NO GUNS LEFT BEHIND

by Mickey J. Corrigan

Where are the parents
their kids running wild
down dark city streets
shooting each other
with fireworks, handguns
fighting and flocking
in one huge roiling mass
of raging hormonal insanity
preteens to twenty-somethings
alerted online, on phones
to create havoc together
a youth wilding
a teen takeover
flash crowds run amok
in Orlando, DC, Pensacola
a fatality on the 4th
ten kids shot and 
where are the parents
now that their children
are hospitalized
or dead?

Mickey J. Corrigan writes about death. A lot. It's kind of her thing. Poetry chapbooks include Days' End (Main Street Rag) which takes place in a fictional Florida suicide parlor, and Final Arrangements, a series of poems about burial practices around the world (Prolific Press). No Guns Left Behind (Cyberwit) shares a chronology of school shootings in poetic form. Mickey lives in the Sunshine State, where crime and bad deaths abound. Her latest novel is Lazy Palms (Cyberwit, 2026) about an experimental euthanasia trailer park.

P-22

by Barbara Parchim

The famous Hollywood-roaming mountain lion known as P-22 is drastically underweight and was probably struck and injured by a car, wildlife experts who conducted a health examination on the big cat said on Tuesday. The male cougar, whose killing of a leashed dog has raised concerns about its behavior, probably will not be released back into the wild and could be sent to an animal sanctuary or euthanized, depending on its health, the California department of fish and wildlife said. —The Guardian, December 14, 2022

you overstepped your allotment

designated when we took over the landscape—

 

wandered into the backyards of

designer dogs that scamper like prey

 

crossed the wrong freeways—

a concrete grid overlaid on the land

 

meaningless, artificial boundaries

not mapped in your DNA

 

how could you know

only certain spaces were allowed?

 

how solitary your existence

far from the Santa Monica mountains

 

the occasional park,

a checkerboard of wild between our constructs

 

what happens next is our decision

as we decide everything in our dominion

 

your celebrity may evoke some empathy

as the wild slips away

 

 

Barbara Parchim lives on a small farm in southwest Oregon.  She enjoys gardening and hiking and volunteered for several years at a wildlife rehabilitation facility.  Her poems have appeared in Allegro, Isacoustic, The NewVerse News, Turtle Island Quarterly, Windfall, Front Porch Review, Jefferson Journal, Cirque, and others.  Her first book What Remains was published by Flowstone Press in October, 2021.

BEFORE EARTH IS LOST

by George Salamon

“In Conclusion” by Peter Kuper at The Nib

"Humans have become as great an influence on the planet as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs," Anthony Barnosky, Stanford University biologist, quoted in The New York Times, July 30, 2021

Paradise was lost long ago,

now it's the turn of Earth,

where humans have assumed

privileges and rights for themselves:

this island belongs to us, one

nation claims, another the right

to inhabit space.

We're mammals, denying the

prehistory of our origins, the

story of how our ancestors

turned the earth's jungles into

today's fortress of machine

and stone.

We've moved too quickly past

the awe for earth's order, left

behind in the wild, playful

nature of the child, now that 

we are beginning to feel the

coming storm.

George Salamon lives and waits, hoping for the best, in St. Louis, MO.