Crack of Dawn
By Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA crack of dawn —fireflies escapethe jar First published in Chrysanthemum #18, 2015
Woke
By Matthew CarettiPago 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…
Critical Mass Shooting Stars Again
By Matthew CarettiPago 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…
Anthropocene
By Steve Van AllenCincinnati, Ohio, USA, Earth hawaiian honeycreeper guam flying fox bachman's warbler yellow blossom pearlymussel scioto mad tom mariana fruit bat Gone forever plasticpollutionlogging drilling hate asphalt microplastics cancer Cannot leave soon enough butterfly the only thing movingthis hot afternoon
A Disease Called Power
Opinion: By Noris RobertsLecheria 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…
The Nature of Falling
By Rebecca DrouilhetPicayune, 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 buriesthe last of the violets vanishing wilderness…beneath the pale moona snowy owl takes wing forgetting who…
The Last Fable
By Rebecca DrouilhetPicayune, 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…
Ceasefire
By Tuyet Van DoVictoria, Australia ceasefire . . .a man in the rubblecollecting body parts First published in Synchronized Chaos, 1st May 2024
Renascence
By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, 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 darknessthat enfolds me—may…
The Spinning Wheel
By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA milkweed bloomsat the meadow’s edgeshe waitsfor the monarch’s blessingunder a shattered sky one strand snapsand the tapestry ravels—at duska mockingbird singsthe old crone’s song soft rain fallingthrough a starless nightshe weavesits many-colored threadsinto a shroud for the earth ~Stacking Stones Anthology, summer 2018
Evensong
By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA butterflies flutterfrom the artist’s brushin memoriam—a river of monarchsonce flowed across the sky slow spiralsup the summer sky—scavengerscleansing my mindof its dark residue I follow a pathof spindrift oak leavesto a clearingwhere no cabin ever stood—its hidden hearth my home the daycloses its circlearound mesilver voicesre-enchant the dusk to keep at baythe wolfish dreams,I sleepwith gentle sorrowcradled in my arms ~red lights 15:2, June, 2019
Out of Season
By Doug SylverSeattle, 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 springanother 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…
The garden in November
By Doug SylverSeattle, 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 …
This time
By Doug SylverSeattle, 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?
Not Somewhere Else But Here
By Robert WitmerTokyo, Japan A poem asks the reader to participate in the making of its meaning, and in this way binds the reader to the writer, while leaving the reader free to bring her own mental associations to the poet’s words and images. Thus, the poem combines a private and a public language in a process of communication. While poetry “makes nothing happen” (as Auden stated in his famous eulogy for Yeats), it can lift the veil from deeply disturbing aspects of our collective lives and in so doing ask us to rethink those troubling realties, which we often…
Help
By Robert WitmerTokyo, Japan lightimprisoned in diamondsthe dark mine a dollar a day windblown sand –children in ragsstaring as the boat recedes orphans at the stoplighttogetherwe roll up our windowswintera bent spoonin an empty potshoe polishthe toxic smellof unemploymenta few starsfewer leaveshis cardboard homea rainbow ribbonon a rich man’s skytree stumpsoutside the new megastoreempty shopping cartsfor the homelessyesterday’s snowunder a naked treea homeless woman awaiting springold nails squeakingin shrinking woodcampaign promisesthe populist’s campaigna loud speakerdistorts the platitudesair raidour last loaf of breadblackens in the oven a child’s balloondrifts awaythe wall crowned with broken bottles First published: Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue…
Once Bereft
By Robert WitmerTokyo, Japan What would the world be, once bereftOf wet and of wildness? Let them be left — Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid” From Pangaea to the Tethys Sea our Mother Earth goes round, and round our central star appears, the Sun, traveling east to west, from Ethiopia to Hesperides, each day a blessing in this circle of life. Brought into this vital light with plants of every kind and fauna filling land and sea, fruitful, we were. And it was good. We crept into caves to mark the walls with ochred images of creatures honored for their flesh, their…
Bleeding Skies
by Florence HeyhoeCounty Down, North Ireland bleeding skies children playing in mine fields
Predators
by Florence HeyhoeCounty Down, North Ireland predators on the web trafficking
As Einstein would say
By Diana WebbLeatherhead, Surrey, UK She is walking back from the supermarket, bag weighed down by difficult choices, when in the day's last rays she sees it. empty snail shell caked with soil the relic Some go to great pains, she recalls, to stop these small land gastropods from underfoot death, by moving them away from pedestrian paths. This one exited naturally, protective architecture unshattered. tick in the boxbetween her fingertips a miracle The creature left its home for her to contemplate under the roof of her own small home on the patch they shared in their mutual home planet earth. silver trace one gleam of…