ON THE ARRIVAL OF MOSQUITOES IN ICELAND

by Pepper Trail

Iceland reports the presence of mosquitoes for the first time, as climate warms —NPR, October 22, 2026

The ice is going, the ice of Iceland

Gone are the herring and the codfish

What we harvest now are tourists, so many

They fill the high tower of the Hallgrímskirkja 

They fill the restaurants, avid for puffin and whale

For bits of fermented shark, all those bygone tastes

And following them, now the mosquitoes have come

Carried north on the world’s sickly southern breath 

Bringing us a different misery than those we loved

Thirsting for a taste of our unmoved Nordic blood

Yet still, we are given our island’s dark comedy

The earth opening and closing beneath our feet

And above, through our unbroken nights

Wavering curtains of unearthly light

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

AT LI WENLIANG'S DEATH

by Yuan Changming

The death of a Chinese doctor who was silenced by the police for being one of the first to warn about the coronavirus set off an outpouring of grief and anger on social media. The New York Times interviewed him last week. Photo: Mourners at a vigil for Dr. Li Wenliang on Friday. Credit: Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times, February 7, 2020

Your humanistic lungs have no more air to pump out
But your whistle-blowing is echoing afar
Like a whale’s call, far beyond a whole continent
Louder than all the songs ever sung in modern China

Yuan Changming published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, eight chapbooks & publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1639 others worldwide.

88 POUNDS

by Pepper Trail

What are the words in whale for this?

For this death?

We will not know

Somewhere, deep, a moan   

Too low for hearing, perhaps

A shriek too high to be borne

The rice sacks, torn, wash into the sea

Float, drift, sink into the dark

Echo back the shape of food

The shape, but not the taste

More, found, eaten, then more

The whale learns what we know

To be full, and starving

The too much and the never enough

On the necropsy table

We sort the plastic, we weigh it

We feel the horror

But the words, the right words

We will never know

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

PERVERSE URGES

by Richard Schiffman

Last week on the floor of the U.S. Senate
the Right Reverend Senator Bugger Mugger
called me and my green-bellied ilk
               “tree huggers”
Has that cracker ever got my number!
He said, “Buddy, keep those muddy
mitts of yours on your own kind.”
“Amen sir,” I replied, “only I’m wondering what kind
of kind that is.” Granted I’m a bit confused
               (asexually speaking)
something to do with being raised by a missing planet,
abandoned by an ecosystem at a tender age.
Seems I’ve conceived a perverse urge to mate
with a star, or if that’s too cosmic, with a right whale,
a snail darter, a spotted owl—
any species that’s as endangered
as I’m feeling right now.
But I can’t seem to find an other
that’s other enough to satisfy
               my kinky appetites.
My eco-therapist is trying to suss it out.
Right Reverend says it’s unbiblical,
calls my fondness for nature unnatural,
says marriage is between opposite genders,
not genus, has drafted legislation
to make tree-hugging in public a federal crime.
The measure has broad support from speciests
on both sides of the evolutionary aisle.
Hell, if it passes, I’ll diddle with a river.
Hear that’s still legal in California.

Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet and author of two biographies. His poems have been published in Southern Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly, New Ohio Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and many other publications. His poetry collection What the Dust Doesn't Know was published by Salmon Poetry in February.