Category: Poetry

Olumide Manuel

The ruins sitting quiet on the belly

of the earth, the slush of water filling

the bleached street, the mouth of deluge

raising a toast to white hills, and

the farmers’ agony and its harvest basket

of tears, are the bodies of this poem

sickening my inside like a claw.

 

My wet body, a flotsam at edge

with the drenched cushions

scattered across the void, through

the roil of heavens, the sepia grief.

 

How the sky unheld a dirty flood

against a city clogged with neglect,

robust at the throat of its sewerage.

 

Tell God, this city is not a kitchen basin.

Say His name is near to the homeless teeth

gnashing in the dripping cold. Say i body

enough colours in my protest to rainbow

this wreckage into a fleeing breeze.

 

Yet every second of feet-sweeping,

I dread if the mouth of flood is shallow

enough to hold my head above the waters,

trembling with step towards a dry exile.

Esther Alter

When Israel finished its retraction of the rights of all immigrants, women, queers, and others, and reduced the Knesset to an advising body for a permanent non-elected executive, when that nation stripped away the rights of the remaining Palestinians, all rights, until they were but animals before the law, the day came when soldiers entered East Jerusalem and rounded up everyone and sent them on trucks to the Negev to live or die, it did not matter, and those who stayed behind were annihilated by missiles, the hospitals, the schools, the people, all gone—on that day, the bulldozers at last arrived on the Temple Mount and drove through the protesters like Moses parting the Red Sea and in the end it was so sudden, one moment there was a shrine, the next debris, and from some of that very material the Israelis began to build the long-yearned-for Third Temple and when it was done, so too ended an entire era of Judaism, and good riddance—it had served us well enough for two thousand years but we turned to the East and saw a Bet-Ha’Mikdash and a Kohen Gadol and a Sanhedrin, and now all halacha was obsolete, no reason to do teshuvah when we now had korbanot, and so we returned, millions of us, though not everyone, not the converts or the half-Jews or the queers or the atheists or the undesirables—and when we arrived we hugged and kissed and danced and ate and sang and drank from the West Bank’s aquifer, we drank and drank until not one drop remained, and we cried out, we were stricken with such terrible thirst that our skin cracked and our health failed and many of us died yet still no amount of rain could replenish what we had taken, and then came the floods, all around the world sparing not the Holy Land, submerging Tel Aviv and Haifa and all the lowlands, and then came such a terrible storm that the parched hills couldn’t contain it and there were landslides, whole towns were lost, and the sea swelled, and the remainder of us fled to the Temple Mount and under a gray sky huddled and held each other’s hands as the water of the deeps lapped at our feet.

 

July 2023

Dyani Sabin

I

In ethanol, the chitin of a crayfish fades,

a carapace of rubber and silk.

Its joints articulate, tail spreads under pressure, uropods from telson

under a microscope, the jaggedness of its mouthparts, a question.

 

The lab is silent as I inspect ten-legged aliens, door open for fumes.

Is preservation respect for the dead?

 

II

November, I am split, cephelothorax cracked and my innards exposed;

the crayfish lab is open, wide enough to scurry in.

My professor wears pearl earrings, Hyriopsis schlegelii;

Emma is dead.

 

Keys pressed in my hand, teeth coarse, uneven, an answer,

Be as busy as you need.

Janitors whistle in the hall at midnight, so I don’t startle when the door opens.

Trash empty, get some sleep kid.

The dead aliens do not speak;

pink sunrise lends them the specter of rusty shells and coral swimmerets.

 

III

Orconectes rusticus, native to Kentucky,

crossed the continental divide to the Ohio River watershed,

borne in a fisherman’s bucket.

What journey would that be?

Excised from your life by rough hands,

your friends, strung up as bait, vanish.

Dumped into a new stream, alone.

 

Did they mourn?

 

IV

Ecosystems collapse, streams stripped clean of algae, fish, insects,

a river-shaped void.

Even as they crossbreed,

Orconectes sanbornii is outcompeted by rusty invaders.

Evolutionary survival, the passage of genes

to future generations;

a poor measure of life.

 

V

Dust coats azure sky, endless corn to the left, soybeans to the right.

We stop the van at a culvert.

Between rocks, in the riffles, the species roam.

Barehanded, I can catch Orconectids.

Left spooks them backwards into my right.

My grip solid on the carapace, a chela swings to pinch my thumb.

Iron smell in the mud. I bleed, rust red on the river stones.

 

VI

Captured, I break off a leg segment and release my crustacean.

Each leg deposited in cell lysis solution. Each molt brings new legs.

It survives. Do crayfish feel pain?

 

In the tarot, the crayfish represents greatness, our higher calling.

A tray of legs on the passenger seat, I listen to the wind in the corn,

drive until dusk, moon peach-ripe on the horizon.

 

VII

The limbs—in blue, fingertip-sized test tubes—like a memory

fragmented.

Cristina Legarda

The Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus,

is not a crab at all—

more an ancient, armored spider,

here 500 million years.

 

Choose the right vessel: long and straight.

Choose a good insertion point: key to success.

Tourniquet, swab, stab, advance,

occlude, connect, untie, secure:

the sequence for an intravenous line.

 

Horseshoe crab blood is blue

from copper in hemocyanin.

Amoebocytes in the blood

detect bacteria in drugs, implants,

electrolyte solutions—anything destined

to enter our bloodstream.

 

Needle tip in—

backflow of blood

into the cannula barrel—

drop your angle, advance a bit more,

then slide the catheter

smoothly into the vein.

 

After blood harvest

Horseshoe crabs move less, mate less.

 

A third will perish.

 

With fewer horseshoe crab eggs to eat, grackles

and loggerhead turtles waste away; red knots

flying from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle

drop in numbers by the thousands.

 

There should be a word for the triumph we feel

when we see the flash of red blood

in the barrel. Invasion. Proof.

In hoc signo vinces.

 

The name Polyphemus—Poseidon’s giant, one-eyed son—

means “abounding in songs and legends”,

but all we’ve done to Limulus polyphemus is use it

for fertilizer, whelk bait, and blood.

 

60,000 dollars a gallon

for limulus amoebocyte lysate

to test I.V. fluids. We almost never think

of the cost in lives and ecosystems, the martyrs

destroyed to get us here, how entitled we feel

to bleed the world.

 

In Japan, horseshoe crabs, Tachypleus tridentatus,

are Taira samurai reborn. Male crabs attach themselves

to female mates, and they move around together,

an asymmetric pair encoded into local parlance

as a love ideal, kabutogani-no-chigiri,

horseshoe crab commitment.

 

We need a word

for the debt we owe

the creatures we exploit,

an unholy grail

stained blue

with our saviors’ blood.

 

At the far end of the wrack line:

an overturned horseshoe crab,

book gills open to the sky,

chelicerae motionless,

vulnerable as Prometheus

but lifeless and dry

on the sand, worthless

even to ravenous gulls.

J.H. Lee

I come from another ocean

just as deep, just as mazarine

 

with tides that swell and churn

of cloves, anise, cardamom,

 

a constellation. Where north?

Where east? A foreboding task

 

for someone so close

to the equator.

 

Do not drown. Do not drown.

A leatherback turtle

 

clutches together

an archipelago just for you.

 

In a hushed patois,

you gill fish and hem

 

layers upon layers upon layers

of waxed orchids and peacocks

 

whose three thousand and one blue

eyes quake, crest, verge in a wave.

 

I am wrecked, wreckage,

my feet knead water, my feet,

 

alien fin, sublease of land.

Sara E. Palmer

When you really want to break someone,

you take their kids.

 

We’re a simple animal, and bearing costs.

 

After the storm I go down the beach,

visit time, lenses of shell on shell,

thousands of practical years of

canoes and oysters, fires on the sand,

veils of cedar and the red bark of madrones

bright against the bluffs.

I call a guy I know from the tribe and we walk it, together,

eroding our way down the tideline,

sand in our socks.

It’s as big as we always thought it had to be,

if we ever saw it, which of course now we are.

The water’s rising, unstoppably.

Waves are breaking around our ankles.

 

We don’t have a design plan

for cheerful interpretive signage

about community heritage

when the end of history

is, here’s where your priests

took our kids and held them captive

and wouldn’t let us see our own children.

And, here’s where our priests

took your children, so they could get an education.

Now it’s a park!

We have all learned a lot, since then;

we have not learned enough to teach this.

 

Even if we could come up with a way

to word it, someone’s going to come along

some Sunday afternoon, with a paint marker,

and draw a mustache or maybe a dick

over the plastic-covered portrait

of someone else’s grandfather.

 

We’re standing on this beach in the rain,

watching history slosh out into the bay

to mix with dredge spoils

and abandoned vessels

and everything else the city would like to sink.

 

We climb back up to the parking lot

where we turn our keys and burn some hydrocarbons,

making everything just a tiny bit worse.

Two old ravens, tempest-tossed, half-seen, creaking,

land on the strand behind us,

scaly feet gritty with forgotten truths,

comfortable lies,

and the bones that wash out of creek banks

when nobody is watching.

Justine Norton-Kertson

Turns out poetic justice

—for me anyway—

might mean

dying in a flood.

 

At age twelve

I had the privilege

of swimming in The Great Barrier Reef.

Floating among dayglow coral,

a psychedelic spacewalk

through old growth aquatic forest.

 

At age forty

I met myself there

and asked him if

two thousand, seven hundred pounds of CO2

was worth it.

 

I screamed until

my face caught fire;

we only heard

the sound of bubbles

drifting to the surface

as if time

didn’t have a care in the world.

 

The ocean suffers.

Schools of rainbow fish

swirl in sync toward extinction.

Coral withers wishing

it could evolve fins.

Varun U. Shetty

After Hokusai’s Breaking Waves (Ink on silk)

 

The sea and the cliff

embrace like wrestlers,

he is   merciless

gutting him with his waves.

Above, the sky is sparse,

and the trees   are blurring in the wind.

 

What of the lake

at the foot of this cliff?

 

An audience of clouds gather

and the water leaves in ripples.

 

A village watches from a distance.

Elizabeth Wilson Davies

rising again        stumps of oak pine birch willow hazel

emerge from the sand                     Noah’s trees

 

their roots stiffened underground       protectors of bones

where families were planted centuries ago

and animal and human footprints remain

 

scatterings of burnt stones from submerged ancient hearths

revealed by equinoctial tides and storms

 

the dead stay with us like bruises

 

well maiden no more      Mererid’s plaintive call

reverberates on the wind      lamenting

 

the sea swell crashing in  flooding

Gwyddno’s lowlands with featureless water

 

blurred memories of drunken Siethenyn’s cries

ring out as the wild sea swept through open floodgates

covering the contours until each person         each animal      each tree

 

drowned       hear the watch-tower’s bells toll the secrets of the sea

wishing they are unforgotten on the shore

 

the opaque sky of Ynyslas is engulfed by metallic bird

calls. A print of a small bare foot preserved

in hardened peat endures

 

this child bore witness to the loss            we too face westwards

into the encroaching sea

 

        rising