Tag: climate change

Mr. Rogers Teaches Little Donny about Climate Change by Gloria Heffernan

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Mr. Rogers Teaches Little Donny about Climate Change

Why don’t you take off that heavy coat, Mr. President?
It’s too warm for that today.
Why, I don’t even put my sweater on
when it gets this hot in the neighborhood.

I am out of Diet Coke,
but I can offer you a cool refreshing lemonade.
You know what they say,
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
We’ve been drinking a lot of lemonade
in the neighborhood lately.

Just drink it slowly, my friend.
It’s all that’s left since the citrus orchards
were wiped out by the last Cat 5
hurricane that ripped through Florida.
I’m happy to share what’s left.
After all, you’ve been so busy lately,
and it’s such a hot day.

But don’t worry.
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,
and maybe Santa will bring you a fan
for being such a good boy.
Or maybe a lump of coal.
He knows you really like coal.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s most recent poetry collection is Fused (Shanti Arts Publishing). Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Quiet Cup by Jennifer Abod

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Quiet Cup
Day after the LA Fire started (January 2025)

This morning, the wide plastic, ugly gray lid on the industrial garbage can in the alley outside my kitchen window is blocking my quiet morning view: high polled wires in an open sky, lush green trees in the distance. The apartment owner next door put a lock on the lid after the fire a few weeks ago that woke Winnie, the dog, who woke my stepdaughter in her upstairs apartment at four AM. By the time she alerted me, she had called the fire department. I watched them in the dark as they tried to stop the flames rising to our roof. I couldn’t help imagining the person who did it, someone who can’t take care of himself, who yells at himself on street corners, leaves empty 7-Eleven cups in our parkway grass, deciding to just do something. I drink coffee looking at the burnt pile of vine branches and lifeless leaves on our charred wood fence, march determinedly to the back-alley, slam shut the lid, return to the house hoping the person who lit the fire finds something else to do.

*

Jennifer Abod is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, radio broadcaster and jazz singer. She is a former assistant professor of Communications and Women’s Studies. Her poems appear in One Art Journal, The Metro Washington Weekly, Silver Birch Press, Sinister Wisdom, Wild Crone Wisdom, Artemis Journal, Fruitslice, Discretionary Love, Persimmon Tree and are forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, James Crew’s Love Anthology, Vita and the Woolf. www.jenniferabod.com

Levels of Concern by Stephanie Frazee

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Levels of Concern

Late summer.
We stay inside,
though the house is an oven,
because the outside air
is damaging.
The sky—
dystopian-future orange.
Air seeping
under the doorframes
smells of campfire, bonfire.
I’m ashamed
to want
a marshmallow.

The chickadees are silent
as they flit to the feeder,
the same color red
as the AQI warning.
Beneath feathers, muscles, breast bones,
particulate matter
deposits itself
in a system designed
for lungs the size
of peanut halves
to find oxygen at high altitudes.
But here they are,
low,
gleaning oxygen from smoke,
dropping seeds
from the feeder
onto the wooden porch rail,
furred with rot,
and hopping down to eat them.
I’ll hold my breath
if I refill
the seeds.

Spring again, and
the chickadees nest
in the laurel hedge.
I’m still waiting to hear
the hungry shrill of chicks.
One daffodil, bent over,
half yellow,
half brown,
half dead already.
The hydrangea
is all brittle wood.
I forget the last year it bloomed.

*

Stephanie Frazee’s work is forthcoming from The Evergreen Review and Bayou Magazine and has appeared in Third Wednesday, Juked, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a reader for Juked, American Short Fiction, and No Contact, and she lives in Seattle.

Counting on Climate Change by Wynne Brown

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Counting on Climate Change

Forty-one seconds
of voice mail

forty-one seconds
of his voice

Hi, Mom.
It’s me.
I don’t know
exactly
what to say?
But
I want to talk to you—

Five years
six months
two whole days

of icy silence

broken

A glacier
tempered
by grief
begins
to melt

calving

into a warming sea

*

Wynne Brown writes from the Arizona lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. Her work has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Wild Roof Journal, Blue Guitar, Oasis Journal, The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos (University of Arizona Press), and Spilled: A Collection by the Dry River Poets (Casa Luna Press). Her most recent book, The Forgotten Botanist: Sara Plummer Lemmon’s Life of Science and Art (2021, University of Nebraska Press), won a 2022 Spur Award for Best Western Biography. She was the 2022 Spring Pima County Public Library Writer in Residence in Tucson. Her website is wynne@wynnebrown.com.

Three Poems by Claire Taylor

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yes, it’s probably because of climate change, but still

I like a garden of tulips
sprung too soon
speckled with ice in February
hoping

*

A Winter Meditation

move slowly
these days linger
in the pause
between seasons
everything breaks
down beneath fallen leaves
a promise: frozen ground
softens the earth
turns over
starts again

*

A Healing

post-storm we find a towering maple
collapsed on its side. the City

comes to clear the way
slices trunk and limbs to restore

the road to normal but
they leave the roots

behind, ripped from the ground
and pointing skyward like

hands in prayer

a year later
I walk through the park

alone

and find the roots
have grown over

moss and vines cover
every inch

a new ecosystem

*

Claire Taylor is a writer in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of a children’s literature collection, Little Thoughts, as well as two micro-chapbooks: A History of Rats (Ghost City Press, 2021) and As Long as We Got Each Other (ELJ Editions, 2022). You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com and Twitter @ClaireM_Taylor.