DOOM

by George Held

Image credit: philipus / 123RF Stock Photo

brought early dawn
to Aurora,
early recess
to Newtown,
early marathon-ending
to Boston
early tornado season
to Moore, Okla,
and lurks
on the outskirts
of your own town:
so hunker down
and pray
it passes by
before it’s
your turn.


An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com

A TORNADO CHASER

by Martin Elster

Image source: FEMAcontracts

I chase tornados all around the Plains
like a knight-errant looking every day
for fresh adventures. Just can’t stay away.
She’d say that a devoted spouse abstains
from risky trips. I’d tell her I take pains
not to crash my jeep, yet her dismay
hung like a storm cloud when I went to play
and photograph Earth’s mightiest winds and rains.

It’s true folks sometimes lift and whirl like leaves;
yet funnel-hunting’s fun. A thousand suns
are not as grand as watching barley sheaves
rise from a ranch and vanish in a breath.
I think now, as I race one, how she runs
with Ian — safe, monotonous — toward death.


Martin Elster is a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poems have appeared in journals including The Centrifugal Eye, The Chimaera, Lucid Rhythms, Mindflights, Scarlet Literary Magazine, Thema, and in the anthologies Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, The 2012 Rhysling Anthology, and Poe Little Thing. Martin’s poem “Microchiroptera” recently took first prize in The Oldie’s 2013 annual bouts-rimés competition. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Poetry Award.

REOCCURING STORMS

by Marjorie Maddox

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Searchers Find Body of Killed Child in Oklahoma Tornado --AP, May 26, 2011
Woman Finds Boy After Mother Drives Van Into Hudson --The New York Times, April 13, 2011


Wind/Water, Oklahoma/New York,
the domestically symbolic bathtub/minivan,
two mothers.

And so fear gathers speed, swirls in
or out, grabbing—in its selfish velocity—each state
of who we are or were, what’s left
of our man-made lives holding tightly to the already-
born, the life still coming.

Temporarily wedged between faith and scream,
a mother sings reassurances as each
tree, board, sink, tub, life
twists and spins into the horizon
no one foresaw, grief beyond the boundaries
of such predictions, life splintered limb by limb,
like and not like (half a country away)

that other dream-turned-disaster:
depression’s dark tunnel twirling
beyond the imaginable, tires whirring
too quickly toward the Hudson,
fueling the speed of no-return,
a family’s last vision of sky flooded
with the damp wet of despair.

Except ten-year-old La'shaun,
who—between death and breath—
rolled down his window to let out fear,
then swam toward light.

And in Oklahoma, five-year-old Cathleen,
who, amidst the hurricane’s howl,
recognized hope in the heartbeat
of her unborn sibling:
that faint hum in the ear,
or that sudden surge toward possibility

into what one day even you and I—
after a particularly hard day of the ordinary—
might discuss as casually
as weather, as someone else’s life.


Marjorie Maddox is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.

TORNADO ALLEY

by B.Z. Niditch

A funnel cloud
of warning
in the eye of a storm
presages high winds
over towns and villages
a mile over
these monster twisters
breaking us up
as a string of souls
become casualties
uncounted
trapped as in a war
under their homes
from a massive path
reported from the ground
in a few live pictures
wrapped in rain
from roofs
under cars
near now barren trees
of shelters
children salvaging
a few belongings
dolls, toys, firetrucks
from a leveled land
emerge as survivors.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher. His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Review, Le Guepard (France), Kadmos (France), Prism International, Jejune (Czech Republic), Leopold Bloom (Budapest), Antioch Review, and Prairie Schooner.  He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.