GAS Featured Poet: Rita S. Spalding

Award-winning poet Rita S. Spalding has been published in 18 Calliope anthologies, National Library of Poetry, AX-POW Magazine, The

Heartland Review, Kentucky Monthly Magazine, Keeping the Flame Alive,

Fallen, Rebirth, The Rye Whiskey Review, Walden’s Poetry and Reviews,

Poet-Tree Magazine, American Poet, Mays Publishing and Kentucky

Humanities. Her books include Abstract Ribbons, What is Beauty, and

The Eighth.

She has been featured in podcasts and the Kentucky Author Celebration, Kentucky Writer Celebration, Insomniacathon, Vagabond Poet National Tour, Endless Horizon, and 2025 Ohio Valley Folkways Symposium. Shegives poetry readings nationally and will be at 2026 Gonzofest in New York City.

Words From the Other Side

i saw you from outside my eye

that first fleeting mist of blackness

at my feet racing across the dust bunnies

not sure of your realness

caught in a nebulous gray mist

or were you just a polished apple

stuck in my mind from long ago

you were here I saw you here

shadow following my body

down the quiet hallway and back

yet when I turned you were gone again

i could swear you tried to talk

today at breakfast you brushed my arm

a finger or hand warmed by blood

you darted into the sinking wrinkles

of a cream swirled coffee mug

i saw you from the inside of my third eye

it was you i know it was you

wavy steam only inches above the floor

my third eye never lies

next time when you try to talk

i will listen closely all those words

that were never spoken

when you walked among us

Mary Lou Because You Asked About My Chickens

you asked about my chickens

they are everywhere

the roosters hens their love and pecks

on icy mornings i chipped away their water

in the darkness of the dawn

into the old weathered walls of the coop

i lifted the feeder bigger than me

and clucked for them to fly from

their roosts to meet the grain

watching the shininess of their wings

bright reds with hidden golds

dark blacks with dazzling blues

the deep red of wattles and combs

strutting flapping accepting me into their flock

my hands softly lifted brown eggs

from hay filled nesting boxes

the eggs were marvels to hold

i kissed each one before placing them

in a flower printed muslin seed sack

draped and tied across my shoulders

it fit like a gown and held them like a mama

like i wished for mama arms to hold me

in summer below the sunflowers and apples

i held rhode island reds to my chest

because they let me smell their feathers

i sat in the dusty dirt with black silkies

who were curious about my toes

i knew what love was when i watched them

come closer to my heart with trust in their struts

i live in the city now in this other lifetime

smelling the fumes of progress and traffic

instead of the sweetness of hay scented by hens

i brought the chickens with me

the roosters and hens are frozen in place

ceramic and steady they still call me theirs

they surround me on shelves from room to room

yesterday you asked why they are with me

i answered because they were my beginnings

feathered reminders of how i learned to love

in the darkness of dawn and light of dusk

Essay by Su Zi: Citizens’ Alert

Many of us have already survived the rising tides of climate catastrophe. Current predictions do not include a return to paradise, and, in fact, are fair warning of future fiascos. Perhaps, it might be wise to consider that which has been written about such events to enhance, at least, personal preparedness.

Published accounts vary widely; however, a memoir of a storm by Riza Oledan-Ramos/ Walt FJ Gooding called Drinking Seawater, which was acquired at a bookfair, contains a scene of evacuation:

This wasn’t your typical storm. This was something entirely different—something of a completely different nature than I or anyone else had ever experienced. It was as if it were alive. It sounded and felt as if it were a living thing—a conscious, breathing, thinking being with an intention, and on a mission. It was trying to get to us. First it tried the front door, then it tried the side walls; then the windows, finally the roof [...] it pounded and howled and screamed at the roof[...]the howling never stopped. It pounded and shook and finally it got its way. It tore our roof off and flung it into the night as it raced inside after us (12)

The arc of the narrative is that of aftermath, personal and specific enough to include both photographs and a survival checklist.

There are professional published accounts as well, and now, although time has passed, the possibility of Gulf storms has not. While myths about storms not coming ashore was disproven by Asheville, North Carolina, aftermath can take a generation for some healing. It has been a generation, now, since the storm that directly hit New Orleans, but mention of the storm among locals is a demarcation in time. Professional accounts of Katrina include that of New Orleans journalist Chris Rose 1 dead in attic (2005), also a memoir. In this case, the protagonist returns to see what is left and return to work. 

And I’m telling you: it’s hard

It’s hard not to get crispy around the edges. It’s hard not to cry. It’s hard not to be very, very afraid.

[...]

We have a generator and water and military food rations and Doritos and smokes and booze. [...] Some of these guys lost their houses -- everything in them 

[...] 

And they stink. We all stink. We stink together (22)

Rose also makes mention of celebrity journalists, “The satellite trucks stretch for eight blocks on Canal Street. [...] I saw Anderson Cooper interviewing Dr Phil, Dr Phil’s camera crew filmed Cooper, and about five or six other camera crews [...] filmed all of that “(26).

Anderson Cooper included a chapter about Katrina in Dispatches from the Edge (Harper Collins 2006), along with accounts of Tsunami, Iraq and Niger. That an American city would be in the same celebrity catastrophe accounting ought to serve as warning as well. Cooper begins his account by counting corpses:

[...]the searchers find a body lying on a sidewalk in an empty-cul-de-sac.I think it’s a woman; at first, it’s hard to tell.  Water wipes away identity, race, even gender. I think she’s African American, but her skin appears white, translucent almost.

Someone has covered her face and part of her body with a dirty bedspread. Her feet and hands stick out.

[...]

The team takes pictures—Click, Click—then records the woman’s GPS coordinates

[...]

I never thought I’d see this here, in America—the dead left out like trash. None of us speaks. (138)

Cooper’s narrative is interspersed with personal recollections of the city, as he tells us of individual moments of aftermath. Yet, lest someone take sole hope in evacuation centers, Cooper interviews Dr Greg Henderson, who arrived at the evacuation point, “discovered that there was no medical team there, just evacuees. Thousands of them.” (161). Cooper describes the interview site as “standing on a garbage-strewn street outside the Convention Center one week after the storm” where Dr Henderson says, “This is where hell opened its mouth” (160). As for the evacuation point itself:

They were packed in everywhere, all the way into to the street, and pretty much the other side of the street; it was just one mass of humanity. No air-conditioning, just people crying and dying. Crying and dying (161)

Cooper witnessed the Katrina aftermath for a few weeks. He makes a remark that ought to be useful for us in preparation, as he asked officials questions: “Demanding accountability is no game, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to understand who made mistakes, who failed. If no one is held accountable for their decisions their actions, all of this will happen again” (191).

These three accounts of once-rare, now frighteningly possible, super storms, must give sane people pause, especially as the northern American continent is already beleaguered with drought, fires and heat in the wake of some devastating arctic storms. Whether or not we want to consider the weather might be keystone to community, if not personal, survival. Perhaps we ought to take some consideration time while we still have it.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

               

Check out her author page on Amazon.

GAS Featured Poet: PD Lyons

PD Lyons was born and raised in the USA  Since 1998  has resided in Ireland. Spent a few years before  in Cape Brenton Nova Scotia where winters are great for writing. Travelled a bit worked a lot raised two wonderful children as well as horses ( Morgans, Andalusian Thoroughbred, Irish sport horse etc.) in USA and Ireland. Has worked as dishwasher, floor washer, textile mill labourer, construction worker, pesticide sprayer, fire safety inspector, toy shop manager, substance abuse councillor, women’s shoe shop manager etc currently cutting grass in a small medieval village in co. Westmeath Ireland. 

Lyons received the Mattatuck College Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry and a Bachelor of Science with honours from Teikyo Post University Connecticut (USA). The work of PD Lyons has appeared in many formats throughout the world. Lyons published poetry collections by Lapwing Press, Belfast and erbacce Press, Liverpool.  Winner of the annual erbacce-press International Poetry Competition for 2019.

Diary

 

Dust in the corner

Pale light through loose boards

Soft paper pages partially filled

 

So small

The world with all its bigness

Could have so easily passed by.

~

Will we, all of us leave the same absence?

Know the same impossible loneliness,

As if somehow shared, could we know one another ?

 

 Each child then, freely

Hand in hand, with their mother

Walking fussing over any small thing,

~

We have all touched this world with little fingers,

As have I.

Not as some imagining or speculation

But as a human being.

Certain of my own sense of purpose.

Afraid, so many things bigger than me.

So many things I could not wait to do.

How long does it take to be a grown up?

~

Unlike you I do know the story’s end.

Unlike you I could not, not know.

Remember me this way:

Small as I was, it all fit into my life.

 

Varying degrees of not knowing,

All that’s left

Between us         

 

(for Annelies)

 

I knew a girl afraid of the wind

 

it would cause her to hide in the basement

 

eventually after she moved

 

to an apartment of her own in the west end

 

there was no basement

 

she would hide in the only room without windows

 

with the minimum amount of intruding sounds

 

the bath room.

 

she had the position of bank manager in a local branch

 

one of those modern type open plan offices large panes of window walls

 

sometimes when on occasion I’d have business at that particular branch

 

we would talk then smoke a cigarette 

 

in the complete silence of tobacco smoke

 

 we’d forget where we were together.

 

 

GAS Featured Poet: Jerome Berglund

 

Jerome Berglund has worked as everything from dishwasher to paralegal, night watchman to assembler of heart valves. Currently residing in New Orleans, previously having lived in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis which was locus to the George Floyd protests, his writing as often as possible strives to engage with significant social and economic concerns of our day that align with missions of decolonization and abolition across prevailing institutions. He has been involved in grassroots activism for the good causes of Occupy Los Angeles, Standing Rock, and the Black Lives Matter movement, supported outreach efforts promoting ecosocialism. Many haiku, haiga and haibun he’s written have been exhibited or are forthcoming online and in print, most recently in bottle rockets, Circle of Salt, and Presence.

Job application

if the 

answer is three 

I’d like 

to know what 

we’re adding up

making light

leaflets blow through 

narrow lane

if all of them 

aren’t participating none 

haven’t been 

aware and

condoning

copper mining 

in dead of night strips 

the school bare

no one 

knows about this stuff or cares 

about this stuff 

or cares to know 

about this stuff

fishnet stockings 

social media 

history 

ethics course — 

curious how many prestigious 

moral relativists 

argue passionately 

in defense of diets

red 

building 

pig farming

behind 

the nineteenth 

hole 

pinochle 

championship

art history 

opening papaya

with a machete 

are some 

nice pigs 

so long as 

they’re stuffed 

on corpses

THE traffiCkingALL 

IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE 

of representatives

of initiation: pizza 

the seventh room 

of Prince Prospero's abbey 

lit a 

deep red

business 

as usual 

massacre of the innocents

revelation 

of the method 

we too 

can guide them gradually 

to the coup de grâce

scooping poop 

when you have a sense of smell

sleeper car

Trump has been arrested! 

. . . breaking news from 

the liberal 

a.i. deep fake wish 

fulfillment teleplays

tree frogs

all the people

hurting

if I hear 

the expression blood libel 

or satanic panic 

ever 

again

a shepherd 

is not aggressive …but it’s 

defensive as f***

mine shaft 

it would be great if no one ever used 

the term conspiracy theorist 

disparagingly 

ever again 

this america 

they may snatch 

and eat me 

2

Moonlight Mushroom

If you need more support for redistribution, reeducation, decentralized power structures, transparency and accountability, here are some snuff films, human experimentation, biowarfare for purposes of population control, racialized eugenics initiatives and demonstrable caste hierarchies, widespread compromise of communications systems and educational materials, affluent people being genuinely vampiric specifically from the poorest most vulnerable populations, assassinations of beloved national treasures, suppressing of treatments and cures for the purposes of profit and to reduce specific demographics, indications of massive false flag operations resulting in enormous loss of life. Hope this will help you swing voters still on the fence. 

quite a storm 

out there

initiated mambo

3

New York Times 

I feel like these AI detection tools are the next Theranos miniLabs. Inconvenient picture of you surfaces in flagrante sacrificio, perhaps after failing to instigate world war three? Clearly a deep state deep fake fake news a.i. parody must be, trouble yourself not our totally trustworthy a.i. tool has a "very high" degree of confidence.

holy cloth

— hey Raefipour, our realtor 

found a map