Has-Beens

By Florence Heyhoe
Warrenpint, County Down, Northern Ireland

 If this town were a set of teeth, I would recommend a visit to the dentist for it is full of gaps. However, the hotel on the main street sparkles like a polished molar, after a recent renovation. It seems out of place amidst this yawning emptiness.

The people I knew as a child long dead: the schoolteacher who beat and threatened the children (including my brother), the grocer brothers in their brown coats … who were fond of young boys, the man, from the tick tock shop where the musty smell lingered.

Many buildings that were once businesses have been demolished. There is a library where the church used to be, and the mission hall has been converted to housing. The pharmacy where my father worked now dispenses fish and chips. I remember all the outhouses out the back and a maze of rooms upstairs where he photographed children. 

So many nightmares…trying to escape.

the colours 
of spring now
vacant eyes

First Published: cattails April 2024

Resources

Northern Ireland Domestic/Sexual Abuse Resources
Hotline for men who have suffered sexual abuse https://www.survivorsuk.org/
Also see, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, available on Amazon

Parched Fields

By Goran Gatalica
Zagreb, Croatia

global warming—
the widowed farmer’s
parched fields

Render Unto Caesar

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

        what mud daubers do organ prelude

We’ve been around a long time. A mother’s day ever since Australopithecus Africanus. Things haven’t gone all that smoothly, though. These days we spend our time critical race theorizing empathy. Realize it’s more than a single letter from refuge to refugee.

        morning prayer a lone canary out of the mine

Wildfire embers rise with Mars. Too much pleasure urges more pain. Our brains built for it. Type 3 fun house mirrors bend bones and time. Some circadian rhythm of our sleepless poems. Mental health creeps out of the rainforest. A plot of cannabis a panacea.

        a slow drag in this line butterfly effect

With aching backs we wonder where to put it down. Not there by the murder hornet’s nest, soon to be a threnody of torch and fire. We look farther. Just passing through the looking glass. Does it have to be so literal? Then digitally remastered. Is that a hi-fi sigh in the cellist’s final note?

        wireless fidelity sound of a muted room

Closet to Landfill

By Monica Kakkar (she/her/hers)
India and United States of America

closet to landfill . . .
as far as the eye can see
end of summer sales

First Published: Asahi Shimbun’s Asahi Haikuist Network, September 01, 2023
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14993322

Reference:

NBC Chicago – Your donated clothes probably end up abroad in landfills.
Green America – Unraveling fashion industry – what really happens to unwanted clothes.
EPA.GOV – Facts and figures about materials waste and recycling/textiles material specific data.
The Atlantic – where does discarded clothing go?

Crude

Theresa A. Cancro
Wilmington, Delaware, USA

unmixed oil slicks press against dolphin skin

fall leaves…
a plastic bag gapes
wide as Texas


First published in The Other Bunny, June 11, 2018

Broken Bottle

By Theresa A. Cancro
Wilmington, Delaware, USA

broken bottle
at the end of the path
blue-eyed grass

First published in Plum Tree Tavern, 2015

Crack of Dawn

By Theresa A. Cancro
Wilmington, Delaware, USA

crack of dawn —
fireflies escape
the jar

First published in Chrysanthemum #18, 2015

Woke

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

The N-word never tasted good in my mouth. Something far too bitter in it. Indigestible. Yet growing up among 1970s white rurals, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the epithet. It was never a word at home, but one cutting along the precise lines of a barber shop razor, caught on the fly out on a sports field, wrapped within damp towels at the summer swimming pool and in sync with slamming lockers along school hallways. A sound just perceptible enough.

        sunburn skies a cant of pigmentation

These days I wonder about all the rhetoric. The school board brawls and book bans. The curtailing of curricula. I wake again feeling most unsettled about the coming storm and the words we use. About how to talk to my students about how they talk to each other. I scroll through my own feeds looking for a way to connect with theirs. I want them to know unrest. To know how to get into good trouble.

        lightning strike eye silhouettes after

Critical Mass Shooting Stars Again

By Matthew Caretti
Pago Pago, American Samoa

Here the future kraken in an ancient mariner’s tale wags us again. Always some bugaboo stacking spreadsheet zeroes. Each counter-space filled with a pristine ruin.

        times new roman scrawl on Pompeii walls

Realpolitik tumbles toward Earth. Cracks a construction hardhat. In mirrored windows a bulbul studies similitudes. Some continental drift wherein a mountain wanders into itself.

        smoke forest water bombers smear it red

Slow TMZ stream into this DMZ between East and West. Dr. West reminds us in real time of the pastness in the present of it all. Perhaps this flower moon a replacement.

        each burning cross aliens alight on prayer flags

We sit alone together in this time machine, waiting. The end times or time to end the show. The letters on the marquee tumbling down. The hours long gone.

        first fireflies the rocket explodes on landing

Anthropocene

By Steve Van Allen
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, Earth

hawaiian honeycreeper
guam flying fox
bachman’s warbler
yellow blossom pearlymussel
scioto mad tom
mariana fruit bat

          Gone forever

plastic
pollution
logging
drilling
hate
asphalt
microplastics
cancer 

          Cannot leave soon enough

butterfly 
the only thing moving
this hot afternoon 

A Disease Called Power

Opinion:

By Noris Roberts
Lecheria Municipio Urbaneja, Venezuela

I will begin by pointing out that this is not intended as a partisan political statement, to attack anyone in particular or to offend. I write and declare my pain and astonishment seeing that my country is being systematically destroyed and its population humiliated and decimated. In the last years nearly 5 million people have emigrated, not because of a war, they’ve emigrated because they foresaw no future, because of hunger and lack of medicine, for not having personal or legal security and basically because they were psychologically affected for living in a permanent state of uncertainty.

Continue reading . . .

This article contains views and opinions which are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other author, agency, organization, employer or company, including the Company.

The Nature of Falling

By Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, MS, USA

Sometimes I still dream of those two old oaks on my grandparent’s old farm. Lightning hit one of them first and then years later, the other. They seemed to be potent symbols of my grandparents, who, ending their last days, were also ending the era of noble peasants tending rural farms. In this era of asphalt and progress, multi-lane highways dominate the landscape. Who remembers a barn full of half-wild kittens or bottle-feeding an orphan calf?

new subdivision…
a bulldozer buries
the last of the violets

vanishing wilderness…
beneath the pale moon
a snowy owl takes wing

forgetting who we are…
the cry of wild things
fading into silence

The Last Fable

By Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, MS, USA

At midnight the little mouse lights a flickering candle and dips her heavy quill in ink. Outside her small hovel beneath a pallid moon the ocean is slowly dying. Even here, across a chasm too wide to cross, she can faintly hear the din of eight billion people roaring down ten-lane highways. But no one hears the mouse or heeds her warning. Words appear one by one, stark and black on the ivory parchment, only to fall like tears into an infinity where the ghosts of dead forests and dying shore birds flutter briefly and then plummet into the black hole of silence. The little mouse struggles on, writing against the tide, writing of glaciers and of melting ice, of dying animals, of droughts and heat and coming storms, until at last the candle sputters out.

a new dawn
and the earth goes on
without us…
snagged on a dead branch
a plastic bag snapping

Ceasefire

By Tuyet Van Do
Victoria, Australia

ceasefire . . .
a man in the rubble
collecting body parts

First published in Synchronized Chaos, 1st May 2024

Renascence

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

No cougars are supposed to roam the Appalachian mountains.  They’re supposed to be extinct here, killed off or driven out by logging half a century ago.  And yet . . . here and there a single footprint lingers in damp earth, a wisp of hair clings to rusted wire, a blurred snapshot betrays the image of a ghost-cat slipping through shadows.

And once, echoing down the mountainside where I stumbled mile after mile over rain-slicked rocks in gathering dusk—once, a long, unearthly scream to pierce the heart. 

I utter a prayer 
into the darkness
that enfolds me—
may all the vanished ones return 
when at long last we’re gone

The Spinning Wheel

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

milkweed blooms
at the meadow’s edge
she waits
for the monarch’s blessing
under a shattered sky

one strand snaps
and the tapestry ravels—
at dusk
a mockingbird sings
the old crone’s song

soft rain falling
through a starless night
she weaves
its many-colored threads
into a shroud for the earth

~Stacking Stones Anthology, summer 2018

Evensong

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, North Carolina, USA

butterflies flutter
from the artist’s brush
in memoriam—
a river of monarchs
once flowed across the sky

slow spirals
up the summer sky—
scavengers
cleansing my mind
of its dark residue

I follow a path
of spindrift oak leaves
to a clearing
where no cabin ever stood—
its hidden hearth my home

the day
closes its circle
around me
silver voices
re-enchant the dusk

to keep at bay
the wolfish dreams,
I sleep
with gentle sorrow
cradled in my arms

~red lights 15:2, June, 2019

Out of Season

By Doug Sylver
Seattle, Washington, USA

Not that it wasn’t appreciated
however unexpected
Not that it wasn’t beautiful
however out of place
Not that it wasn’t surprising
however disturbing

A cherry tree
blossoming full
pink fireworks
but in December
not even winter yet
let alone spring
another palindromic day
12/11/21
 
Haiku-worthy
cliché as it is
but Basho is walking
uphill 
while me down
and he’s taking notes 
on his cell phone
noticing the colors
nodding to them
in their sparseness
noticing my noticing
nodding to me
in my sparseness
and this far north
next door to Canada
a stone’s throw from Alaska
tanka-worthy maybe but
I haven’t counted yet 
I haven’t even written yet
 
You say I am keen today and
since the wind is south by southwest
I know a hawk from a haiku
and a handshake from a handsaw
you should see me on the
other days
and in the
other winds
then you’d agree 
perchance that
beauty happens even
when unexpected
then you’d agree 
perchance that
when everything
and everyone
should be gone
there’s always hope
for disturbing surprises
even then
and especially when
they’re out of season.

The garden in November

By Doug Sylver
Seattle, Washington, USA

Preparing it for sleep
with maple leaves in various stages of decay
a foot thick between soil so cold
and warming burlap bag blankets
with names of coffee companies 
from around the world
Cafe Viejo from El Salvador
Cafe Verde from Ecuador
Cafe Nuyorican from Puerto Rico 
 
It was a tough year to be a tomato
cold wet spring
hot dry summer
records falling everywhere
nature falling everywhere
raspberries tinged with wildfire smoke
gardening gloves tinged with wildfire smoke
my eyes tinged with wildfire smoke
 
But there were others
successes
potatoes hiding underground 
happy to be safe down there 
and squash of every shape and color
asking, like beaming children,
are you proud of me?
and the soil, the earth itself 
so permanent and 
so ever-changing
ignoring us 
with all our good intentions
and our constant need to fix
everyone and everything
and like us, 
these maple leaves
of every shape and color
in various stages of decay
laughing at us 
on our way there
laughing with me
on my way there
underneath a warming blanket
preparing myself 
as well
for sleep.

This time

By Doug Sylver
Seattle, Washington, USA

This is when the Quileute tribe
calls getting to be the time
of no more berries.

Earlier sooner this time than ever.
It has been prophesied by others
that it will last for a time 

times and half a time.
Which time, which times
which half a time is this?

What happens after it has gotten to be the time
and the times of no more berries?
And then, for half a time

when no one can taste the memories
or recall the many times of berries?