Voyage of Discovery by Penny Smith

Another box ; a dusty treasure trove
of keepsakes hoarded over many years:
a trinket: letter: token of old love
forgotten, washed away by gentle tears:

a photograph from childhood, long ago,
where memory's encapsulated shades
of black and white, now faded, serve to show
in frozen movement, little escapades

among imagined fantasies galore.
Oh, then, we could be masters of our fate,
before we knew what life may hold in store,
before we realised it's soon too late

to captain yet another ship, to sail
where calmer waters hopefully prevail.

Penny Smith, Havant, UK

Prairie Castles by Mary Belardi Erickson

When climate change was yet chained, the frozen landscape
changelessly towered, a white fortress on the prairie.
We played to defy winter, shoveling into huge snowdrifts,
hollowing cold rooms--in which I can still sit
in the timeless portion of my mind.

Hardened snow banks are like rocks buffeting farm buildings:
by us transfigured into our medieval burgh,
its heavy doors opening to peasants—neighbor kids
tunneling for shelter from cold wind in our castle’s labyrinth
of rooms. Their shadows ripple on my skin,
thoughts of time’s lodgers.

In its kingdom, winter rules until spring breezily challenges
with a ruckus of black birds swarming expectant trees.
Robins watch for widening slots in cold’s receding walls.
Less an icy regal voice, in fly barn pigeons, mocking jesters
leaving dirt upon the quiet straw.


Mary Belardi Erickson, Minnesota, USA

Climate Change by Gill McEvoy

We will not go about our gardens
lifting the violet's head
to see the tiny orange teeth;

there will be no snowdrops
in blizzard in the spring;

we will not wander round
flicking the fresh rain
from the tender leaves.

We will learn to love cacti,
and stand back.


Gill McAvoy, UK

Our New Washing Machine by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Exulting in our new washing machine,
which like poetry is ambiguous about
how much you can finally shove in.

Even earlier, eating preserved lemon slices,
read in bed and slope in my shirt,
under exquisitely clean sheets.

Mary says that is the fondest landscape
when you’re there in bed with me and
I say oh yeah well here’s a little earthquake,
here’s a little mess.

And there’s too many socks
they spill on the floor and they all make
mystical assertions you’d think they’d float
by themselves but all they evidence

is our short attention spans
and the amount of clothes to fold
while the washing machine
whirs and chirps like the dialtones
murmuring out of European telephones.




Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Gimme Fallout Shelter by Howie Good

The night was tricked out
in sequins, and why not

the moon in a fur-trimmed hood.
Ready? she said. She had

a voice like a lighted doorbell.
We both could remember a time

when grown-ups lived in fear
of the annual Soviet wheat harvest.

I uncovered my eyes.


Howie Good, New York, USA

The Dimmest Forest by Lee Stern

Let me walk in the dimmest forest without you,
unstringing the lights that you left on the pole.
Let me do this without wavering
and without making excuses
for the fact that I didn’t want to do it when it was dark.
And let me wear my best clothes when I’m doing this
so that people know that I wasn’t upset.
Let them think that when I put the lights in a different place,
a boardroom of people I happened upon made noises.
And then retreated, I think,
to a place they knew where it was no longer possible to discuss their
...........myths.
But where it was possible nonetheless to enjoy themselves
and to marry the sanctimony of their lawful tears
in one way or another, perhaps,
to the bulb that departed from the lasting socket of their shame.


Lee Stern, Los Angeles, CA, USA

…Until It’s Gone by Joseph Harker

After we’d dug down deep beneath the surface
of Alaskan untamed wilderness
or the heartbreaking cerulean of the Gulf
and harmattan-swept sands of Arabia,
sucking up our fill of light, sweet crude,

when the gas fields of Persia and Siberia
ran dry, and the plants fell quiet,
and the coal mines were empty shafts of granite
full of dust and the smell of men,
and the rivers whose water we stole
for the Kazakh steppe and the Sonoran sprawl
dried up behind the dams,

one day, when the fluorescent bulbs flickered out,
and the engines refused to fire,
when our computers switched off,
and the sprinklers slowed to a trickle,

we stood up as one

and we walked outside into the humid air,
blinking against the sudden sunlight,
saw the struggling trees and intrepid squirrels,
heard the interrogatives of sparrows
(instead of the whirr of central air
or the roar of SUVs in the street),

and as one, unsure what to do next,
for the first time in a long while,
we looked up into that sapphire sky
and saw just how big it really is.


Joseph Harker, USA

V by Jan Harris

Geese

honk their

way across

the blue sky in

perfect formation

as if they are spelling

a v-sign for nature. On

this too warm January day

when mankind has forgotten his way

omens are more comforting than science.

Jan Harris, UK

alice abandoned by Linda Schram-Williams

i have misjudged the ease of the fall
the tumble into the poet-hole
the rabbits have long abandoned..
you have a sky to watch, he remarked
a vantage point with which to
check out a galaxy’s latest dance..
your view is unmarred by the distraction
of the city’s light
it just might be
all the tug
you need…
and he
was
right





Linda Schram-Williams,

Untitled by Alishya Almeida

You
will find me in disasters.
In the veins of your
sadness, the empty sky
blue, the memories
of black dresses and
the feeling of doom unfolding.
We could wash out this morning,
stay in bed, the world
will do without us.
I could be science,
the furniture of my thoughts
evolving
perhaps become a planet,
revolving
disguising my instability
by reflecting the light
you shed.


Alishya Almeida, Bangalore, India