MY MOTHER IS SUING THE US GOVERNMENT FOR POISONING HER HUSBAND

by Bill Garvey

The government doubts his
cancer was caused by Camp Lejeune.
How do you know he was even there? they ask. 
We lived in New Bern North Carolina, 
she says, and every day Bill took the bus to Cherry Point 
or Camp Lejeune depending on his orders.
 
But even if he was at Camp Lejeune,
how do you know he drank the water?
It was hot, May to September 1952.
I'm sure he drank the water.
Were you with him at Lejeune?
Did you witness him drink the water?
 
Of course I wasn't with him. 
Of course I didn't witness... 
So for all you know he could have quenched
his thirst with an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
Or even a Ginger Ale. For all you know he was never 
exposed to the water at Camp Lejeune. 
 
I was madly in love with a Marine 
with crooked teeth and a cocky grin. 
Every day from May to September he came 
home to me seventy-two years ago,
clean and showered, so handsome 
in his crisp uniform, stepping from the bus 
 
into our tiny apartment, ready for me. 
Embracing me so close I forgot all about the heat. 
I'll always remember how good he smelled 
at the end of a long day, his hair still damp from 
your showers, not a whiff of Coca-Cola—
or even a Ginger Ale—on his lips.

Author's note: This is a true story. My mother is 93, still sharp, and she is suing the US government for my father's death from kidney and renal cancer in 1977, when the world was ignorant to Lejeune.

Bill Garvey's collection of poetry The basement on Biella was published in 2023 by DarkWinter Press. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Rattle, One Art, San Antonio Review, Connecticut River Review, Cimarron Review, The New Verse News, The New Quarterly and others.

NORTH AMERICAN MIGRATION

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

Canadian wildfire smoke created a hazy red-orange sky over Lake Michigan on June 23 at the Michigan-Huron watershed. Wildfire smoke is causing poor air quality in the Great Lakes this week. —Fox Weather

Just a whiff of Armageddon seems worse
than a year of Covid precautions. Canadian fires.
Some jet stream sending a radar plume of it 
like a purple hot dog cuddled up to the blue bun 
of Lake Michigan. Thinner but more toxic
than mountain fog, smoke blurs horizons
and pulls a gray film over every noun,
smothered in adjectives. Diluted sun thins
the smoke like cream into soup, a color
variation, same raw taste. Ash residue
floats on bird baths. Only the crows sing. 
It’s a song they learned on their migration
from Hell. Not long ago. North of Thunder Bay.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske is a Michigan native. She is a poet, visual artist, and mother of three. Her publications include dozens of print and online journals, five books of poetry, and inclusion in several anthologies. She would never live anywhere else.

OLD POISONS

by Jack Romig

The Texas Freedom Caucus—a group of Republican lawmakers—sent a letter to the State Board of Education ahead of its Tuesday meeting, noting that they were watching the changes to history lessons closely. Legislators “will not hesitate to intervene during the next legislative session, should the need arise, to protect Texas children from being further indoctrinated and taken advantage of,” they wrote. The caucus celebrated on Twitter Tuesday night, saying: “The board voted to scrap the wokeified proposed changes to the TEKS.” —The Dallas Morning News, August 30, 2022

If we must stand nostalgic by the crusted rivers of our past,

forgetting how we took the land from other folk,

made belles and cavaliers of those who drove the slaves,

erased a second time those killed for human difference;

 

if we have only mists of vaguest sentiment  

to hide from us the questions that our history asserts,

then let us also keep alive our feelings for old poisons,

 

mercurochrome our mothers painted on our cuts

and used its toxic salt to draw hearts on our knees,

insecticides that fogged the wake of tanker trucks

as we, unknowing, trotted in the spray.

 

Jack Romig was a longtime manuscript editor with Book-of-the-Month Club in New York City. His poems have appeared in Common Sense 2, The Fourth River, and Philadelphia Stories. He lives in Huff’s Church, Pennsylvania.

IN THE ASH

by Sandy Sortwell Makau

Flames from the Glass Fire consume Chateau Boswell Winery. St. Helena, CA, September 27, 2020. Credit: Noah Berger/AP via The Washington Post, September 30, 2020. 

Burned remains float over the mountain ridge, houses, old cars, furniture and dreams, reconfigured into gray soot, travel to the valley floor on the wings of scattered ash to rest on my back porch.

The air quiet, oppression settles on every surface a reminder of the fire’s distant destruction, how lives suddenly transform from hope, to fire, to smoke, to ash.

Trapped in my air tight house surrounded by a white fog of smoke; its haze deceives me. Through my kitchen window, I see a cloudy winter day until I open the door, the smoke bullies me with its toxic fumes, it taunts me with the threat of more fire to come, saying to me ‘maybe when the wind changes tonight I will come for you too.’

I walk across the porch, the wind billows swirling like a desert windstorm trying to lift. My footsteps sink into the ash like freshly fallen snow making a path barren and gray. The destination unknown.

The mountaintop has shown me its sadness in the ash today.

Sandy Sortwell Makau lives in Butte County, California–30 minutes from both the Paradise 2018 Camp Fire and this years Bear Fire above the town of Oroville. She is surrounded by fires nearby in northern California, in southern California, and across the border in Oregon. Friends of hers have lost everything in these fires. She is a freelance writer and poet.

SCURRYING

by Carl Mayfield 

A man is a child
at both ends of life

and much of the time
between dawn and dusk,

touching his toes
to illustrate how the head

can drop out of sight
and still send thoughts

scurrying in every direction
to bounce off other heads

not all there but alive
in a juice neither visible

nor mute, allowing the new arrival
to pick up a language

to discover how far away
words can be from what matters

while noticing how few travelers
sense there is but one tribe

gathered under a toxic sky
which kills everyone, though

not all look up in time to see
their assassin—themselves—

winking back. A pail should be issued
at birth, to play in the sand at first,

then later to bail water out of the desert
as the second childhood shows up,

a little too late to be enjoyed
but with no less power to stun

as it performs the dead man's float.

Carl Mayfield lives and writes at the extreme northern edge of the Chihuahua Desert. His two most recent chapbooks are High Desert Cameos and Gather Round All Ye Wild Children of the Defrocked Atom.

MINING DISASTER

by Howard Pflanzer




I saw hell from my watery grave
In Minas Gerais the first dam broke
Then the second
Workers under a wall of water
The Rio Doce, the sweet river, was bitter
A bloody cocktail spilling all the way down to the sea
Flooding the land
Drowning the people
Floating corpses
Poisoning my fish friends
Now it’s a watery desert
Lifeless
Water undrinkable
No fishing possible
Moribund turtles at the mouth of the river
No crops will grow
The soil filled with deadly poison
Now I am dying in the cloudy water
My flesh will not feed the hungry
I will rot with the stench of decay filling the air
Scales covering my eyes in darkness
Blinding my sight forever.                                                                                            


Howard Pflanzer is a poet, playwright, and lyricist. Dead Birds or Avian Blues was published by Fly By Night Press (2011). Recent publications include FIVE Poetry and Downtown Brooklyn. He was the prizewinning November 2013 Poet of the Month of The Poetry Company. His hybrid performance piece, Walt Whitman Opera, adapted from Whitman’s poetry with music by Constance Cooper, was presented at the undergroundzero festival in New York. July 2014. He has read/performed his work at KGB, LaMaMa, Theaterlab, The Living Theatre, The Cornelia Street Cafe, Medicine Show A Gathering of the Tribes, The Bowery Poetry Club, Brownstone Poets, and San Diego Writers Ink.   

THE LOYAL OPPOSITION

by Ann Reisfeld Boutté






That noble tradition
born in nineteenth century England
has, in the twenty-first century,
gone the way of Yellow Pages,
paper maps and pay phones.
Once happy warriors,
inspired orators in search
of lofty ideas, our leaders
have succumbed to the lure
of wealth and power,
slithered into the politics of
character demonization and
look-into-the-camera lies.
Toxic fallout has oozed
beyond the Beltway, infiltrating
Red State/Blue State cities
and towns, workplaces, churches,
clubs and families. Old and dear
friends, cousins, siblings, even
parents and children, whipped into
frenzies of righteous indignation
and unable to bridge the divide,
have unceremoniously forsworn
topical discussions.  Both sides,
firmly rooted in warring camps,
yearn for and dread the
inevitable reckoning,
I told you so.


Ann Reisfeld Boutté is a writer of poetry, essays, and feature stories. Her work has appeared in many publications including The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV, Texas Poetry Calendars, and Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry. She has a Master’s Degree in journalism and has worked as a feature writer for a national wire service. She was a Juried Poet in the Houston Poetry Fest in 2001, 2005, 2009 and 2010.