Tag: Poetry

Sonnet for the Woman in Walgreens

By Diane Elayne Dees

 

It’s been a week or two since our encounter,
yet your voice haunts me, and I see your face
in waking dreams. There, at the checkout counter,
you yelled and gestured as you made your case:
“It’s all a hoax!” you shouted, while the clerk
delivered a lecture on government regulations,
declaring—as she put aside her work—
that we are so much cleaner than other nations.
I wonder if you’re staying safe inside,
washing your hands, and canceling your cruise—
or are you spreading the virus far and wide,
and getting tips from experts at Fox News?
I think of you, your rage, your blind belief;
there’s no vaccine for that, and no relief.

 

Diane Elayne Dees has two poetry chapbooks, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died and  Coronary Truth, forthcoming. Her microchap, Beach Days, can be downloaded from the Origami Poems Project website. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Visit her author site, Diane Elayne Dees, Poet and Writer-at-Large.

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash.

Good Night

By Angela Costi

 

In 1993,
I walked the night
through Alma Park, St Kilda, from 10 pm
to 4 am, no chaperone, no iPhone,
the poetry gig would end
I would leave
take the tram
no taxi, no text-talk, no self-talk,
and walk
for blocks
through city lanes, urban parks, industrial streets
half a city and two suburbs of walking
to clear the day’s debris.

It was night who befriended me
when my house was slashing and stabbing,
I kept clear of the family room,
unpacked my tantrums
with insomniacs, nurses
and night feeders.

Now 2019, I walk
with no moon for witness
my steps are the loud protest,
I hear muffled blasts
of his outrage
her resentment
in a house I pass.

A hunched figure
sparks the path,
slows down
to show
a girl.

We nod
like soldiers
at the frontline.

 

Angela Costi’s poetry collections are: Dinted Halos (Hit&Miss Publications, 2003), Prayers for the Wicked (Floodtide Audio and Text, 2005), Honey and Salt (Five Islands Press, 2007) and Lost in Mid-Verse (Owl Publishing, 2014). An award from the National Languages Board in 1995, enabled her to study Ancient Greek drama in Greece. She received funding from the Australia Council to work in Japan on an international collaboration involving her poetry, which she documented as poetic narrative and essays at: http://cordite.org.au/author/angelacosti/

Photo by Krzysztof Kowalik on Unsplash.

Humanity

By Steven Croft

 

Wants to believe kindness, its namesake, can still a morning rain
of bombs, calm the lightning strike of artillery shells on cratered streets
scorched hot and unlivable as the surface of the sun

Wants to believe foresight will quiet the chainsaws’ outcry against
ancient trees in the last remaining rainforests, make abandoned
the coal-fired cooling towers as monuments to itself, leave at least some
of the fish in the sea

Wants to believe in the white sorcery of hope: we will never be starving
animals on a dying planet, we are not tongueless to stop a world’s
unraveling, wants to believe in good hearts joining us together in time
like a savior walking out of a desert, the world as scry bowl of better angels

 

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. For the last thirteen years he has worked in a library.  He has recent poems in Sky Island Journal, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Poets Reading the News, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, and other places.

Photo credit: Xavier Vergés via a Creative Commons license.

Donald Trump’s Titanic

By Cassandra Henken

 

The world today
is like watching a shipwreck in slow motion.

Donald Trump
is the iceberg, and America is
the Titanic. We laughed
about being able to smell ice
when it’s near—

Iceberg, right ahead!
We elected him anyway.
Just as they said,
“God himself could not sink this ship!”
when they knew there were not enough lifeboats,
it takes someone equally cold-hearted
to hold the Bible in one hand
and smite the lowly with the other.

Now we’re bobbing in the water,
our ship asunder,
and still, there are those
who say the ship is unsinkable,
even though thousands of people have died,
(even as the cold settled in
choking on their own breath
and they swallowed the Atlantic).

Listen closely enough,
and bullets sound like Morse code.
Men desperate to get into a lifeboat,
to live,
were shot even as they drowned.

Imagine the headlines—

“Titanic Hits the Same Iceberg Twice!”

We accept prayers via memes
or monetary compensation.

 

Cassandra Henken is a mother of three living in Minnesota. She has her Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology and Early Childhood Development. She worked for almost five years as a Behavior Therapist for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Now she is going back to school for a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and Fiction Writing. She has always loved the written word and been interested in politics, the culmination of which resulted in “Donald Trump’s Titanic.”

Photo in the public domain.

 

¡Despierta!

By Ada Ardére 

 

She lies rotting in saltwater that thrashes about white resorts
that in their time and in their place drown out her voice
as it would otherwise be heard begging, pleading, screaming
for the lives of her children as they sit in wards without power,
diabetic comas consuming the elderly and children equally
while Brooks Brothers suit clad Epstein socialite collaborators
avert their eyes from her teary visage in slave-maintained
golf clubs across the sea refusing to acknowledge her
in any way but kicks and spit upon the whore they sell,
upon the bloodied lips and cracked teeth of a mother of millions
without water or food or even the dignity of acknowledgement!

She is remembering for them all the counts and strikes upon their bodies
in the century since forced annexation where experiments
upon illiterate women gave rise to mainland women’s endless fucking and
the cessation of hormonal migraines and acne for little girls in elite schools
who would never see the effects of nuclear testing on her northern coasts,
oh she remembers for them, she refuses to let death or time erase
the millions of hours of modern indentured servitude that her
children were deceived into for the cost of a boat ride to a land
they were already citizens of but still not yet seen as anything
but the dark skinned/too pale inbetweeners of a failed negro kingdom
the lazy, laid-back rapists, thieves of virtue, papists thirsting for jobs!

She is listening to the century long echoed call and response of the tired
cry from Lares whose drone was cannons and drums from
the hearts of those who still remember the Taíno name, to those
as they roar the name of both tormentor and consoler, ¡Maria!,
to the silence of supposed compatriots in congressional halls
whose only gestures are public prayers for miracles they
could manifest themselves in otherwise forgettable acts
of mercy if only they did not reduce her and her people
to lesser than dogs, and she listens to the swelling response:
a beast cannot be made more beastly nor can its cry
be muted as it awakens to the only means that is left to it!

 

Ada Ardére is a Puerto Rican poet from New Orleans, who now lives in Kansas City. She studied philosophy of art and Plato, and loves beat poetry. Her poems have recently appeared in 34th Parallel Magazine and online in Wussy Mag.

Map of 1863 Puerto Rico from New York Public Library.

75th Remembrance Poem

By Michel Steven Krug

 

Another night, so far beyond famished,
the stubby pencil rescued from gravel

sharpened by secret pebbles to
write about the ingredients of normalcy.

Ilona from Budapest narrates:

two cups of flour, 3/4 cup sugar,
an egg or two (depends on size),
a finger of baking powder,
touch of vanilla,
crushed sugar cubes,
1/2 cup diced tart cherries.

The mind travels to a Shabbat dinner
leaving the nihilist barracks, taste of torts

and coffee displacing arid mouths
and acrid hope, imagination baking cakes of

liberation served at future tables
where the progeny is not just from two but of a

whole collection of souls deprived of morning.

 

A note from the poet: This 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz remembrance poem is inspired by uncountable sources, but most recently an article in the Minneapolis StarTribune.

I’m a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist, Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars graduate, and practicing lawyer. I’m also Senior Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine. My poems have appeared in Mizmor Anthology 2019, PRTN, Sheepshead, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven’s Perch, Tuck Magazine, Poetry24, 2 Elizabeths, Main Street Rag, the Brooklyn Review and others.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

my body, my choice

By Kitty Anarchy

 

jesus said?
jesus is dead.
jesus don’t
have what’s
between our legs

our cavities
ovaries
fallopian tubes
uterus
cervix

not just
vagina!

could you
even name
the parts
tucked deep
inside us?

jesus’
mary magdalene
history
erased

resurrected
in us
now who’s
two-faced

men
preach
and give mandates

not to have their
dicks altered
but to do things to us

because jesus said.
but jesus is dead.

 

Kitty Anarchy is an anarchafeminist, chicana womyn poet and short story writer. She has a background in social work, having earned her MSW from California State University, Long Beach, and listens to KPFK radio. She has seven cats, her favorite being ChiChi, and two dogs named Nibbit and Chato. She is published in Chiron Review, Rabid Oak Journal, Los Angeles Review, Ghost Town Literary Journal, and in anthologies through Arroyo Seco Press and Picture Show Press. Learn more at www.kittyanarchy.com.

“Maria Magdalene” by Jan van Scorel, 1530.

Eulogy for the Unfriended

By Jon Wesick

 

We gather to mourn the loss of
Alice stroking her brown-and-white Saint Bernard,
Barbara embracing her acoustic guitar,
Cheryl who tipsy on Chianti flirted with me
at Don’s going-away dinner,
Roberta who toured Chinese Zen temples,
Brad who worked nonviolence into his martial arts
when evicting drunks from a topless bar,
Jeff whose poems meander from sarcasm to irony and back,
Jerry the pot-smoking Vietnam vet always quick with a joke,
and Rob who volleyed batshit ideas with me on the improv stage.

Holding cognitive dissonance
in respect for nonconforming facts,
I’ve paused over the unfriend button for years but
what do I say to Harriet who wants me booted
out of the country for not praying to her god?

Scratch a profile picture. Get a noxious gas
of racist dog whistles and totalitarian sympathies –
praise for Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist, beating protestors,
and banning the press from exposing politicians’ deceit.

Skepticism turns on science and medicine
while leaving hype and spin unquestioned.
Deadly lies infiltrate like a puppy
with a suicide bomb. Measles and whooping cough
back in style. Bound feet, lead makeup, whalebone corsets.

Friendship wears a warning sign.
Trust, an electric fence.

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom, several novels, and, most recently, the short-story collection The Alchemist’s Grandson Changes His Name. Learn more at http://jonwesick.com.

 

The Bean Peddlers

By Matthew Moniz

an ekphrasis of the Trumps’ Goya photos
after Gwendolyn Brooks

They count beans mostly, this vain green-eyed pair.
Ruling is a casual affair.
Stretched stares on stretched and creaking smiles,
Desks bare.

Two who are Mostly Vile.
Two who have wasted days,
But keep on wanting more
And wanting things their way.

And remembering…
Remembering, with hunger and hate,
As they pose over the beans in their white-
washed offices that
are full of iron collars and green pockets and
red hands,
red hats that say America was Great.

 

Matthew Moniz is a metaphysical anthropologist and incoming PhD student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Originally from the DC area, he holds a BA from Notre Dame and an MFA and MA from McNeese State University. Matt’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and has been awarded the SCMLA Poetry Prize. He served as Poetry Editor of The McNeese Review’s 2020 issue and Poetry Panel Chair for SCMLA’s 2019 conference. He is left-handed, is allergic to cheese, and knows Adam West is the only good Batman.

Photo credit: Counse via a Creative Commons license.

Tail of Masculinity

By Ben P. Effiòng

 

I was born into a society
Defined by fraternities
In a hospital ward decorated with partiality
My birth, celebrated like African obesity
This was the privilege attached to my sexuality
I was born a male, with the tail of masculinity

Birthed into this artificiality
Characteristic of ma/pa-triarchy
I sat on the throne of gender roles
Nodding to the rhythm of privilege carols
Sowing seeds of sexism without parole
While getting used by the “second sex” I tagged as whores

I was born into a fraternity
Malignant to femininity
Where being a “man” meant wearing the identity
And non-membership equated with docility
Where ability was defined by “controlling” your family
And the symbol of manhood entrenched in brutality

I was born into patriarchy
The shameless face of matriarchy
That demonizes “courtesy” as a weakness
And being unmarried by women a sickness

I was born a male, with the tail of masculinity
But, I’ll die a rebel, with tales of equality.

 

Ben P. Effiòng is a philosopher, award-winning poet, and a debater whose articles and poetry have been published in both national and international newspapers and anthologies. Ben believes in using the power of creative expression to create social change. Follow him on Twitter @Benblag.

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash.

woman king

By Emily Mardelle

 

I cut my hair off because my father would slide

his hands over my stomach and tell me how fat I was getting

and I

I think sometimes I want to make a woman king

so the moon can finally avenge the girls in the nighttime

imagine her thick hair long and her breasts full

and free

 

Emily Mardelle is an emerging writer whose essay “The Monster in My Corner” was published by the online magazine Sweatpants & Coffee in April 2019. She previously worked as a blogger for Arizona’s Superstition Review, where she was a liaison between national writers and the magazine. She graduated from Arizona State University in the spring of 2020 with a degree in English Literature and a minor in Sociology. Emily’s work draws from her experiences with PTSD, bisexuality, and womanhood. She currently resides in Phoenix, Arizona. Follow her on Instagram @emilymardelle and Twitter @emmardell.

Hangakujo, female samurai, from the U.S. Library of Congress.

Lamar Speaks for Lots and Lots of Us

By Philip Styrt

 

We know that the President lied
As he tried to corrupt the election;
Still, we’ll “let the people decide.”1

Whether he should be disqualified;
But for now we’ll provide our protection.
We know that the President lied,

Though we think it should be classified,
And we’ll try to deny the connection:
Still, we’ll “let the people decide.”

If we don’t shove impeachment aside
We might risk loyal voters’ defection.
We know that the President lied

Now we choose to let lies be our guide,
Blaming others for his through projection:
Still, we’ll “let the people decide.”

Even though by the logic implied
His defense is a huge misdirection:
We know that the President lied;
Still, we’ll “let the people decide.”

 

Philip Styrt is an assistant professor of English at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA. His creative and critical work focuses on traditional forms of poetry and drama. You can find more of his work, primarily focused on sonnets, at 140syllables.blogspot.com.

[1] https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2020/1/alexander-statement-on-impeachment-witness-vote

Photo credit: Tom Hilton via a Creative Commons license.

No Vacancy

By Elizabeth Shack

 

The hermit crab outgrows his shell
and ranges across the ocean floor
searching for a better home
so he can grow a little more.

Imagine the crabby billionaire
hoarding the best and biggest shells
while other crabs roam, all exposed
without secure, protected cells.

One crab has an enormous home;
the less fortunate are easy prey.
With the rich crab’s extra shells,
will he build a wall to keep fish away?

 

Elizabeth Shack lives, writes, and follows the news in central Illinois. Her fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. Visit her site at elizabethshack.com.

Photo by Paul Needham via Snopes.com.

Air Floyd: A Ritardando*

(AKA “It’s Gotta Be The Shoes…”)

 

By Hakim Bellamy

 

George Floyd.

The latest in a long
noose of names
to die in the street.

At the hands
and feet
of police.

Public asphyxiation
is nothing new,
but it has always drawn a crowd
even on Sundays down South.

However,
he still couldn’t get a witness,
just an autopsy,
“on the house.”

A hundred years later,
same result.

His last meal,
all asphalt
no air.

His last song,
the ritardando of his pulse.

The last thing he ever saw,
a montage of his 46 years on this planet,
feels just like a flash.

Including unequivocal evidence that when it plays,
it never starts at the beginning,
it always starts at the end

and plays backwards.

Why else would he cry for his mama
How else would we find him lifeless,
in a fetal position?

In these Black-ass streets,
wide berths built for a steady stream of hearses,
we have no choice but to keep it real,
because we aren’t afforded the privilege of rehearsals.

The stakes is high,
but for everyone else out here mistakes are fine.
And for the cops
mistakes are …

a fine.

It’s no place to die,
but if you drop to your knees.
Get on the ground.
Get in the ground.

Lay

face down, hands up,
chest to cement
and inhale,

you can still smell the wildest dreams
of little Black boys and their burnt rubber soles
begging Mom and Dad
for sneakers

that could fly.

And if you lie there      long enough
you can still hear their laughter

too.

 

 

*Ritardando (or rit.) in music, a gradual decrease in tempo.

 

Before being tapped by Albuquerque Mayor Keller to serve as the Deputy Director of the Cultural Services Department, Hakim Bellamy was the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Albuquerque (2012-2014). Bellamy is a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network Fellow, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, an Academy for the Love of Learning Leonard Bernstein Fellow, Western States Arts Alliance Launchpad Fellow, Santa Fe Arts Institute Food Justice Fellow, New Mexico Strategic Leadership Institute alum, and a Citizen University Civic Seminary Fellow. In 2012. he published his first collection of poetry, SWEAR (West End Press/University of New Mexico Press), and it landed him the Working Class Studies Tillie Olsen Award for Literature in 2012. With an M.A. in Communications from the University of New Mexico (UNM), Bellamy has held adjunct faculty positions at UNM and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Bellamy has shared his work in at least five countries and continues to use his art to change his communities.

Photo credit: Tiger500 via a Creative Commons license.

Ghosts in the Eucalyptus Grove

By Julie Martin

Ending with a line from Brooke Jarvis

 

Footsteps churn
sassafras, mud, and fern leaves
into confetti in a continual cycle–
germinate, thrive, die, decay, give way to new life.

The hollowed log of a King Billy pine
garlanded with moss and mist serves as a lair
for the transverse stripes that radiate
in shadows.

Eyes gleam in the dark
on the threshold between dead and undead,
present and absent,
remembered and forgotten.

Every crack of a twig
is ripe with potential
for a glimpse
of Thylacine–

Amalgamation of a creature:
head of a wolf, hindquarters striped like a tiger,
long thick tail of a kangaroo,
the size of a Labrador retriever.

More commonly known as the Tasmanian Tiger.
The last known specimen
died in a zoo in 1936.
And yet of all the world’s officially extinct species,

Thylacine has the highest number of supposed
post-extinction sightings.
“Is it more foolish to chase a figment
or assume that our planet has no secrets left?”

 

A poet and a public school teacher, Julie Martin lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband, sons and dogs. Her poetry has appeared in several online journals, most recently Thimble Literary Magazine, Gravitas, Pasque Petals, Dreamers Creative Writing, Tiny Seed Journal and Tiger Moth Review. She was the 2018 first place winner of South Dakota State Poetry Contest, in the landscape division.

Photo credit: Young, male thylacine at Beaumaris Zoo, about 1936, National Museum of Australia.

the heart of the matter

By Yvonne G Patterson

 

eldritch energies twist and warp
the skin of space, bend time, weave
shields of plaited light, cloak the heart

bodies orbit, surfing unleashed power’s vortex
grasp at coloured baubles glittering
in furnaces fuelled by matter’s dying screams

dark theatres host phantasmic pageants
vast auroras writhe upon the stage
magicians’ spectral hands seduce

sensory feasts fuel ferocious appetites
chimera’s cosmic heroin addicts

gravitational force accelerates
the heart’s event horizon looms
Faustian bargains sink their teeth

conscience battles rage
locate the will to exit, or
satiate the lust for full immersion

through the looking glass where

life travels forever into stasis, embalmed
in adamantine quicksand, decaying time
endless iteration

a flaw interred inside a diamond
a breath exiled inside obsidian
glacial involution, a collapsing star

free falling in the heart of the black
the singularity where time hibernates

where even coldness hides
shuts its eyes, shudders
deep inside the caverns of that void

in the stasis of the heart

does self awareness flicker
feel the slightest flare of shame, contrition
seek absolution from the choice?

the choice

at the heart of the matter

 

Yvonne Patterson lives in Perth, WA, Australia, with her wife and has a career background in human services clinical psychology and state-wide human services policy in mental health, disability, community, and justice services. Her poetry reflects themes of social justice, equality, and environmental issues. She received a commendation in the Australian 2018 Tom Collins National Poetry Prize.

Photo credit: Andrea Della Adriano via a Creative Commons license.

Oh, brother, where art thou?

By Kathleen Hellen

“You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely.”
– J.D. Salinger

I’d thought that you’d do better than a sidekick, thought that you’d articulate—knowing,
as you must, about the stink they left behind, the helicopters lifting from the ruins in Saigon.

Of course, I smelled it as a kid—a whiff—when boys who lived in trailers—their fathers pulling double-shifts, drunk on sulfur stink, spoiling for a fight, raising fists—shouted Jap—go back!
picked me up and threw me down a hill. They spit on my mother.

I smelled it when the mills laid off. Again, the odor. They murdered Vincent Chin.
Again the hint—like chlorine burning in the failed reactor:
ching chong ling long ting tong. It smelled like girls I knew in college.
A strange perfume, as if they’d lit the storefronts, piled up bodies (murders, exonerations).

And then I saw you in the clip, aiding and abetting. You turned your back on witness, like Frankl said. Only those most brutal, those who’d lost all scruples, were self-selected in the camps.
The well-fed, red-cheeked guards who ushered others to the crematoria.

I suppose that in this game of self-selection there are always those
marched off to smokestacks, and those who choose instead to pinch their noses.

 

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. For more on Kathleen, visit kathleenhellen.com.

Photo by Mike Marrah on Unsplash.

Late Afternoon in the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe

By Joe Milosch

 

Sitting in the barrio church,
I look at the altar window.
It is a pale October evening,
but now its rainbow-colored shore
glows in the stained-glass.
Standing mast-like in a boat,
Christ looks toward land as he turns
red at sunset. He doesn’t look
like a carpenter’s son
any more than the men around him
look like fishermen;
any more than the man
I saw drinking from a bottle
looked like a refugee
as he rested near the south side
of the metal barrier on the border.
Wearing his Padres cap
slightly off center, he seemed
to study his shadow.
If someone from north of the border
shook the hand of this man,
their shadows would blend
and speak from the dust:
“We are the earth, mined, tilled,
and worked to exhaustion.”
Here, the gardener rinses
the stained-glass
and interrupts my thoughts
about men, land, and the sun.
Rubbing the cross of my rosary,
I kneel beside the aisle of marble tiles;
their broken pattern becomes
a landscape of farms
in my home state.
Looking up at the face of Christ,
I see watery traces
leading from his blue eyes to
the lead-bordered edge of his jaw,
and there, droplets fall unnoticed
among roses, stones, and soil.

 

Joe Milosch graduated from San Diego State University. His poetry has appeared in various magazines, including the California Quarterly. He has multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and he received the Hackney Award for Literature. He has two published books: The Lost Pilgrimage Poems and Landscape of a Hummingbird.

Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash.

Sonnet: Australia in 2020

By Chris Collins

‘graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day’
                     – P. B. Shelley, England in 1819

 

An orange light, pale, sickly, dying
Chokes the sky, while it anaesthetises.
Infected air, poisoned, thick and blinding,
But smoke can’t shroud our eyes from these fire’s sizes.
Our rulers neither see, nor feel nor know
But deny, scorn, politicise and peddle
As drought, hunger and extinction grow;
The stench of half a billion gone to the devil.
They make glib comments on cricket and ‘soul’
And our ‘resilient spirit’ that sucks the lie.
They warm their hands on lacquered coal
While their people sleep on beaches – and die.
Now even water, and breathing air aren’t free
Unless you’re on holiday in Hawaii.

 

Chris Collins writes poems and fairy fiction in between marking essays, narrowboating, Morris dancing, and folk singing. Her writing has previously been published by Animal Heart Press, Between These Shores Literary Annual, and several online presses and magazines, including Cephalopress and Mooky Chick.

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash.

Fire Storm: Poem Beginning with a Line from Jane Kenyon

By Lynn Wagner

 

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen
while the crown fires burn and branches break, charred
and brittled to the tall trees’ bones. Fall down from the sky
fantails, so stumble purple swamphen along the shore.
And day is night and ash is all while pyrocumulonimbus
counterclockwise circle the globe.

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen.
Australian sharpshooters cull ten thousand thirsty camels
brought to their knees. To the east, their brothers in choppers
tip carrots and yam to wallabies. Call the Karajarri to pray
for rain. Call the prime minister back home. And all is ash,
is ash, so the children make a circle and sing a tune.

Into light all things must fall, glad at last to have fallen
like the very same rain from the sky, that gratefully
commingled with beads of hail. And the black earth
knows its sacrifice. And the beasts, vegetarians and sad
predators alike, their bodies baptized in death, yet koala
come, pockmarked, to puddles and drink, satisfied, at dawn.

 

Lynn Wagner is the author of No Blues This Raucous Song, which won the Slapering Hol Chapbook competition. She received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where she won the Academy of American Poets prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Subtropics, West Branch, Green Mountains Review, Cavewall, and other journals. See more at lynnwagner.com.

Photo by Joanne Francis on Unsplash.