THE GULF OF AMERICA, NÉE MEXICO

by Susan Ayres

The U.S. Department of the Interior announced on Friday that they will implement President Trump’s name change for the Gulf Coast.(wjhg)

 

                        I laugh at what you call dissolution,

                        And I know the amplitude of time.

                                                            —Walt Whitman

 

And yet she too is dissolved in a sea

of fears and worries. Will the rocks smash

her if the saltwater lets her go? In the muted

submersion there’s an isolation. The air

 

bubbles rise in a tickle. Small fish nibble

her toes. It’s not like she’s fallen to pieces.

She’s just lost her reason, her name.

She’s the brain mush and muscle mash

 

of dark swirls in the clear green water,

the murky way men possess women. Her particles

bond to the tickles. The waves push her

forward with the incoming tide. She laughs

 

at what they call dissolution. Floating

face down she knows the amplitude of time.

Susan Ayres is the author of Walk Like the Bird Flies (Finishing Line, 2023) and Red Cardinal, White Snow (Main Street Rag, 2024). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals. She studied Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, practiced karate for nine years with her son, and now spends time in Texas writing, collaging, teaching, and learning tai chi.

SEA GRAVE

by Sarwa Azeez

We peered through bullet holes

to see our future 

on the other side 

fled home—

dodging fires 

and gunshots.

We held on 

to tree limbs that 

despite being weighed low

by snow and wind

guided us back 

to safety.

We wandered astray

along the haunting 

mountain trails

Our fast-beating hearts 

chased 

by the soldiers’ ghost cries 

but our gazes raised

heavenward

beyond those sky-piercing summits.

Our roaming bodies

stumbled on a vast blue tomb—

The waves thundered

like wrathful gods 

who were lifting us 

through clouds

and mist. 

Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet and translator. She is a Fulbright alumni, got her second masters in Creative Writing from Nebraska-Lincoln University. Her debut poetry pamphlet collection Remote was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in many publications such as Parentheses Journal, Writing for A Woman's Voice, Notre Dame Literary, Wingless Dreamer and elsewhere. 

OUT AT SEA

by Lee Eustace

Almost 12 hours after two vessels sank in the Aegean sea, rescue workers hampered by inclement weather were in a race against the clock on Thursday to find survivors as authorities reported that at least 16 women and a boy had died when an overloaded boat capsized east of the island of Lesbos…. In a separate incident hundreds of miles west, at least five people were thought to have died overnight when another boat ran aground off Kythira, to the south of the Peloponnese…. Last month the Greek migration ministry said it had prevented about 150,000 people illegally entering the country so far this year, though rights groups say many have been prevented through a policy of pushbacks, in contravention of international law.—The Guardian, 6 October 2022. Photo: A local resident stands on a cliff as bodies of migrants are seen next floating debris after a sailboat carrying migrants smashed into rocks and sank off the island of Kythera, southern Greece, Thursday, October 6, 2022. AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis via The Greek Herald, 7 October 2022

Boats. Boats, approaching the shore.

Turn them around, we’ve room for no more.

Men, women, and children on board.

We’re sorry it’s something we cannot afford.

But where can they go and what will they do?

Well, that’s not a problem for me and you.

 

Out on the boat their voices can be heard

Please let us enter—the children are scared.

The waves are strong and the water is cold

Please open your hearts and your household.

Precious little food and water in supply

We won’t have enough if you let us pass by.

 

The sun starts to set and the boats turn around

We’ve come in search of help. But no help have we found.

Out on the horizon the waves begin to rage

Soon you will find us splashed on the front page

of newspapers which read, “Migrants Lost At Sea.”

Well, it’s not a problem for you. It’s a problem for us.

Lee Eustace (he/him) is a writer and poet whose work centres on the themes of relationships, social constructs, and culture. Lee is previously self-published in the creative nonfiction space and is now in the advanced stages of producing a debut novel, a collection of poetry, and a standalone collection of short stories. His works have found a home at Apricot Press, Free_The_Verse, Dipity Literary Magazine, Eunoia Review, and the London Wildlife Trust. Follow his Instagram @creativeleestorytelling for updates on his progress.

CONJOINT

by Imogen Arate

When the waves come

you will remember my name

When the mountains melt

in the blaze of your misdeeds

you’ll beg for another chance

though you squandered them

in your privileged stance

calling your destruction 

into being you sealed every

egress to my escape and

annihilate yourself in turn

Then our gaze will meet again

and you’ll recognize your

anguish in my eyes

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of Poets and Muses (https://poetsandmuses.com), a weekly poetry podcast that won second place at National Federation of Press Women's 2020 Communications Contest. She has written in four languages and published in two. Her works were most recently published on The New Verse News and in Consilience and Rigorous. You can find her @PoetsandMuses on Twitter and Instagram.

CALIFORNIA STATEWIDE FIRE MAP, AUGUST 2018

by Ron Riekki

Source: CAL FIRE

for Zachary Schomburg and Nick Flynn

“Where the hell is global warming?” —DJT

“The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” —DJ Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three


I used to sit on the shore and watch the waves,
but now the shore is closed and the heat waves

and I’m seeing death in the woods and feeling
death in the air and hearing death on the radio

and knowing death is lurking next to Death so
that there are two deaths everywhere that I look

at all times and the death is the death of booths,
the death of voting booths, the death of all

of the animals near the voting booths and in
the voting booths, except there are no voting

booths anymore, just the rigor mortis of these
electoral colleges that are universities with no

freedom of speech unless you count death
speech, the threats to countries, when we don’t

want to concentrate on the fires, on the air
outside of my apartment right now with its 154

red listing of unhealthy and main pollutant:
atmospheric particulate matter, which really

means death but we can’t say death when we
mean death, and what I mean is the newspapers

are having the headlines of California Ablaze
except that we’re told all media is fake that

death is fake, although here we’ve had more deaths
from forest fires in the last year than in the last

decade combined and we are becoming the last,
with the death taste in my mouth—can you

taste it?—The cereal I had this morning was death
brand.  And the milk was death.  And the bowl

was made out of death and I ran after my death-
bus but missed it so I walked through the forest,

a shortcut, except the deer were on fire and my
head was filled with the particles of death

because death is made up of the little things,
the smallest moments of ignorance, the tiniest

bits of hate, until they pile up and I just read
the graffiti near my apartment: CALIFIRENIA

with dotted capitalized Is in cartoonish flames
and 1.4 million acres is burning in thirteen

states with the third-degree burns of the earth’s
crust, the earth’s nerve endings being destroyed,

its skin swelling, the way these wounds tend to heal
poorly, and the heat is a death and the death is a heat

and this is not theater but rather our lives, my life, your
life

Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).

OUR FAR-FLUNG FOOTSTEPS

by Devon Balwit




I came for the beaches but stayed for the O rings,
for the liter bottles, tooth brushes, buoys and bags,
for the shush of takeout boxes at dusk.

I came for the palm fronds shivering like dancers’
fingers but stayed for the orange-pinafored crews,
rubber-booted, working against the tides.

I came for the frigate birds and brown pelicans
but stayed for the seals strangled in rope,
for the whales, gullets splitting with PCBs.

I came for the once-in-a-lifetime memories,
the honeymoon and anniversary, but stayed
for the imprint of kin, our far-flung footprint.



Devon Balwit lives scarily close to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. She has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her individual poems can be found here or are forthcoming in journals such as The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, Cultural Weekly, Triggerfish, Fifth Wednesday, The Free State Review, Rattle, Poets Reading the News, etc.

MY MOTHER’S OCEAN

by Bill Meissner

vis Giphy

I can never take just one photograph of
the ocean. The cerulean waves are too
lovely, too graceful, tumbling gently over themselves,
then turning to foam that kisses
the sandy lip of the world.
There are no other words for it—this
huge and endless ocean’s rise and fall, this
rocking back and forth, back
and forth, the way my mother used to

hold me when I was a small child, afraid
of the oncoming storm.
The brittle window glass rattled, but
she rocked me, and replaced the thunder
with a humming, a lullaby
that rose and fell.
It’s a melody I would,
as the years passed, remember,
then forget, then
remember again. There are no words

for this song my mother sang, her liquid voice
small, but still filling the room,
overpowering the fists of wind and stabs of lightning
with a language I couldn’t understand

at the time.
One single photograph
is never enough. I know now
that there is beauty in the things that are
closest to us, and beauty in the things
that we lose. She

is gone now.
But as a wave lifts itself and rolls
toward me, then bows down and becomes
a wing of bright diamonds,
I stand again on this shore, without words,
my bare feet sinking into
the hourglass sand,
and wait for that song to wash over me.

Bill Meissner is the author of eight books, including a novel and four books of poetry.  His most recent poetry book is American Compass from the University of Notre Dame Press.

MIGRATIONS #1

by Judith Partin Nielsen

Shifting Perception, painting by Jay Alders

                                                                                                  In Memoriam
                                                                                                  José Angel Alfano Solana


We crossed over the border
I won’t say how
and what can I say of
freezing desert nights
black sky blazing stars
then searing, burning sun
tearing into flesh
relentless, relentless
the walking, and fear
then- - - - - - -running, running
as sand clouds appear
against the far sky
running, running- - -and then
I lost you and Juan and
the girl running, running
and falling face down
breathing sand and
dreaming, dreaming of naranjas and
water, rain falling and
phantoms unfurling like giant
sails across the desert floor
and the pounding, pounding of
ocean waves in my ears
and then- - - - -the face, the face
of El Senõr

                                                                                                 

Following a trail of words, mountains, spirit and tears, Judith Partin Nielsen, writer, mother, wife and eventually psychoanalyst left Texas for Colorado in 1985. "Freud said 'everywhere I go, the poet has gone before me.'  May we keep following those footsteps on our paths thru the worlds."

A VIEW OF ISIS’S EVOLUTION IN NEW DETAILS OF PARIS ATTACKS

by Mary Leonard

A VIEW OF ISIS’S EVOLUTION IN NEW DETAILS OF PARIS ATTACKS. A wounded man was evacuated at the Bataclan concert hall during the Paris attacks in November. Investigators hope the arrest of Salah Abdeslam will shed new light on the assaults. Photo credit: Yoan Valat/European Pressphoto Agency via NY Times, March 19, 2016

                         While reading the Sunday Times on my daughter's birthday

"He turned and looked at the people,  and with a
 smirk, apologized and blew himself up."

It matters that you notice the bulky layers,
the anorak with fur collar on a warm night.

It matters that you go through security, open
your backpack, the trunk of your car, be

Frisked, attention, TATP, bombs, answer personal questions.
I'll tell you this: notice him, her, everyone

Alone. Do you understand? That one.
Attention must be paid. This one.

"TATP bombs require real training,
a skilled bomb maker," A Start Up

Bomb Factory? something for your
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs?

It matters that you notice, the absence
No phone, the blank stare, nothing

"Forget small scale attacks," a senior
ISIS said, "hit everyone and everything."

You must pay attention. Your life matters.
Your child matters. Her school matters.

Be wary of men in tracksuits with logos
of nearby teams. Be wary what their

Hats say.  Notice if they look so calm
they'd accept ball bearings inside their flesh

Listen to me, this is your mother
speaking. The world is not

safe. The world is not
an oyster here for the taking.

Forget the sound of waves,
the smell of salt, all the sweet flowers

Where? Long time asking . . . 
And I will ask, Where have they gone.

Mary Leonard has published chapbooks at 2River, Pudding House, Antrim House Press, and RedOchreLit. Her poetry has appeared in The Naugatuck Review, Hubbub, Cloudbank, The Chronogram, Blotterature and most recently in Red River, Ilya's Honey, and A Rat's Ass. She lives in an old school house overlooking the Rondout Creek in Kingston, NY.  Away from her own personal blackboard, she teaches writing workshops for all ages through the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College

WAVES

by Geoffrey A. Landis

"Cosmic Chirp From Black Holes Colliding Vindicates Einstein:" The sound of the collision from a billion light-years away is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. —NY Times, Feb. 11, 2016

Waves in space and time:
a billion light years away
black holes whirl and dance.


Geoffrey A. Landis is a scientist, a science fiction writer, and a poet. As a scientist, is a fellow of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, working on developing new concepts for space missions.  As a science fiction writer, he's written one novel and over fifty short stories, winning the Hugo and Nebula awards.  As a poet, he has written numerous poems, including this one.

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.

BE PREPARED FOR THE BIG IF

by Tricia Knoll

Image credit: lukich / 123RF Stock Photo

                                      Nehalem Bay Spit, Oregon


Twenty years ago a snowy plover explored
the bay spit to nest -- I could have been there.
A June day when one palm-size trilling wader
scooted on stick-black legs on the scruff
of a minus tide poking for shore flies.
Perhaps I didn’t notice.

Were nester-plovers to show up now,
rules weigh down the bird books, heavy NO
horseback riding, kite flying, dogs,
bicycles, sand sails, beach volleyball,
kites above the tide line. Back ups
include poisoned eggs to kill
crows and ravens that gobble
plover eggs. Ropes
to keep birders out.

One commissioner complains
of  limiting family fun.
Another fears phone calls.

We’d notice the yellow signage
to save the tiny plover.
The betting at the bar
is the plover will be a no show.

So the waves have washed
across the tides of time.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet.  Urban Wild, her poetry chapbook, is now available from Finishing Line Press.

SHUTDOWN

by Sara Berkeley

Image source: nationalparks.org

The day the government shut down
the ocean showed up for work.
They put some barricades up
but waves kept coming in, unfazed.
The toilets were locked
and the barricades went up
to stop the people coming in to the park
but we went early, before they closed
the National Seashore, and I can attest
that the seals and the pelicans
and the small fish and the birds that eat them
kept coming back for more.

The waves were giving it their all,
rending the heart of the beach in two,
throwing their violent weight around
while Congress ran aground;
the rush of foam and fuming toil
of the wind blowing spume back
from the crests as loud as the silence
along the corridors of power,
the sand hot beneath our feet,
the water silvery gold, the gulls
laughing and crying as we were
laughing and crying too.

Pelicans flew as low as they dared
we reckoned they hadn't heard
that the government was hung -
hoist by its own petard -
that they'd put some wooden barriers up
to stop the tourist cars
from visiting the National Seashore
while well beneath the roar of the breakers
tearing up the shale
and the keening wail of the gulls
the day was a good day, ungoverned,
lovely, full of miracles.


Sara Berkeley was born and raised in Ireland. She has had five collections of poetry published, one of short stories, and a novel. She has been widely anthologized, including in the Harvard University Press An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter, dog, cat, guinea pig, and varying numbers of fish. When she is not writing poetry, she is a nurse for traumatic brain injured patients. She is well ready for the shutdown to end.

THE RAIN OF MERCY

by Laura Rodley

Image source: Dipity.

Now your waves drink the sky,
an everflowing cup,
that soothes your skin
constantly scorched by daily sun.
See how my raindrops
speckle you with sweet relief
so your tides can surge
upon the sand, keeping
the promise of everlasting life
a promise in danger of being broken
but here, the falling drops
wet and seal the cracks
so your waves tumble, tumble,
the ground sure beneath your reach.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” has won a Pushcart Prize and appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.