STREAK-BACKED ORIOLE

by David Chorlton

A cloudy desert day. The city smiles.

Slow rain falling. Circles of light on the pond.
The same sad news
                             drop by drop
and no umbrella for protection
against reports from far away. 
It’s numbers day
by smoking day with innocence
as no defence, a conflict over who belongs
and who doesn’t. It’s different
with birds,
              the ones who stray
out of their range are most sought after
like the Streak-backed Orioles
come north to the water reclamation park.
They don’t need papers.
No visas. Just an orange
cut in half
              for easy feeding. Welcome
bright birds. No borders in the air.
The newscast doesn’t reach
to where they are. They leave a question
hanging:
           are there orioles
in the Middle East? Has beauty ever been
a broker between the sides
of an old argument? One side does this, the other
does that.
             They keep doing what they know
to do. Every answer comes
in kind. There must be a field guide
for cruelty. It must be disguised
as a holy book.

David Chorlton lives in Phoenix and takes note of the local wildlife. He had a book out early this year called The Flying Desert in which many of the birds he sees even within the city limits are represented in poems and his watercolor paintings.

WINTER 2045

by Steve Deutsch

We bought the corner place

on Burroughs Street—

I’m sure you know it—

a stately two story

built when the neighborhood

was only good for grazing cows.

 

It took two years of construction

now that the summer restrictions 

are in force. We replaced the windows,

added insulation and central air—

two bathrooms and a kitchen.

 

Only this week, we found our way 

to the attic. It’s a wonderland.

Skis and snow shovels

and sleds for children and adults.

And in two huge chests

clothing for a winter fashion show

on an air-conditioned stage.

 

It was cold here once—

although the children refuse

to believe it.

It was cold here once—

although I hardly remember.

Ice hung from the trees—

the snow so high

we could barely open our back doors.

 

My parents would go 

south for the winter—

to Florida or coastal Carolina.

To places first scorched then drowned—

to places now as bare 

as the surface of the Moon. 

 

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and is poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His chapbook Perhaps You Can was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length books Persistence of Memory; Going, Going, Gone; and Slipping Away were published by Kelsay. His book Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press and published in 2023.

MONSOON BLUES

by Geoffrey Philp

Venice is sinking. So are Rotterdam, Bangkok and New York. But no place compares to Jakarta, the fastest-sinking megacity on the planet. Over the past 25 years, the hardest-hit areas of Indonesia’s capital have subsided more than 16 feet. The city has until 2030 to figure out a solution, experts say, or it will be too late to hold back the Java Sea. —Bloomberg, December 6, 2023

Walking along Jalan Tebet Baru Timur where the East Tebet Sugar Plantation once sprawled across the delta on which modern Jakarta is built, cranes hover over a metropolis dotted with blue and black plastic water tanks. The air seems thicker, trapped between the glass and steel towers crisscrossing the city where water supplies wither under a blazing tropical sun, and the city's thirst drains the last drop from depleted reservoirs.
 
While sea levels rise
Jakarta waits for the rain
in the Ring of Fire.

Author’s Note: As coastal megacities like Jakarta sink under the combined weight of rapid development, rising seas, and unstable land subsidence, these converging forces spotlight the harsh realities of climate change threats facing our urban future.

Geoffrey Philp, a Silver Musgrave Medal recipient, is the author of Archipelagos, a book of poems about climate change which was long-listed for the Laurel Prize. Philp’s Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas retells the nativity story, transporting readers back to that holy night in a fresh yet traditional way. His poem “A Prayer for My Children” is featured on The Poetry Rail—an homage to 12 writers who shaped Miami's culture. He  lives in Miami and is working on a children's book Marsha and the Mangroves.

LET THEM DRINK WATER!

by Amy Wolf

Last Thursday [December 14], on the eighth night of Hanukkah, JVP members shut down eight bridges and highways in eight cities across the U.S. to demand an end to the genocide of Palestinians. Thousands of Jews and allies protested in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and San Diego — eight cities symbolizing the eight candles lit on the final night of Hanukkah, plus the shamash, or “helper” candle. JVP members blocked traffic for hours, singing, chanting, carrying giant menorahs, and holding signs reading “Jews says ceasefire now” and “Let Gaza live.” Hundreds were arrested. —Jewish Voice For Peace

Let them drink water!

As you protest, and shut down bridges

As you congratulate each other on your solidarity 

And stop traffic

They are dying of thirst, and of dysentery,

And a dozen water-borne diseases.

The bombs are killing far fewer

Than thirst, hunger, bacteria.

Don’t look away.

Rather than chanting prayers 

With our street-borne menorahs,

Rather than snarling the evening commute,

Should we not be commandeering boats,

And airplanes 

And jeeps

And our cousins and relatives in the Knesset, 

In the State Department,

To bring water to the Gazans?

To give a cup of life to those who thirst,

The babies, the children, the adults alike?

And now food.

Do you know that over a million are starving?

That none know where their next meal is coming from?

In these circumstances, it is little more than a week 

Before that next bomb will not matter.

I am tired of marching.

I do not believe the merchants of Pike Place Market 

Control the foreign policy here

Let alone the War Cabinet of Eretz Yisrael.

Principled Jews the world over have prayed and demonstrated,

Occupied, chanted and sung.

Not a morsel of food have we been able to bring over that border,

Not a cup of water.

"Nation shall not lift sword against nation;

Neither shall they study war anymore" 

Gave me such hope, in the beginning, as my relatives sang it

In Grand Central Station, in Capitol Buildings, in the street, in Hebrew.

It's an important prayer, straight out of liturgy, out of Torah.

I grew up singing it.

Surely this would work!
Surely when the President and the Congress saw

That Jews ourselves condemned this indiscriminate massacre,

They would prevail on Israel to stop.

Catch the murderers, catch the rapists, execute them,

But leave the population alone.

Their answer, an unqualified, inelegant, "We can't."

Mixed in with a mind-bending, gas-lighting, "We are!"

Pretending to be cautious of non-combatant deaths

While leveling whole city blocks on top of the heads of babes,

In full view of the whole world.

Those blinded by the narrative say, "But the images coming out of Gaza

Are only what Hamas wants you to see. I don't believe them."

True, to the extent that the images don't show us weapons amassed in tunnels,

Soldiers in uniform plotting their next strike, or hoarding supplies,

Untrue in that those buildings are truly flattened, those babies dead,

Filmed by iPhone and uploaded by stunned and defeated citizens. 

I am tired of marching.

Where are the convoys of boats full of Americans,

Heading to the Gaza coast with water and food?

Where are the airdrops of sustenance from private planes,

Where are the means by which we might feed the starving?

In Sudan as well, in Syria, in other lesser-known conflicts,

I look at us out in the street, closing bridges and highways,

And see a feel-good exercise.

Show me one person who has changed their mind on the urgency

Or right of an issue, because they were stuck in traffic one extra hour,

While their little ones and spouse waited at home.

I'll show you two who were run over while protesting,

One dead in her twenties, the other badly hurt.

Sign me up for the convoy, the jeeps, boats, and planes

Flying an American flag, daring the Israeli army to stop us

From bringing food and water.

Oh wait. Rachel Corrie.

This experiment has been run before.

They would not hesitate to fire on us either.

They rolled a bulldozer over her young body

As she stood between it and a Palestinian house

They were intent on demolishing.

24 years old, from Olympia, Washington.

Dead in 2003.

This is why we close bridges and march against our own merchants.

Israel is too deadly a place to demonstrate.

Amy Wolf is an LMT and energy worker who resides in Seattle, WA, and is studying writing.

MY PRAYERS FOR HOSTAGES DIDN'T END WHEN MY PRAYERS FOR PEACE BEGAN

by Laurie Rosen

With college campuses seized by conflict over the war, is there anywhere for students who don’t want to choose a side to turn? Image by Yoav Einhar. —Forward, December 6, 2023

For every child kidnapped, 
burned, bombed 

I believe there is someone 
on both sides grieving 

the pain of the other, 
hearing cries from the other,

growing wary 
of taking sides. 

For every yes, but someone is saying 
this is true and so is this,

Elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim: 
these and these.   

For every life displaced,
beaten, brutalized 

I believe in the hope 
of two hands holding

multiple truths,
two hands plowing a path 

for compassion and peace. 

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poetry has appeared in Peregrine, Gyroscope Review, The New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater: a journal of The New School, One Art, and elsewhere. Laurie won first place in poetry at the 2023 Marblehead, MA Festival of the Arts.

GRAVITY WILL GET US

by Alan Walowitz

“Just last night, there were shots fired outside of Temple Israel in Albany. And just yesterday, the menorah of Chabad Sunset Park in Brooklyn was vandalized.”  —Mayor Eric Adams, December 8, 2023

Some of us are willing to wait
till our native caution fails  
on the worn and slippery stairs.
No matter our disparate falls 
in the garden, or the desert, the reclaimed land,
or holding the safe door tight, 
against the next volley.  
It all becomes so much the same
in the short history of you and me. 
Today it’s news, tomorrow we’re gone. 
Who has the will to study and learn,
as Torah demands, such a short stay?.   
 
Everyone’s bound to fall,
even the lithe and balletic among us 
give way to age and our own sad shuffling.
Some will make a thud when we hit the ground, 
some a noise of lesser note,
as we learn, again, as if we didn’t know, 
this is not a movie. 
No shot, no bang, no dying fall.
Sometimes a shatter will sound
before we get the sharp reminder
what the slimmest shard might do.
 
Let me hide in plain sight long as I can—
I’ll agree to shut my mouth for now.
My forebears knew how to sound grateful,
and content, the price for being taken in. 
But one dyspeptic uncle, always a stranger,
warned never to feel safe—even here,
in The Golden Land.
Hah! his voice-- though not heard for years--
now rings like an alarm in my ears:
Boychik, you just wait and see. 

Alan Walowitz is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook Exactly Like Love comes from Osedax Press. The full-length The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems is available from Truth Serum Press. Most recently, from Arroyo Seco Press, is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night written with poet Betsy Mars. Now available for free download is the collection The Poems of the Air from Red Wolf Editions.

WINTER RUBBLE

by Susan Kay Anderson

New leaves strive

to take the place

of blossoms

even if they 

don't bear fruit

there are

so many flowers

hanging above

the cold ground down down

winter's tomb

tomorrow's rooftop.  

 

The foreign countrymen spray

into the pushing crowd

marking where the land       breaks       faces

cheeks        eyes        mouths

 

weeds needing killing.  Pulling.  Before sunset.

Rolling    razor wire  

someday we’ll be sitting

at a table remembering  how

saying why.

Susan Kay Anderson lives in southwestern Oregon’s Umpqua River Basin. Her long poem "Man’s West Once” was selected for Barrow Street Journal’s “4 X 2 Project” and is included in Mezzanine (2019). Anderson also published Virginia Brautigan Aste’s memoir Please Plant This Book Coast To Coast (2021).

HAVOC

by William Aarnes

A Palestinian child stands among the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks in Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza. [Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu] —AlJazeera, December 4, 2023

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

 

children exist, children exist,

cheery children exist,

chasing each other

at a wedding chosen 

as the target for the missile

that’s seconds away

 

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

 

children exist, infants

napping in the daycare

in the building the terrorist

chooses to bomb

 

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

 

                                          children

exist, orphaned and maimed

but maybe recovering

in a children’s ward when men

with grandchildren choose

not to worry if the hospital

might be shelled

 

                        rubble, rubble

                                    rubble, rubble, rubble

William Aarnes lives in New York. The refrain of "Havoc" might be a spell uttered by the gods  of havoc, though you might also hear an echo of "Nothing" by The Fugs.

RED TIDE RISING

by Geoffrey Philp

“This is absolutely scary!” declared Mary Jones when she beheld thousands of dead fish lining the Harbour Head shoreline in Harbour View, St Andrew, yesterday morning. She was among several persons who made the usual Saturday morning trek to the area for recreational fishing and was shocked by what greeted them. Photo by Ricardo Makyn. —The (Jamaica) Gleaner, December 10, 2023

It began slowly at first. Mary was the first to notice the algae’s tendrils, wispy and scarlet, intertwining with the seagrasses. But like the warmer winters, she paid it no mind, for she was determined to finish her Christmas shopping in New Kingston before the end of the day.

 

As far as she saw

in the season of light, fish

drowning in the sea.

Author’s Note: Whatever the source of the buildup of nutrients, either from sewage or ship impacts, Jamaican authorities need to develop policies that limit the spread and severity of devastating red tides.

Geoffrey Philp, a Silver Musgrave Medal recipient, is the author of Archipelagos, a book of poems about climate change which was long-listed for the Laurel Prize. Philp’s Twelve Poems and a Story for Christmas retells the nativity story, transporting readers back to that holy night in a fresh yet traditional way. His poem “A Prayer for My Children” is featured on The Poetry Rail—an homage to 12 writers who shaped Miami's culture. He  lives in Miami and is working on a children's book Marsha and the Mangroves.

ON WATCHING A REENACTMENT OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY

by Matthew E. Henry

The Boston Tea Party Reenactment: On December 16, 2023, Boston will commemorate the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

I was not prepared for how horrifying it feels to be Black 

and suddenly so pro-British. the desire to don a red coat, 

fingers itching to clutch a cartridge of ball and black powder. 

to lift a loyalist musket to shoulder and beset Boston Common 

or Lexington Green. the feeling even brother Crispus could catch 

a hot one were he to cross between Congress and State Streets today. 

 

if crows assemble in a quiet murder, and ravens collect

in a tranquil unkindness, what is a mass of frenzied 

white men? a mob, a riot, does so little justice. 

 

have you seen it? the screaming “sons of liberty”— these boys

proud in their covered faces, heads feathered and mohawked 

more than wearing tri-cornered hats. the ecstatic storming 

from a speech past ill-armed guards, hands aflame with torches.

 

have you seen it? fists, feet, bars, and axes shattering brown 

box heads, spilling loose leaf blood into the Harbor’s once 

placid waves. white rage decrying oppression through 

$1.7 million in adjusted destruction, hoping to make america

great. again, I am shocked how the echoes are almost enough 

to make me holler, “Long Live King George!”

Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of six collections, including the Colored page and The Third Renunciation. He is editor-in-chief of The Weight Journal and an associate poetry editor at Pidgeonholes and Rise Up Review. The 2023 winner of the Solstice Literary Magazine Stephen Dunn Prize, MEH is an educator who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. You can find him at www.MEHPoeting.com writing about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground.

EVEN GROUND

by tom bauer

I was born with my teeth bared hunter-like
and I chased the good life like it was a stag
in God’s forest, chopping workdays like trees,
dragging them back to build a family home
and nourish new children with veggie stews,
candles lit, our smiles in golden shadows
around a table, but there was nowhere
to hide, we couldn’t escape genocide.

And never thinking, not once, it would be
this neural energy, fluids heating
the nervous systems of society
like some mid-century reptilian brain,
terror pouring out of mansions on hills,
muddy rivers flowing, crashing great stones
to earth around us, unable to hide
because we hadn’t escaped genocide.

I had the job, the car, the family home,
I had built a life on plans, blueprints of hope,
big dreams of a career being a star,
but nothing I could do could stop a war,
though I’d hoped there wouldn’t be anymore,
no more bombs and the shrieks of dying kids,
but I think we see there’s nowhere to hide,
we cannot, will not, escape genocide.

tom bauer lives in montreal with his sons and plays boardgames.

KEEP AWAKE

by John Linstrom

Rescuers pull a child out of the rubble of a building in Khan Younis, on October 24, 2023. Photo:  Mahmud Hams / AFP / Getty via The Atlantic

for Gaza

The sun darkened, and the moon,
stars falling from heaven, powers

shaken. A toddler is lifted
from a pocket of air

below a concrete slab barely held
by neighbors: her eyes are hollow planets,

dry, they stare—these are not her parents,
she had just been napping and now

the world has gone all dust and jagged.
It was very loud, then very quiet.

This child is the same age
as my own daughter

who wakes with the sun
in the crib across the hall

each day. This child is your child;
she is one of two million.

O God, that you would come down
but you nor no one ever else would be

this child’s mother, nor the quilt
to pull down from over the couch, 

the rocking chair, the picture
of the rabbit at the end of the hall,

the pitcher of juice, the stuffed dog. This child
will now be fed the bread of tears: you

have given her tears to drink. This night
is too dark, carries no answer, and the only words

that come in the furtive inky air are keep awake. 
When she cries, what father will come in to lift her 

in the night? Keep awake. Was there a sibling
for whom those dry eyes moistened? Keep awake.

O God, that you would come down and shield
these children from the blinding grief that falls

with hate, from the ancient territorial tragedy
as we grasp for the revealing of some balm

this child is stricken to the root
deeper than tears, than her voice

and my God may we keep awake, for all
our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth

until we cry out for this stricken girl
and for her loose our voices and

O God kindle our brushwood souls
and fire our water to boiling—powers shaken,

restore us that we might be saved from this,
that all might be saved in this night

for yes, I see, you have come down
and are there: crushed beneath the stone,

and there, sprinting over, lifting boulders, and
there: neighbors lift you and you stare

out among us as stars fall from heaven
and staring, wordlessly demand,

for every child, for every shining light
threatened in the falling night, to keep awake.

John Linstrom’s first collection of poems To Leave for Our Own Country is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in April of 2024. This poem, “Keep Awake,” was written in his role as Poet in Residence at Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish in Manhattan and was read in worship for the First Sunday in Advent. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Northwest Review, North American Review, and The Christian Century. He is the series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for Cornell University Press, making available the works of environmental poet-philosopher L. H. Bailey (1858-1954). John holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and a PhD in English and American Literature from New York University. He lives with his wife and their young daughter in Queens, NY.

SHEEP-KILLING DOG

by Michelle DeRose

Texas AG Ken Paxton steps in to make a woman’s life hell. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Big hats welcome but not a Texas uterus
they won’t probe, tell you how
you can wear it in public,
a watched portal to the baby chute
they need it to be. I guess
to make future bullseyes? Because
there’s also not a barrel
they will look down, keep out
of campuses. In Texas
all depends on the tunnel. 
Barrels determine themselves but canals
are hyper-policed. At the end of every story
is a woman bleeding, empty, and an Attorney
General smug and whole as he always was.

Michelle DeRose hopes she can retire from teaching at the college level before she must relive a school shooting, and she is grateful she doesn't live in Texas. She teaches creative writing and African American, Irish, and world literature at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

A GOREY MOMENT

by Lynn White

An agreement by countries to phase out fossil fuels would be “one of the most significant events in the history of humanity,” according to Al Gore, amid wrangling by governments at Cop28. “If there were a decision here to surprise the world to say ‘OK we get it now, we’ve made enough money, we will get on with what needs to be done to give young people a sense of hope again and stop as much as suffering as possible and start the phase-out of fossil fuels,’ it would be one of the most significant events in the history of humanity,” the former US vice-president said. —The Guardian, December 4, 2023

I sometimes have a Gorey moment

wondering what could have been

if the hanging chads

hadn’t hung,

or if Gore had hung up

his gentleman’s suit

and cried “Fraud”

as loudly as Trump was to do.

No hate to fuel 9/11,

no war in Iraq, 

perhaps

the end

of history 

would be nigh

as Fukuyama predicated,

existing divisions becoming

historic

and no new ones

created.

With more Gore less blood

would be spilled.

There would be no Bushfires burning

the sun would be shining 

but without its intensity,

the storms would be still

and the world would be stable.

It was hanging by a thread

and we missed it

missed the chance

to grasp those chads

hanging.

Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality and writes hoping to find an audience for her musings. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud 'War Poetry for Today' competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Peach Velvet, Light Journal, and So It Goes. Find Lynn on Facebook.