DEAR PREZ

by Barbara Loots

Yes, there are certain legends

   you aim to stand among:

Caligula and Nero,

    Hitler and Mao Tse Tung,

Attila and Genghis 

    and Stalin, for a few—

But the dumpster of world history 

    will pile some shit on you,

Until, like all things rotten,

    you sink into the slime,

Soon buried and forgotten 

    in the lightning speed of time .

From towers and casinos,

   your name will be erased,

Your merch and memes abandoned,        

   your gold decor replaced. 

Your “legend” will be murky 

   with cruelty and vice, 

And, as you’ve often put it, 

   that isn’t very nice. 

Barbara Loots is retired but not retiring in Kansas City, Missouri. In addition to appearances in literary magazines (eg. I-70 Review, Pulsebeat) and anthologies (eg. Love Affairs At the Villa Nelle) she serves as book review editor for Light Poetry Magazine online. Three collections can be found on Amazon. 

HAUNTING SEPTEMBER

by Jerrice J. Baptiste

Photo: Kevin Bubriski, World Trade Center Series, New York City, 2001, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Consolidated Natural Gas Company Foundation, 2003.65.1, © 2001, Kevin Bubriski

                  ~for Nolbert

 

Your sanctuary hasn't been touched

in over twenty years.
Hair intertwined with bristles
resting on the bathroom windowsill

next to the porcupine plant.
The shower still smells of Irish

Spring soap bathing your body.

 

You thought you would be late to protect

two sky scrapers.
Blue striped sheets pushed aside

on your futon fitted your body each night. 

That September

morning, running late you grabbed

 

a pair of un-matching socks. 

One grey sock hid from you under your bed. 

You looked confident

in your grey uniform,

deep pockets for hiding notes,

ready to stop crime in the towers.

Today, I peek outside the oval bedroom window
seeing the view of early Autumn that you had

that last morning. Leaves beginning to change

colors, red, yellow, violet, hugging branches

before they fell in the yard. 

Jerrice J. Baptiste is a poet, educator and facilitator of poetry for healing and self-expression. Her new book of prose poems is titled Coral in the Diaspora published by Abode Press (August 2024).  Her writing has been published and is forthcoming in The New Verse News, Artemis Journal, Urthona Buddhism and Art Magazine, The Dewdrop, Shambhala Times, The Yale Review, Wax Poetry & Art, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Mantis, Penumbra Literary & Art Journal, The Banyan Review, Kosmos Journal, Silver Birch Press, and many others. Her collaborative songwriting and poetry are featured on the Grammy-nominated album Many Hands Family Music for Haïti. 

MONSOON BLUES

by Geoffrey Philp

Venice is sinking. So are Rotterdam, Bangkok and New York. But no place compares to Jakarta, the fastest-sinking megacity on the planet. Over the past 25 years, the hardest-hit areas of Indonesia’s capital have subsided more than 16 feet. The city has until 2030 to figure out a solution, experts say, or it will be too late to hold back the Java Sea. —Bloomberg, December 6, 2023

Walking along Jalan Tebet Baru Timur where the East Tebet Sugar Plantation once sprawled across the delta on which modern Jakarta is built, cranes hover over a metropolis dotted with blue and black plastic water tanks. The air seems thicker, trapped between the glass and steel towers crisscrossing the city where water supplies wither under a blazing tropical sun, and the city's thirst drains the last drop from depleted reservoirs.
 
While sea levels rise
Jakarta waits for the rain
in the Ring of Fire.

Author’s Note: As coastal megacities like Jakarta sink under the combined weight of rapid development, rising seas, and unstable land subsidence, these converging forces spotlight the harsh realities of climate change threats facing our urban future.

Geoffrey Philp, a Silver Musgrave Medal recipient, is the author of Archipelagos, a book of poems about climate change which was long-listed for the Laurel Prize. Philp’s Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas retells the nativity story, transporting readers back to that holy night in a fresh yet traditional way. His poem “A Prayer for My Children” is featured on The Poetry Rail—an homage to 12 writers who shaped Miami's culture. He  lives in Miami and is working on a children's book Marsha and the Mangroves.

JUST AS THE BIRDS, DISTRACTED

by Paula J. Lambert

Most nights this week, there will be more birds in the air above

this country than people in beds down below.” —Josh Sokol

 

Just as the birds, distracted by light

that splits the star they follow into sparks

and mirrors so they never see the towers

that reach out to kill them, just as the birds,

 

so entranced by needs they cannot explain

that they propel themselves steadfastly

forward through all the wildfires we set 

for them (if they recognize their own 

plummeting numbers when they emerge 

from the smoke, they don’t show it, 

they keep flying) just as the birds 

soar even through their own sleep as, 

one by one by one, they die of thirst 

or starvation or exhaustion, falling into fields 

and ditches and sidewalks, mountain peaks

and seldom-seen valleys, just as they 

keep going, season after season, year after 

year, eon after unfathomable eon, so we 

sleep through it all in our beds below, 

writhing maybe through tangles of sheets 

and the existential threat we’ve made

of our lives—we who’ve lived long enough 

to multiply every problem we inherited, 

who’ve ignored or angrily explained away 

the desperate patterns of our own migration—

but sleeping, blithely unwilling to do more

than worry while, awake, we grab our keys 

and cameras and binoculars and go,

 

to the marshes, waterways and wild places

still left, still untrampled, still—unbeknownst

to us—part of the twisted dreams and difficult

truths we rarely remember, come morning. 

Paula J. Lambert has authored several collections of poetry including The Ghost of Every Feathered Thing (FutureCycle 2022) and How to See the World (Bottom Dog 2020). Awarded PEN America's L'Engle-Rahman Prize for Mentorship, Lambert's poetry and prose has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes.

THE SKYSCRAPER MUSEUM

by Kate Bernadette Benedict

Even after the crisis eases, companies may let workers stay home. That would affect an entire ecosystem, from transit to restaurants to shops. —The New York Times, May 12, 2020

Indeed. This lobby is marble-graced.
Heels would echo as workers raced
for pinging elevators, though some stopped
at newsstands first, where they’d opt
for breath mints and a morning paper.
Here’s a New York Times, with vintage
headline. Centennial of Brooklyn Bridge.

Let’s go up, let’s press floor 43.
Bad art, glass walls, a ficus tree.
Outside : virtual sky and steeple.
Inside: holograms of busy people
dressed like Peggy and Joan and Draper.
Here’s a typewriter. Hear it clacking?
Pages on the side for stacking.

What a time it was! It ended.
Congregating got suspended.
The energy of streaming streets.
Uptown, Mad Men; downtown, Beats.
Coffee smells and carbon paper.
Towers went up and towers fell,
a simple virus fouled the well.

So let us praise Manhattan
as it used to be
and marvel that we worked that way
in harmony
in soaring buildings
that caught the sun
and let in moonlight too.
Eras end. History gives them due.

Kate Bernadette Benedict, of New York City, is the author of Earthly Use: New and Selected Poems.

ATLAS OF AVIAN FLIGHT

by Mary Lux

The skies are emptying out. The number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29 percent since 1970, scientists reported on Thursday. There are 2.9 billion fewer birds taking wing now than there were 50 years ago. –The New York Times, September 22, 2019. Video of sanderlings by Washington State, Cornell Lab of Ornithology.


Gone from the River of Foul Run-off
flowing with trash-plastic and sick fish–

Gone from the Prairie of Emptiness,
of bee and grasshopper, gopher and butterfly–

Gone from the Killing Fields of crops coated
with chemicals, deserted
by cricket, tatydid, firefly–

Gone from the Feral Cat Jungle of woods,
back alleys, fenced yards, waterfronts–

Gone from the City of Lethal Towers
of implacable, break-neck glass–

Gone from the Choking Skies of Smoke
covering the dearth of insects–

So has departed the Passenger pigeon:
now falls the Swift, the Oriole, the Jay,
Bobolink, Meadow lark, Wood thrush,
Barn swallow and Bluebird,
even the commonest, the House Sparrow.

Fled, all, into another
Country,
that of No Return:
the last eye frozen in death's ice,
the last wings lying still, bent off-angle,
on earth's sterile ground—

Gone into the Cosmos of Absence
of all but memory and imagination.

Mary Lux is a Milwaukee poet, longtime practicing member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.  Has appeared in four anthologies including Masquerades and Misdemeanors, edited by Marilyn Taylor; in print and online publications.

SUNSET COMMENT ON THE NEW YEAR

by George Held

29 December 2016

It’s one of those glorious sunsets,
Like an ad for New Mexico, that makes
You feel blessed to be alive even as
Authoritarianism leaks over the horizon –
Orange and gold flames with a purple core
Over New Jersey without the seasonal
Obstruction of leaves on the trees –
What might it presage, what tacit
Message doth it bring, this dynamic neon
Peach Melba of a twilit sky? Not the Orange
Man risen from New York City towers
To loom Kong-like over even the sunset,
The sky, the compliant Universe,
The galactic figure of our tabloid
Imaginations?
And now the fire in the sky
Deepens like a Roman omen, the night
Rushes in to drape dark auguries
About the perishing republic, and we brace
For the inevitable inauguration, the sunset
A mere glowing ember in the charred evening.

George Held, a frequent contributor to TheNewVerse.News, has received ten Pushcart nominations, including ones for both poetry and fiction in 2016. His new poetry chapbook is Phased II (Poets Wear Prada, 2016).

BERLIN, DECEMBER 19, 2016

by J.D. Smith





Much reading renders dust the myth
Of some past golden age,
As rust and tarnish, canker, rot
Have flyspecked every page.

Outlines emerge, though, that describe
The wax and wane of powers
And which times had the wit to build—
Or only tear down—towers.

As on a crowded street one sorts
The harmless from the threat,
Some stories stand out from the day
And mark a turn, so that

If we can’t quite assay this age
Or what it is replacing,
We still can feel the flames and smell.
The swart smoke of debasing.

J.D. Smith’s third collection of poems Labor Day at Venice Beach was published in 2012; his first humor collection Notes of a Tourist on Planet Earth the following year.. His poems have appeared in journals and sites including 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Texas Review, and Dark Mountain 3.