Duck and Cover

By Robert WitmerTokyo, Japan The Cuban Missile Crisis. I was in grade school and we had drills. The same loud alarm as a fire drill, but a different experience altogether. Instead of walking single file out to the playground, joking around with your friends, we had to sit against a wall in a dark corridor hugging our knees to our hearts. Dead silence was expected. But sometimes we whispered. Kid stuff. spring rainchildren holding umbrellasupside down (First published in Presence, Issue #81, March 2025.)

October Showers

By: Regina (Gina) PiroskaTurners Beach, Tasmania, Australiaoctober showersa blackbird tugs at the wormstretchingwe prepare to join the group at a yoga retreat Published catchment edition 4 2025

Magpie

By: Regina (Gina) PiroskaTurners Beach, Tasmania, Australia the magpiepostures on a sheep's backin tall wheat grassthe discarded red remainsof a rusted-out plough Published catchment edition 4 2025

A cloud of blackbirds

By Melissa DennisonBradford, Yorkshire, England I am standing with my pen poised to record but it's so quiet and still. It's often like this, a waiting game. The wait is becoming longer and longer. I am taking part in a citizen science project to document blackbird sightings. Climate change can seem like an abstraction or something that effects people a long way off, on the other side of the world, but it's not, it's right here on our doorstep.  in the treesonly the soundof the wind Much-loved songbird threatened by mosquito-borne virus | BTOMosquito-borne killer disease threatens blackbirds - BBC…

Exponential

By Richard GrahnEvanston, Illinois USA My muse has seduced me again. You’re the Writer.  You’re the only one who can write it.  It’s your responsibility to write it—your duty! So, here I sit, fingers massaging keys that whisper letters and words—whispers spun into sentences, woven into paragraphs, loved into poems. bearing giftsfor a barren hillside—one sprouting seedswaddled in sheetsof rain

Night Vision

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA clear-cut . . .the quavering cryof a screech owl I am driving up Rte. 7 in rural Connecticut. A quarter-mile past my childhood home, an infamous curve threads its way between Straits Rock and the Housatonic River. Torrential rain pelts the windshield. On the dashboard, a life-sized Trump bobblehead blocks my view. dark of the moon—the dreamer stirsyet cannot wake

eco-tourism

By Debbie StrangeCanada Failed Haiku Journal of English Senryū, Volume 4, Issue 39, March 2019

derecho

By Debbie StrangeCanada Prune Juice (cover), Issue 38, December 2022

BEACHED

By Regina (Gina) PiroskaTasmania, Australia Heat hangs, torrid, pressing upon tired shoulders. Touched by the occasional warm starfish an ancient, patchy, bird-shit monument kneels in puddled sand beneath a sky stitched to the sea. below bluesails billowover blue Ripples circle the rock where, in the tide's cloud-crawl, tiny crabs get on with their crabby lives and I wonder how words can convey this sense without images to the eye. On this slow, tedious, amplified afternoon, I lean against the colossus baffled by the clamour of these idiot gulls, ignorant in the art of give and take, because it's perfectly clear…

Dining Out . . . 

By: Anna Cates, Wilmington, Ohioand Steve Van Allen, Cincinnati, Ohio even on gray daysthe sun fights to silver sheenbeyond cloud cover We held the door for a lady, dragging two wheeled suitcases, balancing a shopping bag on one. Her long black coat was nice, years ago. She parked her bags inside the door and shuffled to the counter.  "I have 4 dollars," dragging wrinkled ones from a pocket. "Keep your money; I'll cover it," said the manager. We took our order and began eating. When the manager swung by our booth, we thanked her. "I'm from Louisiana.  I was homeless, and…

Incantations

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, NC, USA forestsburning far awayI bowto the wood thrushsinging orisons unseen I follow a path along the brook, through mountain laurel and rhododendron. The stone hut stands half-hidden among the trees, its roof green with moss. Thick, curved walls enclose an oval of coolness in the summer heat. Elliptical windows admit a little light.  As my eyes adjust, I notice a message chalked on the sloping ceiling: maybe the world isn’t dying . . . maybe she’s heavy with child *Note: The second tanka is a ‘found poem.’~From my book Earthbound: Tanka-Prose & Haibun, 2022

Just This

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, NC, USA I used to thinkit would last forever—the swallowscoming home each year,the green hills blossoming on my pathone pure white featherI carry with menews of a dying planet,a widening war the bridgeacross the creek—I cannot seethe barred owl calling from the other side a water striderdimples the surface,an otter rises and vanishes . . .the stream flows on spring beauties bloomamong tiny handprintsin the mudI kneel on the bankof the passing moment ~First published as the Afterword to A Worn Chest by Joy McCall & Tom Clausen, 2022   Reprinted in my book The Wind Harp: Tanka Pentads, 2023