DEATH OF A FRIEND

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

The death of the orangutan named Sampurna was confirmed Thursday by the West Kalimantan Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) in Borneo. 

Sampurna the orangutan has died

You may not have known him in life

But you will perhaps 

Know him in death

 

A male orangutan who was being monitored

By a wildlife rescue organization

He was at home in an Indonesian rainforest

When it caught fire

 

As the fire raged on and on

It filled with toxic smoke

Which Sampurna and all his neighbors

Could not help but breathe

 

After several days of poisonous inhalations

Sampunrna was found wheezing and choking

In a dry roadside ditch

Unable to stand

 

Rescue workers tried to help

They lifted him from the ditch

Gave him oxygen 

Told him he was going to get better

 

But he did not get better

The struggle for each labored breath

Grew more and more difficult until

Sampurna died

 

Of course his death was emblematic

Of the deadly effects of the climate catastrophe

That is wreaking havoc with life

On planet Earth

 

But his death was also the death

Of a singular being, 

A fellow creature, a unique self 

A brother to all of us, a friend

Buff Whitman-Bradley podcasts his poetry at thirdactpoems.podbean.com .

LIVING WITH MA NATURE

by Lenora Rain-Lee Good

Wildfires surround my town

air quality goes from green to red

 

my sister’s town is burning

her air quality is purple

 

I wear mask when outside

would wear it inside, but 

 

they are paper and dissolve 

in my cup of coffee, so I run

 

my air cleaner. Perfumes, smoke,

pollen, dust, anything to irritate

 

my larynx and my voice goes

or I sound like a pubescent boy

 

either was fine when my kids 

were young and full of laughter

 

they have more sympathy now

I wish Ma Nature did.

 

Lenora Rain-Lee Good lives near the Columbia River in Kennewick, WA. Her latest chapbook is Saying Goodbye to Thomas published by Finishing Line Press. She writes fiction, radio dramas, and poetry. Her words have appeared in online and print magazines and anthologies, including Quill and Parchment, Ekphrastic Review, and Notes of Light and Dark: Southwestern Aubades and Nocturnes. Her favorite poetical quote: “A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.” —Robert Heinlein

BORDERS

by Howie Good

Nature abhors borders. A smoky haze from Canadian wildfires blots out the sun in Columbus, Ohio. An earthquake under the Sea of Japan shakes skyscrapers in LA. The Earth shares one skin. Borders are human constructs, a kind of illusion, lines that appear on maps without appearing on corresponding landscapes. Governments speak of the sanctity of borders. The smoke from far up north has turned daylight where I live a ghostly amber. There are no borders, really, only fences and patrols and checkpoints as if there were. Men have died by the millions defending what doesn’t exist.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection True Crime was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.

BEING NEIGHBOURLY

by Brydon Caldwell

As humanity expands to

fill the globe, so too

does density as we are

stacked one on top of

another on top of another.

Neighbours, who used to be

a friendly wave across a 

field, are now as close as

thin sheetrock, plaster, 

and some studs.

In our proximity, our

capacity has not changed;

we are no more magically

tolerant of others than before.

We share a space that is

subject to the elements,

acts of God, even fire, water,

and air. Accept or deny

climate change, we all live

on the same globe with

common conditions. We can

turn on the kitchen fan when

the smell of curry gets too

strong, but none of us have

control over Mother Nature.

Still, it is easier to blame

someone nearby for those

things that are beyond our

dominion, rather than face

the shared responsibility for

dealing with those outcomes.

What, then, is the

neighbourly response?

Brydon Caldwell is a long time teacher and emerging writer from the western edge of the Canadian Shield. A lifetime of creativity and flirtation with the written word has finally coalesced into writing that he’s proud to put out into the world. His writing can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, The Fib Review, and the upcoming Fear Dealer, Opolis 2026, and Still From Somewhere anthologies.

FROM THE HIDEOUSLY SMOKY MIDWEST

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

I love my Canadian neighbors but…

 

At least during Covid we could step outside.

I resurrect my masks and wear them now

to water the puzzled garden, get the mail,

drag in the dumpster. Ash on squash leaves

ages them as surely as gray hair. My throat hurts.

Eyes sting and I’m breathing filtered air.

Exhausted squirrels lay in bird baths.

Deer stagger through the yard.

We keep water out for them,

not to breed mosquitos, nosy neighbor!

Sun a muffled peach pit in both skies.

Moon, overcome with particulate matter,

hides her face, throws scarves of stars

over her mouth to filter pernicious smoke.

Just guessing, since we no longer see her.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

AN UNDESIRABLE SILENCE

by Katy Z. Allen

I first noticed it early in the morning, isolated orange rays of light passing between the trees, the unusual color catching my eye, and so I went looking for the Sun, hidden from sight, and stopped abruptly when I saw it, not far above the horizon, a deep orange disc in the foggy, hazy, cloudy sky. Later, stepping outside for a second time, the light was so strange and eerie it gave me the shivers. I thought a storm was coming, maybe even a tornado, for the feel of the air was foreboding, so I checked all three weather apps on my phone, but none said anything about rain. The unease remained with me as I journeyed from errand to errand, wondering why I had heard nothing, although to be honest I hadn’t gone searching beyond my weather apps, but each time I stepped out of the car I felt that unease and when at last I arrived home and checked my email I saw a subject line, “The sky looks ominous and the air quality is bad. When will it end?” and that was when I learned—perhaps having had my head in the sand for longer than I should have—about the latest wildfires across Canada and Minnesota and the smoke from those fires arriving on our doorstep, so to speak, here in New England, and at last I understood, but all day I’d been feeling the silence of an explanation and only when it was so bad that everyone would notice did some brief and insufficient explanation arrive. I don’t have my head so far into the sand to be fully unaware that as long as we’re not seeing it, we’re not hearing it, we’re not experiencing it, the fact that the world is on fire is greeted with silence, even though it is a deep, dark  heaviness that breaks our hearts and weighs us down, no matter what the color of the Sun as it rises above the horizon in the morning.

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, poet, retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, former healthcare chaplain, and co-founder of a Jewish climate organization. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as The New Verse News, Amethyst Review, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, The Soliloquist Journal and Art on the Trails: Number 9. She was awarded Honorable Mention in The Prose Poem’s 2025 Prose Poetry Competition, and her book, A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text was published by Strong Voices Publishing. 

OUR FREE UNION

by Zumwalt

with respect to André Breton

Image by the poet using Nano Banana Pro

My country with the hair of embedded fiber-optic cable
With the thoughts of a backed-up four-lane freeway at dusk
With the waist of a redwood in the center of a scenic bypass;
My country with the lips of algae and silt from the Great Lakes

With the cheeks of a ticker tape parade on celluloid stock
With the teeth of a picket fence on a shifting, slumping shoreline;
The tongue of a cracked bell that just rings and rings on command
Of a televised courtroom, a satellite that spies in dark silence;

My country with the eyelashes of high-tension wires
With brows of the upper seats of a sold-out stadium
Of the blue light under the sheets
And of the steam rising from an executive sauna fifty stories high.

My country with shoulders of interstate concrete
And of a hydroelectric dam holding back the stars;
My country with the sticky, messy fingers of a contested ballot box
Of a strewn deck of plastic cards;

My country with armpits of coal dust and scented bubble tea
Of suburban sprawl and the nest of a bald eagle in a cell tower
With arms of Mississippi tributaries and of a thousand assembly lines
And of a mingling of the cornfield and ambushed migrant workers;

My country with legs of elusive wildfires
The movements of a swing state and a jazz festival
Calves of sequoia bark, feet of broken treaties and numbered amendments
Toes of subway tracks and tourists flicking coins into canyons.

My country with a neck of unharvested wheat
A throat of pulsing fiber and high-powered cooling fans
Of a protest stage shrieking in the bed of a dry river
With breasts of the Appalachian night;

With the ribs of a multi-story shopping mall
Of a ghost town shadowed by the noonday sun;
My country with the belly of a thumb-scrolled digital map
With a back of an abandoned silver screen;

My country with a nape of red clay and cooling asphalt
And of the threads of a smudged napkin on a diner counter at 3:00 AM.
My country with hips of a barreling NextGen Acela
With hips of a county rodeo and of Friday night tossed penalty flags

Of a pendulum swinging between fairground stand food and Michelin-rated dining.
My country with bones of Civil War reenactments
With the ligaments of uncirculated library books
With the tendons of a buffalo nickel gifted to a grandchild.

My country with the loins of an offshore drill and the grocery store pharmacy
Of prairie grass and vintage baseball cards.
My country with ears full of rotating sirens
Of eyes of parabolic, steerable radio telescopes.

My country with eyes of a flatscreen TV left on at night
With eyes of a forest gasping for breath…

My country that vowed to love us always:
Our hands held out for answers, trembling within rusty handcuffs.

Zumwalt's poetry feeds on alienation, shifting reality, and forced adaptation. Zumwalt is a repeat contributor to The New Verse News.

AIR QUALITY ALERT

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

The National Weather Service has issued an air quality alert for Aug. 11-12 for multiple northern Michigan counties because of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. —Lansing State Journal, August 10, 2025

We’re in charge of so little. Less than an acre; a cat. Clearing debris from the street drain. The few things we control are so inconsequential, no one cares. Not even us. Take my lungs. Please. Take Canadian wildfire smoke. Their wilderness makes civilization  hard. Even deer here in Michigan wear masks. How do they get them on?  Last week, we found out we were made of plastic. Today particulate matter is coating our lungs with Teflon. Silver Beach is like the bottom of an ashtray half full of gin. Haze, the weather man says, trying to fool the tourists. Maple/bacon smoke rolls in, a plague from the Northwest, but we are so far gone, its smell only makes us hungry.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

BIG CRUNCH

by Sally Zakariya

Dark energy, the mysterious force powering the expansion of the universe, appears to be weakening, according to a survey that could “overthrow” scientists’ current understanding of the fate of the cosmos. If confirmed, the results from the dark energy spectroscopic instrument (Desi) team at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona would have profound implications for theories about the evolution of the universe, opening up the possibility that its current expansion could eventually go into reverse in a “big crunch”. —The Guardian, March 19, 2025

Maybe we’ve all just had enough.

Raging wildfires… melting icebergs…
rising temperatures… falling birth rates…
whispers of war… growing fascism…
divided nation…

Where will it all end?

And now scientists are worried—
it looks like the universe itself
has had enough and has stopped
expanding.

Before you know it, those lady telescopes
(Nancy Grace Roman and Vera C. Rubin)
will huddle on a star, drinking tea
and tut-tutting about the end of it all.

But don’t worry.

Whether the universe starts expanding again
or—gulp—does a cosmic 180 and contracts
in a big crunch some billions of years from now,
we’ll still have plenty of time to destroy our own
little part of it in the meanwhile.

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

THE REST IS STILL UNWRITTEN

by Katie Kemple

Instead of watching the inauguration,
I conduct a series of online searches
for cast members of The Hills. Because
I heard one of the couples lost
a home in the Palisades fire. Holy shit,
I thought, they're still together?!
A hot mess on the show. I guess
that's the magic of editing. How sweet
to learn they'd had kids, sold crystals,
posted socials together. Now they're
suing the city of Los Angeles. Back
in The Hills days we were new to realty
TV didn't realize playing a villain
could be profitable, a career even.
The lines blurred between villain, 
hero. I think about The Apprentice,
watching that first season with my
husband, trying to decode the language
of boardroom politics, house poor
snuggled into our IKEA sofa.    
You're fired! a phrase we parroted
for laughs. I'm nostalgic for innocence
to be honest. There's no rain today.
My skin, dry. The Santa Anas blow
fire. Who decides what happens next? 

Katie Kemple still gets choked up listening to Unwritten—its optimism and faith in the future. She hasn't lost hope in our country yet. She has contributed poems to The New Verse News in the past. Her poems have appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), SWWIM, and Maudlin House.

COVER IT

by Ron Riekki

“Everyone keeps saying 'apocalyptic,' but that doesn’t begin to cover it.” —CNN’s Karina Tsui from Pacific Palisades, January 8, 2025

 

My sister texts me saying she is sorry

to hear about my long disease [sic] and I

think of the long history of fire, how often

our world wants to be held instead of this,

now, how it’s helled.  And in the military

they put me in the burn pits, not to help,

but for punishment, no mask given, and

 

forced to stand there with the ash now

that owns me, apical scarring, and this

is the world now, scaring me, the news

where I see fire in the Ukraine and fire

in Gaza and fire in Sudan and fire in

Myanmar and fire in Haiti and I look

online at a “current large wildfire map”

 

and it looks as if all of California is on

fire and I worked in California during

COVID, a disaster healthcare volunteer,

going to all the worst-hit cities, raged

by COVID and, always, driving in, I’d

see countless TRUMP signs [sick],

almost as if COVID went wherever his

 

supporters were, a nurse yelling one

time that the OR needed to have at

least two sets of negative pressure

respirators, and I remember a shift

where all of the staff was sick, how

nobody showed up but me, and, out-

side, the horizon was ablaze, rooms

 

packed with COVID patients, one

dying every other shift, and I could

go outside for my break, but couldn’t

take my mask off outside either, not

with the planes dropping fire retardant,

and a medic telling me that the UV

in L.A. was deadly, is deadly, and this

 

doctor screaming something about

a CT scan, and a COVID patient who

came in with no ID (we took him),

and an MP from a nearby military

base who died in his 20s, drowned

in the water of his own lungs, and

how someone came in and a nurse

 

was asking if the patient couldn’t

breathe because of COVID or be-

cause of the fires and the fires were

COVID and COVID was a fire, is

a fire, and my father is in bed and

he’s flicking through the news and

it’s orange-red on the screen and

 

red-yellow on the screen and it’s

yellow-orange, all these different

hells we create—bombings and

wildfire and a Republican’s pool

in his mansion backyard drowning

in flames and the fires in Burkina

Faso don’t make our news and

 

the fires in Cameroon don’t make

our news and the fires in Mali

don’t make our news, but fires

of the wealthy are all over our

screens and the mansions are so

quickly eaten by Hell.  My son

googles the words Who invented

 

fire? and the A.I. answers, Homo

sapiens and we invented all of

this, all of this ash and smoke

and I remember when I was

standing in the middle of my

lungs being destroyed for

the rest of my life and there

 

was fence all around me and

I thought of incarceration,

how we are getting so good

at war that we are turning our

whole entire world into a prison

and the only way out of this hole

is to stop everything we’re doing.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).