I-89 FROM VERMONT TO CANADA IN WINTER

by Tricia Knoll

The Canadian border is less than an hour north.
Our countries have history. Good neighbors, 
borrow and offer. Fight side by side. 
I get my power through Hydro-Quebec.
Canadians come to shop, ski, hike
icefish, and mountain bike. I drive north
for museums and botanical gardens. Maple sap
runs both ways. Sugar shacks boil
here and there. I love the maple leaf flag 
as much as the blue and yellow of Ukraine. 
We share shock and a blood moon.
So close now
 
to winter’s big thaw. My eyes downcast. 
As if every winter pothole 
might eat me, vomit me out. 
Black slush banks the highway, 
a salt road gleams white. 
Once fleeing to Canada seemed
like an escape-hatch. Love
your neighbor. Don’t beggar them.
Will Canadians forgive? 
The border is less than an hour away.
We are so very close. 

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont near the Canadian border. Her 2024 collection Wild Apples documents her downsizing and move seven years ago from Oregon to Vermont. The taste of maple is sweet; the anger of neighbors is not.

ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

by Jackie Fox




Paper beats rock
Rock beats scissors
Scissors beats paper
Water beats them all
The river runs with scissors
like a child laughing
in whitecaps
Laughing so hard
it capsizes the airboats
sent to save families and pets
Clenching its fists of ice
it smashes the rock
in highways and dams,
the metal in bridges
and grain bins
until they crumple like paper
and are swept away

Jackie Fox’s work has appeared in Rattle, Bellevue Literary Review, The Fem, Tar River Poetry, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, and other journals and anthologies.

SNOW

by Mimi German

A Portland baby is dead after being found last week in freezing temperatures with his homeless mother in a bus stop along Southeast Powell Boulevard. The infant, found Jan. 9, marks the fifth death on Portland's streets during the cold weather this year. Four homeless people died of exposure in the first 10 days of 2017. A week after the baby was found, it's still unclear whether he died of exposure hours after being born outdoors or was stillborn. But the circumstances of the child's death illustrate that much of the tragedy on Portland's streets involves untreated mental illness. Photo of Portland snow on January 11, 2017 by Joe Riedl. —Nigel Jaquiss, Williamette Week, January 11, 2017

I took a shovel to the ice

before the thaw
would bring the rains
before the rains
would bring the flood
before the flood
would raise the worms
before the worms
could feed the birds
before the birds
could shit upon

frozen people
lying dead
in sleeping bags
on the sidewalks
of this City.


Mimi German is a Poet and Activist/Organizer and free radical for change in Portland, OR.

POLITICIANS DISCUSSING GLOBAL WARMING

by Donelle Dreese

                        after Isaac Cordal, Cement Eclipses

The billions beneath have drowned
leaving tiny pink congressional skulls
to emerge as pimples in a water-fat city.

They will not survive. They are swamped
in thawed Arctic Sea ice uttering bloated
bubbles that debate and float away.

They ascend on stacks of money and hover
the Atlantic waves, awaiting the final swoon
praying for a proposal to surface.

The discussion gurgles on and on
through puffed, water-inflated robes.
The last life-preserver goes to the whitest scalp.


Donelle Dreese is an Associate Professor of English at Northern Kentucky University. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Sophrosyne (Aldrich Press), A Wild Turn (Finishing Line) and Looking for A Sunday Afternoon (Pudding House). She is also the author of a YA vignette novella Dragonflies in the Cowburbs (Anaphora Literary) and the novel Deep River Burning (WiDo Publishing). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary magazines and journals.