Tag: climate

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.

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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.

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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