Category: Poetry

Grace Wagner

(listed as extinct in 2018)

 

Little black-headed song

bird, discovered

only recently—1973,

the year Secretariat won

the Triple Crown—so much

relentless muscle

 

racing a circle

while this cryptic bird

flitted up Haleakala’s

steep slope—moss-tangled,

dripping ferns—snapping up

snails and waxworms.

 

Now imagine this:

a last ditch effort,

venturing across

the volcanic crater

with padded boxes,

hoping to catch

 

the last three

specimens—perhaps

a breeding pair—

256 birds captured, but no

Po’ouli—fifteen years

later they would declare

 

the bird extinct—another

in a long line lost

to invasive species,

disease,

and habitat destruction.

The people who tried

 

to save this little bird

are immune

to despair—

they suspend

themselves

from ropes,

 

pollinate flowers

when the pollinators

have died—

they trek

the rainforest

playing calls

 

from long dead birds,

but you, little bandit,

refuse the call—

there is no hope

but we can’t help

ourselves,

 

we believe in miracles—

a songbird waiting

to be discovered.

Avra Margariti

i. The Artist

 

Agrees blood doesn’t make for the best paint,

but humans will use worse through history,

whelk dye and highly toxic cinnabar,

the mollusks mourning their mass murder,

the painters’ lungs shriveled with poison for eternity.

The artist immortalizes sunsets and war-zones.

They name each stone canvas imperial purple,

vermilion, carmine, crimson,

but the truth is, they’re just red.

Everyone is red.

 

ii. The Poet

 

Roams battlefields in search of personal effects

harvested from those dead or dying,

for tragedy births the best poems.

Dog tags, torn or scorched photographs,

hand-carved bone figurines of a serene woman

who might have been peace, personified.

The poet takes his razor-edged pen

and scratches palimpsests of history

across his heaving chest.

 

iii. The Scientist

 

Tries to detect water in the dacryphiliac desert.

She dowses through endless expanses of cracked earth,

holding on to the forked wishbone

of some long-extinct animal, carving spirals in the sand.

Her feet blister and her skin melts off in rivulets

before her fossilized rod palpitates.

An absinthe-green lake, a promised oasis.

The desert floor opens wide to swallow her,

the trilobites and arthropods welcoming her home.

 

iv. The Teacher

 

Fails to convince his students of his prophetic visions.

Long before the first local conspiracy theory

or worldwide panicked broadcast,

he drew chalk figures across the blackboard,

interpretations of death and destruction

like geoglyphs or paleolithic cave art.

The teacher begged his students and their families

to gather provisions and build underground bunkers,

to save themselves any way they could.

But even then, he was too late.

Their creator had already sealed their fate,

painted in red pigment across the walls.

Ken Poyner

I saw the moon come down.

I was driving that old stretch

Between home and late night,

Not another car on the road,

The moon the only real light

In a sky pitted with enough clouds

To chase off most stars. The moon

Made enough of a hole to lick

The dark itself. But then

The moon started to come down.

As if inch by inch, though

That seemed but an optical illusion

Given my angle and distance. I watched

It sliding lower, eyes darting back

To the ever-darkening road often enough

That I could drive without slowing,

My wife expecting me home on time.

Finally, it was out of sight, lost

In the trees. I did not actually see

It crash, nor did I feel

Earthquake or rumble, collision

Or fevered merge. The conclusion

Was simply the dark sky, the darker

Road, and I thought the tides,

The tides.

Tim Fab-Eme

I understand you don’t like talking sex and indoor games

when the Sun is high and the winds take on

the warmth of a kiss. Everything takes the extreme nowadays;

it’s no longer the luxury of race, religion, and politics.

But I’m bored because there’s nothing else to talk about

when the heat is high and my lips crave yours.

 

Our kids are in school learning new ways to take

more from the world. Do you wonder what life would

be in a century or two? There’ll be fires, floods,

droughts, and pandemics . . . oh, I forgot, you dread bad news.

You think there’ll be more love if we hope more.

 

We walk around and talk about paradise whenever we want;

I try to laugh loud more every time my mind

wanders away from the lair of a world beyond love.

But the heat is on and I’ve got no way

 

of looking away from sex, and the heat is much

and we’re afraid our bodies would rain heavily again

and the bed would be soaked and you don’t like that.

 

So, we sit out under the almond fanning our faces,

giggling the way foes feign smiles, thinking more of heaven

 

than what we feel now and will ever have. Earth.

Nancy Lynée Woo

Someone has left the building. The building is now

a rubble of bones. Butterflies are sometimes kisses,

but mostly larvae. Language: a cocoon to emerge into.

 

To come down from the tree means breaking

a bough. Rocking to wake. The world is a nursery

and rhymes are waves. To be a person describing

 

is to be a rat scavenging at the crumbs of language

for the remains of thought. Holiness has nothing

to do with it. Yet, meringue. Yet, music.

 

Yet, everything. In other words, divinity is a shoebox

at a science fair for the other words. I am not sure

my words are my own. I walk past a bookshelf

 

and read How Nature Works. I read how nature works

in the spinning of a silk worm. Someone reads out loud,

“How nature works.” To be awake in the world

 

means to be aware of sleeping. I won’t survive language.

Language is the only way to survive. Thank goddess,

I was never given a god to flounder for. A man with a tie

 

can be an instrument of violence. Why not say so?

For fear of being locked up, we keep our wisteria

to ourselves. I am bursting dragonfruit, pulling cards

 

and reading. The definition of “apocalypse” is “to reveal.”

So what if my language is pleased with itself?

To speak at all has been a travail. I am cacophonous

 

now, a body of scales dragging along the sand.

Don’t mind me while I feast on oil fumes.

How are we still manufacturing plastic foam?

 

Even fairies need to breathe. The slot machine

dings. Any money I get needs to be cleansed.

Who has the power to move the currency of thought?

 

Whose hook is in my cheek? I eat puzzles for lunch.

A bomb goes off in a break room. If the poem is a vine,

the climbing to where becomes the question.

Cislyn Smith

after the storm

there is a dryad on my roof

and the river is licking the porch

like it can taste freedom in the foundation

got news for you, bayou baby,

there’s only things to hold you back in there

best look elsewhere for escape.

I splash out to take a better look

and the tree tells me to be careful of fire ants

floating spheres of pain

surrounding the precious queen in the middle

ready to swarm.

Well, I’m not impressed with that.

We’re all trying to protect something

(aren’t we?)

and we’ll sting to do so if it comes down to it.

Besides, I’ve got on my granddaddy’s waders

they still smell like fish and stale cigarette smoke

though he’s been gone twelve years now

if the reek of memories won’t keep the biting things back

maybe his ghost will.

My granddaddy didn’t care about flood or fire 

he set the lawn ablaze once with a careless butt

smoke and flame carried on the wind of dryer days

but that’s long passed now

and I’m past the washed-out gravel driveway

looking back

at the combination of oak and house 

thinking sweaty chainsaw thoughts

though she looks so pretty up there

such a jaunty angle

crowning the house with leaves

She says she don’t care what I do,

being uprooted makes her cavalier like that 

but maybe I care.

I slap a mosquito off my arm

and consider the smear of blood there 

thicker than water, they say

though I never did know what density has to do with it

so little floats in this brackish mess

but underneath the oak branches

in the broken eggshell attic 

are baby books, old military uniforms

fishing poles, holiday ornaments

yearbooks nibbled by silverfish

all being caressed by the dryad’s twiggy fingers.

Right then

with the sun slanting through the clouds

and mud churning around boots

my heart whispers

let the beetles have it

let the gators sleep like logs in front of the tv

and eat defrosted frozen meals

let the sandhill cranes stalk through the living room

and the bedrooms fill with black mold

eating baby blankets and pillows and teddy bears

spreading like gravy stains on the thanksgiving dinner linens

I’m done protecting this stuff

and ready to put me at the center 

swarming for dryer land and better places

there’s a car in the garage

gassed up, right next to the mower

ready to go

I don’t care about water getting in

I just want to get out

little metal ants are marching down the interstate

back into the state they fled

ready for reconstruction

clogging the roadways south

while my eye turns north

just like the storm did

considering deconstruction instead

right now

this moment

the getting is good

let’s go

Tom Barlow

My hometown was already a wreck by the

time I arrived. Nimishillen Creek ran

 

motor oil and sewer slops behind the

high school, and downtown disappeared in

 

smoke the day fathers lit their coal furnaces.

Deer and bluebirds were as rare as the

 

people who worried about the deer and

the bluebirds, and we hurled beer cans

 

onto the roadside like our heroes threw

hand grenades. We rode our motorbikes

 

up and down the slag heaps left us by

the strip miners who took their money

 

and moved as far away as they could afford

from the ruin that funded their move, and

 

there was joy everywhere in the conviction

that America went on forever and nothing

 

we could do would ever fill it up.

 

Surprise.

Russell Nichols

oh to be breathing

in a strange

land of strangulation

shown from different

angles where extreme degrees

of difficulty make it harder

to draw anything other

than a gun

 

oh to be one

with the lung of the universe

expanding . . . inhaling the charred

steak of dead stars, kicking up red

dust on Mars in the pale faces

of fear and dread

 

oh to be an engineer

that makes diagrams of diaphragms

to invent new ventilators

for post-reconstruction purposes

available for delivery

at premature

funeral services

 

oh to be mother

nature’s summer lover so every

time she takes my breath away,

i know it won’t

be forever

 

oh to be like the trees

that synthesize the light of day

leaving without leaving

 

oh to be alive

again

 

oh

to

      be

 

oh to

            oh to

oh to

                                                      oh to

oh to

                        oh to

oh to

                                                                        oh to

Russell Nichols

To those who can’t stand

the rain:

 

let it flow

and move mountains.

 

cry me a spout

for watered mustard seeds

to sprout from well-tended

gardens of grief,

eroding rocks, making hard

places bend to the will

of irrigated tear ducts.

 

cry me a mountain range

so i can measure variations

in river steepness and rainfall

and calculate the pain

carved in your rugged terrain.

 

do not blame yourself.

fault the tectonics that try

to shame your way of weathering

and take credit for relief.

 

there is no relief without release,

says science.

 

so cry me a new topography

with contours that naturally defy

convention and gravity in the same weep.

 

let it flow

let it flow

let it flow

 

from mountains high to valleys low

let us make a new earth.

Francesca Gabrielle Hurtado

They called us resilient.

 

They think it only means strong.

They say the Filipino Spirit is all positivity,

is smiling when the storm hits,

is finding the light in the darkness,

no matter what.

They don’t know that daybreak finds us

shadowed and shaking,

breaking and almost broken,

caked in dirt and the debris of someone else’s

irresponsibility.

Because when the storm hits,

it brings us to our knees.

Witness, then,

the concavity of a body,

wide open and aching,

gasping in the sunlight,

spilt on the earth.

 

We are god’s poison-tasters,

bitten off by the teeth,

bitten off at the skin.

Purpled by the dawn, we are

shivering for want and waiting

for something that feels like justice.

We take refuge in the rock piles,

drunk on earthquakes and

fermented in cheap grace,

tooth by tooth,

flesh by pound of tender flesh;

we would give anything

not to disassemble in the echo

of a careless politician’s footsteps.

 

Find us howling

where mangrove meets with salted water,

nursing from the sea,

hands clasped in prayer,

throat aching for prayer to be enough,

eyes anguished with supplication.

We are human splinters,

scattered by the flood,

by the fire,

by the shaking of the earth,

by the blood on the pavement,

in the cracks of the land,

on the stones of the mountain,

caked underneath the fingernails

of all the strongmen who so desperately want

to be strong men.

They know nothing of the Filipino Spirit.

They only know what their greed whispers to their dirty hearts.

They cannot see us coming undone.

They choose not to see us coming undone.

 

And yet here we are,

eroded with every new tempest,

bleeding our runoff into an ocean of time,

knuckles splitting on the door of

an indifferent god,

our mezzanines shattered,

our columns felled,

our temples all defeated.

We are children to this anger,

this hateful neglect of a people,

this ageless war for the soul of a nation

that has not learned yet how to love itself

without devouring its own.

 

And so here we are,

leveled in the beat of the earth,

still holding on to everything,

still trying to call this ragged country home.

In this flowerfield of wreckage,

find us crying into empty cups,

mouths waiting

for a hot meal,

for a garden song,

for a kind word to say about the state of our nation,

or else for a war cry.

For a call to arms.

The Filipino Spirit demands

that we be strong,

not only in defeat or in darkness,

but in the disobedient thundering of our hearts

in a clamor for our due.

 

Remember this:

we grew from seeds.

We hid in the cracks of the land and

let the storms make us brave, not broken.

We let the lightning carve our grief into good intentions

and we refused to call them scars.

We are the better tomorrow,

the lesson learned,

we are the light in the darkness,

the way home, resplendent

even in our disrepair.

 

This is us. This is resilience.

This is the Filipino Spirit,

unyielding and unbroken.