Gopu M. Sunil – The Only Language That It Still Speaks

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Gopu M. Sunil
The Only Language That It Still Speaks

We kept the thermostat set to ‘forever’,
as if the planet were a room we could heat
without paying the bill.

We filled the sky with our invisible footprints—
a slow snowfall of carbon
settling into every breath.

The ocean, patient as a monk,
began to rise
not in a dramatic rush,
but in a quiet, relentless inching
that stole the shore
one silent morning at a time.

The forests stopped whispering.
They began to creak,
to cough,
to turn their green into ash
like old paper in a fire.

We called it growth—
a word that sounded like a promise.
But promises don’t come with deadlines.

Now the storms arrive
with the weight of a warning,
and the air tastes like metal
after a summer that never ends.

We have overshot the limit
we didn’t know we had,
and the world is reminding us
in the only language it still speaks:
weather.

Jane Thomas – Arctic Insect Adaptations in Reykjavik

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Jane Thomas
Arctic Insect Adaptations in Reykjavik

Lace-white butterflies once flew safe over snow
now they glide fearful over grey concrete. Etcetera

*

Meanwhile, across town in the ‘Marina Village’
(‘Port’ on maps printed before regeneration IX)

             Giant beetles rove feed in the kitchens of new hotels

             Ice lice infest memory foam beds sized for a King

             Intoxicated red mosquitoes cloud mill over meltwater

             Great crystal gnats swarm-suck on high-fat scraps

             Furry moths fatten on tourists’ discarded designer down
             (more frequent moulters than tufted duck or old eider)

             And the flies. Flies. Swarm shrouds of flies.

                                            Pitch Oil flies                   Great Ashwings

                                                                          Black Bottles

                                                                         Ice Blow Ticks

                                                                 Frosty Banes

                                                   Fungal Feeders                            Cinders

                                                                          Toxitockwings

Sucking on warm blood.

Spitting on cryonic flesh.

Coming earlier each year.

Monique van Maare – The Passage of 3I/Atlas

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Monique van Maare
The Passage of 3I/Atlas

Winter solstice nears, Earth’s axis tilts towards darkness.

In the hills around Sapporo, Japan, clear skies are rapidly cooling the night air. Despite the biting chill, chairs and stools are hauled up to the hilltops, telescope tripods are installed and directed towards the same spot of sky. There! A long veil-like tail follows a bulbous head of light, piercing the dark, subduing any stars that dare appear in its vicinity. Gloved hands point up, others are cupped around steaming tea bowls.

                    Were you born in the fury of massive stars, torn and hurled by violent explosions?
                    Were there others like us, were you sensed before? Or was your journey mostly
                    emptiness and dust, the remnants of decay?

Irkoetsk, Russia—a few hours later. The hilltops here are dotted with dancing lights, the swirls of cigarette smoke drift among the gathered. Quiet chatter and the soft chink of kvass glasses filter through furry ear flaps. The occasional laughter, filled with wonder at this singular passing.

                    Scientists say the anomalies of your track point to intelligence. Have you come
                    bearing a message for us? And if so, is it friendly, innocent, incomplete? Like our
                    songs and greetings, etched on golden phonographs on the hulls of spacecraft,
                    bound for the unknown, like a pair of outstretched hands?

Once more the day has given way to a clear night. In the Midlands, UK, a group of hill-flockers lift their binoculars to the same point. Biscuits are passed around, and the quiet zooming of the camera lenses fills the air. Large quilted blankets are placed over knees, stiff from the long walk up. The lakes in the valley blink inkily back at the sky.

                    Where will you travel next? Will you swing by the seven beauties of the Pleiades?
                    What stories will you carry of us to other beings gathered at their own hilltops,
                    watching your form shoot across their sky? What do you make of us? Will you bear
                    witness, to our destruction, this slow annihilation of our home?

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, winter has been unseasonably warm, and the pickup trucks’ slushy spatter covers boots, cargo pants and instruments. But they’re all here, looking up at this Bethlehem star. Beer bottle caps are twisted off, and there’s mulled wine, too. In that early morning, surrounded by the darkness, they at least have this, the shared awe at this tiny dot of light traveling onwards

as the Earth’s shadow slowly creeps onwards, across the longitudes.

Linden Van Wert – Recapitulation

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Linden Van Wert
Recapitulation

Though we don’t believe it, the story nature tells has never been human-centred.

This early morning, a silhouette seems to be an Archaeopteryx spreading
its long-feathered wings in the glare of today’s climbing sun
motionless on the tall, steel tower carrying power lines
beside the causeway leading to a nearby island.

It is an anhinga drying its wings after breakfast—
today’s link in the unbroken chain of winged fishers
from Late Jurassic waters among extinct reptiles—a reminder
that every day we travel among miracles as if they were merely mundane.

Will the possibility of impermanence ever pierce our saurian sense of entitlement?

Michael H. F. Wilkinson – Skirmishers

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Michael H. F. Wilkinson
Skirmishers

Dandelions dot the windswept grass
on this man-made chain of hills,
this earthwork fortress,
solid bulwark against the tides,
besieged by the North Sea.

Sheep graze here, oblivious,
impervious to the stiff sea breeze.
Waves lap the shoreline rhythmically,
no frontal assault seems imminent,
no storm surge is gathering.

But something comes creeping,
seeping through cracks and pores,
deep under the dike we thought secure,
seawater advances underground,
feeling its way forward.

The sea’s skirmishers, maybe,
infiltrating their old domain
trying to reclaim it,
or at least deny mankind
the fruits of its conquest.

Winter rains hold them back,
but with every summer’s drought
underground outriders advance,
insinuating themselves
into the water table.

And so the skirmishers creep on,
sapping the soil’s fertility,
finding their way towards the roots,
blighting some corner of a field,
one crop at a time.

The sea has all the time in the world.

Michael H. F. Wilkinson – Dust devils

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Michael H. F. Wilkinson
Dust devils

Summer is hellish
in the fields of the Provence
where dust devils twirl.

Autumn sees no seeds
sunflowers are sandblasted
in the scorching air.

Fall has lost fragrance
lavender stripped of blossom
dust devils dance on.

Winter brings silence
broken vines in the vineyard
the devils have fled.

Mantz Yorke – Road Movie

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Mantz Yorke
Road Movie

The dilapidated bus has transported us
far beyond green fields
and communities devastated by flood,
whose houses are no more
than occasional walls
standing above rubble and mud.
We’ve traversed vast plains
scorched to a leonine tan
and deserts dotted with creosote bushes,
leaving behind an oily smoke
from an engine long past its best.

Measures of atmospheric CO2 tell us
the bus has been accelerating:
from 31 parts per hundred thousand
a century ago,
successive silver anniversaries
have recorded 33, 37 and 43.

And all this while,
the driver, sealed off in his cab
and staring straight ahead
as if hypnotised by the donkeys
nodding on his dashboard,
has been oblivious to our shouts
to slow down
and stop.

The bus is now travelling through
a cindery landscape,
with nowhere to turn round
and go back.
We are heading towards the end
of the road: on the horizon
is a red glow below dark cumulus.
Not the setting sun,
but fire.

Hollis Kurman – A.S. Williams’s The Palliative Horse

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Hollis Kurman
A.S. Williams’s The Palliative Horse: A Journey of Hope

One of my most bittersweet childhood memories is from the theater. Our mother took us to see the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, structured into three acts: ‘Daily Life’, ‘Love and Marriage’, and ‘Death’. In the play’s famous final scene, the newly deceased character Emily is granted permission to rejoin Earth and the sweet ordinariness of daily life–for just one day. When Emily blurted out the iconic line (borrowed from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay), ‘O, World, I cannot hold You close enough!’, I thought my young heart would explode right there in my theatre seat. ‘Yes!’, I thought, ‘all this beauty and goodness hiding everywhere, if only we would look closer while we still can.’ I decided on the spot that I would pay more attention, bear witness, and love harder. Stop taking it all for granted. This may be one of the most valuable things poetry can help us do, as the poet A.S. Williams demonstrates in her gorgeous new book The Palliative Horse: A Journey of Hope.
       The poems and flash fiction in this short collection take the reader on a journey of battling and accepting illness, reminiscence and reflection, fury and appreciation – taking nothing for granted along the way. In plain, but evocative language, Williams’s writing offers an embrace but also the kind of aching wake-up call Wilder was getting at in Our Town. As she concludes in her poem ‘If Wishes Were Faeries’, ‘Sucking up to their whimsical ways so they may grant me/ just a/ little/ more/ time.’
       Throughout the book, Williams calls on faeries, fairy tales, and character-speak to great effect. Has anyone said it better than ‘Wolf in a White Coat’? Williams captures the recognizable jumble of dread, hope, and helplessness of a patient waiting for a doctor’s news that may seal their fate:

               Her white coat luminescent
               in the moonlight.
               Hearing my footsteps she stands and bars
               my way, but doesn’t dare
               meet my eyes. Anger rises in me sharp
               and vociferous as a pike’s
               bite. I want to cup her chin and
               scream, look at me. Smile as if you have good news.
                But no, she just takes another
               pebble and skims it over the water.

       In the poem ‘Put ‘em up! Put ‘em up!’, she conjures the courage and ‘deluded’ forward momentum of The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only, in this case, it’s not a yellow brick road that moves her along but a ‘butter-yellow/ dress. Triumphant/ its sunny banner says, yay/ I beat the nay-sayers.’ Yellow, in a Christmas scarf or ‘knobby cascades’, eggs and daffodils, peeks through the verses as a subtle but cheerful dare, like ‘sunshine an insult to my grief’. She also draws bits of bravery from memories of a stronger time, a time before there were ‘red blood counts’ or ‘rising tumor levels’ to contend with, like the revenge ride in bumper cars with her bullied son: ‘Our bones jangle like ghost-train skeletons./ We aim for the jeering kids. Head on.’
       Nothing evokes memories as poignantly as familiar smells from the past, and Williams sprinkles them generously throughout the book. The scent of farmland and its fresh mown hay, kitchen baking and Sunday roasts, seaside salt and the sticky sweetness of fairground treats, strung together here like an olfactory soundtrack of the poet’s life and an ode to the world she would like to hold close while preparing for the end.
       In ‘The Murmuration’ and other poems, Williams exposes the naked truths of humanity at its most vulnerable moments:

               Inside the whale-belly building
               I am just a clump of cells.
               A bar code announces my
               presence, grants me an audience
               with mercurial gods.

       Even in verse, pain comes in waves: ‘I bawl out my humanity in a side room…The cathedral spits me out into fading/ daylight.’ Yet these poems warn against the othering of the ill, be it in condescension, awkwardness, or awe. In ‘They Mean Well,’ Williams reminds well-wishers, ‘I am not more special than I was.’ And to see the person, not the patient. Instead of a careful How are you? or ‘tip-toey polite’, ‘Ask me about/ a poem I wrote, when I galloped/ across a hillside, lay among bluebells,/ shared an ice-cream with my dog…’
       As they do in our lives, animals play a central role in these poems. The dog and the truth of her unbridled joy. The memory of a newborn lamb in the snow who didn’t make it despite loving care. And the incongruous, healing presence of the Palliative Horse from the book’s title: ‘We inhale each other’s breath, watch the sun fall, both thankful to be here, alive.’ Who is healing whom feels almost irrelevant in these poems, as the connection between human and animal brings out the best in both.
       The later poems in the book wrestle with acquiescence. In the brilliantly titled ‘Death Came in an Uber’, the narrator takes a little trip down Memory Lane with Death in a stuffy Uber fitted with faux leather seats. After a bumpy start and wrangling for control, ‘The tension between Death and me lessens. He offers me a boiled sweet and I accept.’ Ultimately, as lovingly ‘remembered hills’ come into view, they make their peace: ‘I open the window wider. Death reaches back his hand and I grasp it in gratitude. The scent of fresh mown hay and the sound of the skylark tell me, finally, I am heading home.’ The poet indicates that this ‘Death Came in an Uber’ is after Emily Dickinson’s ‘Because I could not stop for Death’. But it also hints at the pointed wistfulness of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
       Finally, in clear, clean, tight verses, the poem ‘Afterwards’ challenges us to imagine those we will leave behind once we’re gone: ‘How will it be when/ there’s no one on the shoreline/ to wave back?’ and ‘The sun will shine through/ empty contours/ where I used to stand.’ Nothing saccharine here, but I was left with a lump in my throat, nonetheless. O World, indeed.
       I’d like to re-read and re-visit many of these poems, some of which made me close the book and close my eyes after reading them to allow their full impact to hit me. Williams’ writing will be a gift to many as she gives voice to the un-voice-able. This is a book to share.     AQ

Bryan R. Monte – Susan E. Lloy’s Deep Breaths of the Inanimate

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Bryan R. Monte
Susan E. Lloy’s Deep Breaths of the Inanimate

Regular readers of Amsterdam Quarterly’s reviews know that I am just as interested in a new book’s cover as its text. I believe this is what first draws in most readers (if they haven’t been fortunate to read a review beforehand). Susan E. Lloy’s latest book, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate, cover by Warthog Designs, features a woman, photographed from behind, with braided blonde hair, wearing a dark pinkish parka, sitting on an old, wooden bus or railway station bench. She is a woman at the beginning or end of a journey, a good visual and apt literary metaphor for the point of departure in Lloy’s new set of 16 stunning short stories.
       And do her characters travel: either physically or mentally to a Zurich bar and casino or the tinder-dry Canadian countryside, or meditating on touchstones of past lovers, we are privy to what most are thinking. Deep Breaths is Lloy’s best short story collection yet due to its variety of characters, conflicts, settings, and narrative styles such as science-fiction, Gothic tale within a tale, and multiple perspective stories.
       To give an idea of the variety of Lloy’s characters, their conflicts or emotional journeys, I will mention only some of Deep Breaths cast of quirky characters in this book’s first half. In the title story, two or three women muse over three objects that are related to their relationships with three men: a painting, a lighter, a clock. Years later, each object and the memories it evokes still moves the women so much, that they can’t bear to discard them. In ‘Rabbit Fever’, Sadie Rayburn, a Canadian Parliament legislative assistant, loses her job when a video of her as a stripper in her college years appears online. Sally leaves Ottawa and buys a convenience store in an Ontario tourist town. This storyline also morphs even further from conventional to science fiction mode due an outbreak of genetically altered rabbits who bite the locals and make them fall in love. In ‘Girls Only’, an older woman decides to move into a three-storey house of younger women in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While living there, she discovers and becomes obsessed by a Gothic style journal purported to have been written by a young woman held captive by her paranoid aunt who was also held hostage by her aunt. ‘Fixed for Life’ is about Rafael, an abused 18-year-old son, who dreams of a good life someday somewhere else instead of the cold, impoverished one he shares with his alcoholic, gambler mother. However, when his mother finally does hit the jackpot and she offers to share her winnings with him, Raphael leaves and taking all put $5,000 with him. ‘That Was Then’ is a tale of a semi-closeted, gay Quebecer, Bobi Jones, who discovers his recently deceased, pudgy, homemaker, single mother financed her life, before he was born, as a sex worker. Bobi also finds a clue to his unknown father. ‘All In’ is the story of two people—one a female, compulsive gambler, who is dangerously deep in debt, and the other, an older widower, whose only son committed suicide, who meet one evening in Zurich bar and start to have second thoughts about their euthanasia appointment the next day.
       One outstanding aspect of Lloy’s characters is their courage (or lack of) to strike out (literally and figuratively) in new directions. ‘She’ is story told from a multi-perspective point of view. It includes the voices of immigrant women in their new countries, some haunted by memories of former lands while living in new ones, others by the loss of a children who disappeared during their migration, and still others who feel they are living neither in a new country, nor an old one, but somewhere in between.
       Another of Lloy’s narrative strengths is creating vivid settings. Whether she is describing a character in the grim and noisy bustle of New York City’s Greenwich Village, a quiet, neat, townhouse district in Montreal, the tinder-dry Canada countryside, or a Neapolitan neighbourhood’s narrow streets, she places her characters firmly there and takes the reader with her. Whatever the setting, Lloy’s stories are fresh and peopled by fully-rounded characters, in original conflicts, who sometimes make surprising choices.
       In addition, Lloy’s narrative frequently employs intriguing, open-ended stories that make the reader (at least this reader) continue to wonder and care about her characters long after these stories have ended. For example, does Jones in ‘That Was Then’ find out that his mother’s, former-life, ‘manager’ is his father? Does Raphael, who tells his Neapolitan girlfriend’s relatives that he was raise in an orphanage, ever come clean? Does the woman, who turned her phone off after she received messages from the hospital in ‘Turn Left on California’, find out she has cancer? And finally, is the nameless city-girl protagonist who moved to the countryside to stretch her meagre retirement savings in ‘Time Out’, able to thumb a ride out an approaching forest fire in time before she and the tinder-dry, climate change scenery are engulfed in flames? The endings of these stories kept me wondering about the fate of all four characters long after the words on the page had ended.
       Each of Deep Breaths stories feels authentic, peopled by characters’ with believable interests, addictions, and sexual preferences, and activities involved in unusual conflicts. (And I’ve only mentioned half of them). These stories are suspenseful: each character’s conflicts are clear, but how they will or won’t not solve their personal dilemmas (or dig their graves even deeper) is not apparent until the very end. In addition, as mentioned above, Lloy’s stories sometimes don’t include standard denouements or resolutions.
       Whether they are starting out, starting over, midway, or have reached the end of the line, Lloy’s masterful cast of characters and their conflicts are unique, engaging, quirky, and sometimes surprising. Deep Breaths of the Inanimate will interest everyone and it is unquestionably Lloy’s best work yet. I couldn’t put the book down.    AQ

AQ45 – Climate Overshoot

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