SARGASSUM

by Mark McKain

“Yellowtails and Turtles in Sargassum” by Michelle Nicole Lowe

This morning folds of orange light, the garden under construction. 
A heat wave threatens. The Gulf Stream slowing.
 
Dislocated matts float into the Caribbean. Home to fish, turtles, 
childhood memories. Sexual identity, nutrient availability,
 
dust from Africa. Wanted: herbivories to graze algae from the reef 
able to scrape the toughest deposits. It won’t recover
 
without your teeth. Seaweed swirls, coquina clams burrow. Shush 
of white noise only birds can penetrate. Water sings to the child,
 
running to the shelter of mother’s knee, a soft tree. Wake up worrying 
I will have to flee—censorship-antisemitism-misogyny-racism
 
feet high washing ashore. A teacher works overtime to erase “take a knee.” 
Her job eliminated if she didn’t ban empathy.
 
Rows of brown-green rafts on the shore, covering turtle nests, 
choking air passages with sulfur fumes—how I often feel,
 
out of place, like Braithwaite in New York, yearning for the “blue mist 
from the ocean” the cotton tree in the school yard,

the crack of sugarcane. The houses flood the trees aflame the bed shaking 
like a theme-park ride throws me into the street.
 
On the curb with cracked cup. And you, sea, gulping water and sky.
The house groans, swims.  

Mark McKain’s work has appeared in Agni, The New Republic, The Journal, Subtropics, Cimarron Review, Superstition Review, ISLE, and elsewhere. He has published two chapbooks: Blue Sun by Aldrich Press and Ranging the Moon by Pudding House Publications. He writes, teaches, and experiences global warming in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

A DEADLY BEAUTY

by Geoffrey Philp

 

    

When the MV Express Pearl, carrying twenty-five

tons of nitric acid and seventy-eight tons of plastic

pellets, lurched into the port of Colombo, sailors

 

released carbon dioxide into the hold to put out a fire

that had been smoldering for two weeks. But it was too late.

The ship keeled from an explosion of the acid and hurled

 

the plastic pellets into the air, which descended on the yellow

sands of Sri Lanka in a flutter of plastic snow that glittered

at sunrise, like the stone Devair Alves Ferreira bought

 

from two junkyard scavengers. Intrigued by the blue

light, Devair shaved granules from the stone and shared

the poison of cesium 137 with his family and friends

 

in Goiânia until his wife’s hair fell out in clumps

on the bathroom floor. And while the Brazilian police

arrested the men responsible for the theft of a radioactive

 

canister from an abandoned cancer lab, competing

adjusters shift blame to India and Qatar, which denied

entry to their harbors because they “didn’t want

 

the problem in their backyard.” But tell that to the soldier

scraping debris from the backs of crabs, and who fears

the pellets will raise the temperature of the sand in nesting

 

grounds of turtles, and a generation of single-sex hatchlings

will crawl into the sea. Or tell that to fishermen who can no longer

feed their families as the ship sinks and the ocean burns.

Geoffrey Philp is the author of five books of poetry, two novels, two collections of short stories, and three children's books. His poems and short stories have been published in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, sx salon, World Literature Today, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Bearden's Odyssey Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden, Rattle: Poets Respond, and Crab Orchard Review. A recipient of the Luminary Award from the Consulate of Jamaica (2015) and a former chair for the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, Philp's work is featured on The Poetry Rail at The Betsy—an homage to 12 writers that shaped Miami culture. He is currently working on a graphic novel for children, My Name is Marcus. Twitter: @GeoffreyPhilp / Instagram: @geoffreyphilp

SOME DAY, PERHAPS...

IT WILL HELP TO REMEMBER THESE TROUBLES AS WELL.*

by Bonnie Naradzay

*Aeneas to his men, after theirs is the only ship

  to survive a violent storm at sea near Carthage.

         

Friends, a study of The Black Death states the plague 

may have come from outer space. The Mars Rover 

landed in a dried up lake. Perseverance is transporting 

images home from the red planet. On earth, we learn 

that magnetic north and south may be flipping sides, 

an ominous event, according to weakening attractions 

and ancient iron shards stuck pointing the wrong way. 

In Galveston, medical workers asked for a refrigerated 

truck to store the dead bodies. Thousands of turtles 

stunned by the cold have gone to a convention center 

in the backs of station wagons. Ted Cruz got on the plane

in jeans but went the wrong way, or the optics were wrong.

Sweet Thames, and Virgil, flow gently while I end my song.

Bonnie Naradzay leads poetry workshops at a day shelter for homeless people and at a retirement center, both in Washington DC.  Recent poems are in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), Kenyon Review Online, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, Tampa Review, Poet Lore, EPOCH, Northern Virginia Review, Anglican Theological Review, Seminary Ridge Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.

THE AMERICAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

XXIX.  May 14, 2020 85,884

by Harold Oberman

I want to sit here and breathe my own air;
My den is my paper panic attack bag—
     Rational fears.
Remind me next pandemic to ostrich cliche
Deep enough to fill my head with sand,
Deep enough to avoid CDC science,
So deep I’ll run the savanna
When I emerge, oblivious to predators.

Now they’re forcing us out,
Opening up.
A trial here, a meeting there,
Left behind if you don’t attend.
Just out of their eggs
Join the trail of tiny sea turtles
Trying to make it to the sea.


Harold Oberman is a poet and lawyer trying make a living, and live, in Charleston, S.C.

NO PLANET B

by Gail White

Image source: Tehran Times, April 22, 2020

A truth we’d rather see removed
now stares us in the face:
how much the planet is improved
without the human race.

Now hatchling turtles on the beach
escape in seaward flight.
In Africa’s deserted streets
the lion sleeps tonight.

Now dolphins leap from their lagoon
and wave excited tails,
while goats go sauntering among
the shuttered shops of Wales.

So every passing day would find
the earth more fresh and green
if only all of humankind
would stay in quarantine.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats.