FEMA AND MY DEAD PARENTS

by William Aarnes

FEMA was authorized in 1979

 

Lately, it seems raging storms have gotten worse

and the news about people hunting FEMA agents

has me thinking of my parents, my father

dead six years before FEMA got funded,

my mother dead ten years after FEMA

began helping clean up Love Canal.

My mother voted Republican.

My father voted Democrat.

                        

When our house blew away in 1957,

FEMA didn’t exist, so my parents

                              

had no thought of receiving $750

to help them recover from our loss.

The window wells filled in a millisecond.

Lifted out of the garage, the Bel Air landed in the front yard.

Somehow the piano stood alone in the living room.

Only my bedroom retained all its walls.

                              

Neighbors we barely knew and lived

—their home untouched—a block away

offered a place to sleep (as if my parents slept).

The day after a volunteer van arrived, women

dressed as nurses offering to sell

egg-salad sandwiches. I was ten

and now don’t recall how long

it took my parents to contact

their insurance agent. The tornado

left us little. Picking through debris

my parents laughed empty laughs.

They could do nothing else but rent

an apartment while having our home rebuilt.

They could have used $750

(or whatever the equivalent

might have been back then). My mother

would have hated taking a “handout”

but would have claimed a little extra

as “rightfully” ours. My father

would have diligently filled out the forms

to apply for any additional funds

a federal agency might grant

to help cover some of any shortfall.

My mother, worried about her brothers’ farms,

continued to vote Republican. My father, in favor

of teachers’ unions, kept on voting Democrat.

If alive now, my mother wouldn’t understand

the telling and repeating of hateful lies.  

If alive, my father wouldn’t mind, too much,

being told he tends to condescend.

My mother would now vote for candidates

who support tax breaks for small businesses.

My father would vote for candidates

who support improving ventilation in every school.

They’d agree to give something to Planned Parenthood.

There’s rubble and there’s rubble; they’d agree

to contribute to the children in the Ukraine and Gaza.

They’d worry about where best to donate hurricane relief.

My parents would have welcomed FEMA’s help.

But lately, it seems, raging storms have gotten worse.

William Aarnes lived in Fargo, North Dakota in 1957. He now lives in Manhattan.

QUESTIONS OF PORTENT

by Steven Croft

"the wind will rise, / we can only close the shutters."

—Adrienne Rich

The Emergency Alert System dial-up screech has crossed

the television with warnings several times when I nudge

the dog out the back door.

Tall pines freighted with the wind's push sway, wave lateral

arms, recompose when the wind lets go. Finger branches

splayed with needles snap, parachute down.

The dog finishes, runs back to the sound of myriad drops

touching leaves with tiny slaps. I close the glass door,

watch the wind flex muscles against an overgrown azalea.

In the house, out of harm's way, I realize there is really no

safe distance anymore.  I feel anxiety born recently,

how Irma ripped a five-hundred-pound branch from a pine.

And I still hear its fingers' soaked-green needles whipping

the edge of my tin roof, and later the sound of chainsaws

in the island's sunlit wreckage, mine one of them.

Can the twenty-first century afford the price of petroleum?

Our bad karma circling back on us with skies dark as

a funeral coat, ready to drop snakeskins of churning wind?

Should we consult climatologist oracles: leave the coast,

construct your buildings with rock-solid materials. Or forget

warnings and sniff the air like animals knowing when to run?

Or is the world brighter now when, after the wind sweeps

the earth for hours, like tonight, in catharsis, the power

stays on and no destruction comes?

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

MAYFIELD

by Donna Katzin

In this photo taken by a drone, buildings are demolished in downtown Mayfield, Ky., on Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021, after a tornado traveled through the region Friday night. Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader via AP

Where cold and warming winds collide,

twisters—minions of an angry earth—                    

lash out in pain, flatten farms, homes,

houses of work and worship in their paths.

As roofs rain bricks in darkness,                               

mothers, fathers, sons, daughters,

sisters, brothers sit in cellars,                                               

making calls never returned.

 

When the wild ones have gone, survivors pick

through mauled metal, shredded remains.       

A bus lies on its back—a turtle shell

with the body sucked out.

Splintered ghost trunks rise  

like hands to heaven.

There are no voices now.

Even wind has no words.

 

Cadaver dogs sniff through rubble.

Crews root around the clock

for what is left of men and women

who worked the late shift,

even after alarms screamed,

for twelve dollars an hour

making candles to light consumers’ holidays       

at the factory now extinguished.                   

 

On Sunday morning, faithful gather,

console and hold each other,

interrogate the Almighty,

sing hymns of hope

to staunch despair.  

A few pray for the mother

planet we torture at our own peril—

who will not be patient forever.

 

 

Donna Katzin is the founding and previous executive director of Shared Interest, a fund that mobilizes the human and financial resources of low-income communities of color in South and Southern Africa.  A board member of Community Change in the U.S., and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners working in Nicaragua, she has written extensively about South Africa, community development and impact investing.  Published in journals and sites including The New Verse News and The Mom Egg, she is the author of With the Hands, a book of poems and photographs about post-apartheid South Africa’s process of giving birth to itself.

SATURDAY

by John Guzlowski

Mayfield, KY Daylight Drone Footage Aftermath - December 11, 2021

Where I sit, the world 

is quiet, unassuming.  

Snow falls & becomes 

rain, rain falls 

& becomes snow.  

I write on a pad of paper 

& think of the tea  

steeping in the cup next to me.

200 miles away in Kentucky 

The wind shook the world

And my friends died.

John Guzlowski's poems and stories have appeared in North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review. Garrison Keillor read his poem “What My Father Believed” on his program, The Writers Almanac.  Guzlowski's poetry book Echoes of Tattered Tongues won the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Award for most thought provoking book 2017. He’s also the author of the Hank and Marvin mysteries. Now settled in Virginia, Guzlowski lived in Kentucky for a while.

TORNADO SIREN

by Julie L. Moore

Unmoored from its original empirical underpinnings, particularly with respect to African Americans...  ‘Blackness’ has become the symbolic assailant. 

—Jeannine Bell, Indiana University Maurer School of Law

 

Each Saturday at noon they practice the drill—

shrill shine in spring air like a child’s high-

pitch whine in a public sphere 

where everyone can hear—

so when the real storm

arrives, we’ll fly down 

basement steps or insulate

ourselves in inner rooms,

to save ourselves—

but what horn warned 

John Crawford III

                             that fiddling with a bb gun 

in the middle of a Walmart aisle 

while chatting on his cell

               would be his sirens’ song 

full of sound and fury signifying

assailant, that 9-1-1 wouldn’t 

bring aid but grave 

in a half-second flat? 

What bell rang 

for Breonna Taylor, 

who climbed into bed, reaching 

for her beloved, for a good night’s 

rest, not knowing it’d be eternal

& irredeemable?  

                                                          O, something wicked that way 

came, & keeps on coming: 

It knows no caution & hides 

in plain sight. Sly & slick,

it slithers through amber

waves of grain, through the rocks

of ages. Did you see it 

funneling all its strength 

as it chased 

Ahmaud Arbery 

on the road, 

nipping at his heels, 

mowing him down?

And after, 

did you see 

its twisted tail 

slide across his fallen 

flesh & hear

its overdue alarm 

roar like Chimera

used to snort, 

sense its 

white-

tipped tongue

wagging 

as it left?

Author's Note: The epigraph comes from Jeannine Bell’s article, “Dead Canaries in the Coal Mines: The Symbolic Assailant Revisited,” Georgia State University Law Review, vol. 34, no. 3, Spring 2018.

A Best of the Net and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. Her poetry has appeared in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. She is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University, where she is also the poetry editor for Relief Journal.

FAIRDALE

by Joan Colby

FAIRDALE, Ill. — At least two tornadoes unleashed incredible destruction through north central Illinois. Two people are dead, and several others are injured. Some people are also unaccounted for. Photo: A lone horse is staying close to what used to be his barn. Owners aren't being allowed back yet. —Sean Lewis @seanlewiswgn via WGNNews, April 10, 2015

The bloodied horse walks in small circles
Where the barn stood with the stall.
Straw, timothy, sweet feed
A bucket of spring water.

From the chopper, he’s observed
In a slow practiced rehearsal
Like a monk at his devotions,
Head bobbing, lame in the forehoof,
Miserably alive.

All that’s left of structure:
Splinters. The body of the mare,
His companion, thrown
Into a nearby field with the
Defeathered chickens. At dusk

The twister plowed a fifty mile
Path like a rogue
Tractor. Huge dark wedge
Of rotating force. Shingles
From the barn’s roof plant a pasture
Thirty miles away. This horse, bewildered
Knows only to stay
In the place that he knows.

All those whose homes are smashed
Pick through the ruins
For the one surviving thing—a photograph,
Quilt, child’s toy—that confirms
The lives they had. The horse
Keeps walking.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press. 

READING THE TEA LEAVES

by Kit Zak 

Since our first report, the massive campaign against climate science – and action on climate, funded by oil barons the Koch Brothers has come to light. And while fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, whose very products are causing global warming, continue to fund think tanks driving the campaigns, much of the foundation funding has now been driven underground, masked by a funding front-group called the Donors Trust – and its associate Donors Capital Fund, two “donor-advised” funds created to hide the real givers and thus shield them from negative exposure of their support for these campaigns. Funding to the organizations that comprise the denial machine has risen during the Obama presidency, just as the urgency of climate solutions and promise of policy advances also rose. --Greenpeace, September, 2013

three falls later
traces of Sandy's wrath linger
losses top 50 billion
in a swath from Norfolk to Maine

Tacloban's cyclone
bodies line roadsides
the unnamed dumped in mass graves
thirst  hunger  disease stalk
the half-dead search for Mom and Son
among shack-splintered debris

tornadoes blight Illinois
tearing through twelve states
the highest winds ever
telephone poles stuck in trees
cars flipped upside down, found two lots away
500 homes in one town rubbled

fossil fuel moguls sigh
calculate their rising costs.


Kit Zak lives with her husband in Lewes,  DE. She has most recently had poems published in an anthology about motherhood as well as in the following journals: Avocet: A Nature Journal, The Blue Collar  Review,  and A Time of Singing.

MY DAUGHTER IS PLAYING OUTSIDE

by John Guzlowski

In the quiet space of the dining room
My wife and I lay out the place settings

The forks beside the Wedgwood plates
The spoons and knives in their places.

A napkin in her hand, she pauses
And tells me again of how her mother

Would starch and iron the squares of cotton
Wash the plates by hand and again by machine.

I smile, nod my head and turn to the window
See the roof next door lift, shingles

Exploding like scattered sparrows, and there
It is—the howl of the locomotive wind

And then a pounding at the glass door
And a screaming that will not stop.



John Guzlowski’s writing has appeared in Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac, The Ontario Review, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals.  His poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.  He blogs about his parents and their experiences at http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/ .

DOOM

by George Held

Image credit: philipus / 123RF Stock Photo

brought early dawn
to Aurora,
early recess
to Newtown,
early marathon-ending
to Boston
early tornado season
to Moore, Okla,
and lurks
on the outskirts
of your own town:
so hunker down
and pray
it passes by
before it’s
your turn.


An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com

A TORNADO CHASER

by Martin Elster

Image source: FEMAcontracts

I chase tornados all around the Plains
like a knight-errant looking every day
for fresh adventures. Just can’t stay away.
She’d say that a devoted spouse abstains
from risky trips. I’d tell her I take pains
not to crash my jeep, yet her dismay
hung like a storm cloud when I went to play
and photograph Earth’s mightiest winds and rains.

It’s true folks sometimes lift and whirl like leaves;
yet funnel-hunting’s fun. A thousand suns
are not as grand as watching barley sheaves
rise from a ranch and vanish in a breath.
I think now, as I race one, how she runs
with Ian — safe, monotonous — toward death.


Martin Elster is a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in journals including The Centrifugal Eye, The Chimaera, Lucid Rhythms, Mindflights, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Thema, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and Poe Little Thing. Martin’s poem “Microchiroptera” recently took first prize in The Oldie’s 2013 annual bouts-rimés competition. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Poetry Award.

REOCCURING STORMS

by Marjorie Maddox

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Searchers Find Body of Killed Child in Oklahoma Tornado --AP, May 26, 2011
Woman Finds Boy After Mother Drives Van Into Hudson --The New York Times, April 13, 2011


Wind/Water, Oklahoma/New York,
the domestically symbolic bathtub/minivan,
two mothers.

And so fear gathers speed, swirls in
or out, grabbing—in its selfish velocity—each state
of who we are or were, what’s left
of our man-made lives holding tightly to the already-
born, the life still coming.

Temporarily wedged between faith and scream,
a mother sings reassurances as each
tree, board, sink, tub, life
twists and spins into the horizon
no one foresaw, grief beyond the boundaries
of such predictions, life splintered limb by limb,
like and not like (half a country away)

that other dream-turned-disaster:
depression’s dark tunnel twirling
beyond the imaginable, tires whirring
too quickly toward the Hudson,
fueling the speed of no-return,
a family’s last vision of sky flooded
with the damp wet of despair.

Except ten-year-old La'shaun,
who—between death and breath—
rolled down his window to let out fear,
then swam toward light.

And in Oklahoma, five-year-old Cathleen,
who, amidst the hurricane’s howl,
recognized hope in the heartbeat
of her unborn sibling:
that faint hum in the ear,
or that sudden surge toward possibility

into what one day even you and I—
after a particularly hard day of the ordinary—
might discuss as casually
as weather, as someone else’s life.


Marjorie Maddox is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.

TORNADO ALLEY

by B.Z. Niditch

A funnel cloud
of warning
in the eye of a storm
presages high winds
over towns and villages
a mile over
these monster twisters
breaking us up
as a string of souls
become casualties
uncounted
trapped as in a war
under their homes
from a massive path
reported from the ground
in a few live pictures
wrapped in rain
from roofs
under cars
near now barren trees
of shelters
children salvaging
a few belongings
dolls, toys, firetrucks
from a leveled land
emerge as survivors.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Review, Le Guepard (France), Kadmos (France), Prism International, Jejune (Czech Republic), Leopold Bloom (Budapest), Antioch Review, and Prairie Schooner.  He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.