t see borders from space  just fat land slices

and blue elixir  He chuckles When did that ever matter 

I say  You make money from different parts of the world

He talks about the history of empire

and dictators cycling like water   I say  Nature 

flits like pixies       Burning Siberian peat

brought Anchorage  soot He says  Sad Not 

your fault Enjoy your short life   I say I am  

enjoying my friendships in Lviv and Kharkiv  and 

want hamsters and parakeets to live on  He replies 

Arrive  Thirty-four years late  Better than never   

Look    The whole planet on your well-chosen plate

Sweet and staring at us both with disbelief

Docile and looking up with brilliant hope

Olga Livshin’s poetry recently appears in Poetry, The Southern Review, and AGNI. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (Poets & Traitors Press, 2019) and translator of Today is a Different War by the Ukrainian poet Lyudmyla Khersonska (Arrowsmith Press, 2023). 

AND YOU, WHAT DO YOU NEED?

by Janet Ruth

after Mary Oishi’s poem “I Need Poems”

 

These days I need the sun,
            because it gives us light,
            whether blazing, or watery,
            or obscured by clouds,
and the words to share it with you.

These days I need the moon,
            because it’s a reflection of light,
            whether new & invisible, or waxing,
            or waning, or full,
and the words to share it with you.

These days I need all the flowers,
            because they each provide food
            for some creature and our hearts,
            whether tiny prickly flowers of tumbleweed
            or galaxies of sunflowers,
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all the world’s creatures
            because if they disappear none of us will ever
            be the same, whether the tiger that padded past
            our jeep in India without a glance, or the black widow
            spider spinning a web by our back door,
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all the recipes I can collect
            because they feed us, whether my ancestors’
            pfeffernuessen and kringel, sauerkraut and pickled eggs
            or my adopted state’s tamales, posole and biscochitos,
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all the stories of standing up to say NO!
            because they show us the way
            and the price we must be willing to pay,
            whether Dad’s stories of being
            a conscientious objector in WWII
            or people today carrying signs that say “No Kings,”
and the words to share them with you.

These days I need all of your hearts,
            whether bruised and broken,
            or fibrillating, or full of joy,
            to hold them up to the light with words,
            because they are
                        the heartBEAT            heartBEAT
                                                heartBEAT
            of the real America.

  

Janet Ruth is a NM ornithologist and poet. Her writing focuses on connections to the natural world. She has recent poems in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Ekphrastic Review, The Lyric and anthologies including The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press, 2025). Her sonnet “A World That Shimmers” won the inaugural True Concord Poetry Contest, was set to music and performed by True Concord Voices and Orchestra in Tucson, October 2023. Her book,Feathered Dreams: celebrating birds in poems, stories & images (Mercury HeartLink, 2018) was a Finalist for the 2018 NM/AZ Book Awards. 

OUT OF THE SHADOWS

by Jiang Pu

I want to bring you a heady symphony of roses, 

lavender and golden poppies as April unfolds

into giant butterfly wings in my yard, but 

I can’t sing; this morning my throat is choked 

like the Strait of Hormuz. 

I’m self-schooled in the art of drop-cover-shelter

from the bombing news, but o you wise one, 

teach me: how do I turn off this glaring pain

of my brothers and sisters constantly bombing

each other? And how do I forgive

the twin lakes of my eyes for shedding

useless tears—so useless they can’t even feed 

into desert desalination plants spared

by thirsty missiles? My tears sting more 

than the bitter horseradish a friend brings 

on a Passover. She teaches me to dip it 

into a nut paste, which is sweet, which, 

she says, tastes like 

hope. Maybe it’s time for a few Medjool Dates

grown from the cradle-land that I’ve visited

so many times in spirit but never once 

in body, so that I keep its soil and water

inside me to nourish a prayer for peace, so that

when I open my door to the unstoppable

spring outside, I can welcome Rumi’s sun

and other honored guests to visit

me today besides pain. 

 

Jiang Pu, Ph.D., is a first-generation Chinese American author and Ed leader. Her recent poems have appeared in California Quarterly, The Tiger Moth Review (Singapore), and Panorama (U.K.) among others and in several poetry anthologies.

TAXES, SEEN FROM THE MOON

by Indran Amirthanayagam
NASA photo

I walked in the woods 

today, a spring in my step,

the Great Leader had

stepped back from 

his threats 

to the sovereign 

Republic of X,

and my tax deadline 

loomed even clearer; 

no more time 

to distract with poems, 

even this one a lazy 

fingering,  extracting juice 

from the rind of past fears, 

raising arms to God 

to say thank you

for your intervention.

But what’s ten minutes 

to a poet avoiding reckoning 

with the IRS?  Only ten 

minutes to say thanks, 

 to say I love you  and keep 

in touch always. Ten minutes 

to say tomorrow will come—

it already has—

 

despite the terrible words

and bombs exploded

until now in the latest 

killing fields 

of our one Earth

lit by the rising Sun seen 

now for the first time 

by the Artemis crew,

from the dark side 

of the Moon. 

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

DOES THE SUN RISE (FOR ME)?

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Does the Sun rise 

for me? Or if not 

for me, does it rise

for my brother,  

for my sister?

What about

the sun rising

over Tehran

or Gaza,

London,

or Doha?.

Does the sun

rise for me?

Who is 

my brother?

Who is 

my sister,

the mother

wailing beside

the rubble

of the school,

her girls

bombed

to bits?

Does the Sun 

rise anyway

over killing fields?

Does it rise

over our bodies

thrashing 

in the dark?

Does it rise

exposing

the open 

grave?

Does it rise

helping plants 

to bloom?

Does it rise

whether

we live 

or die?

Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. He has just published Isla itinerante ( Editorial Apogeo, Peru, 2025) and White Space Sonnets ( Sarasavi publishers, Sri Lanka, 2025). His other publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

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.