North of Langtang Lirung Peak
(August 26, 2026, and After)

Nearer the heavens than the ground
Tibetans walk on, the earth gave way
at 17,000 feet. Its speed increasing
with gravity's pull, the unknowing not
having even microseconds to count,
the land heaved into the unstoppable
slide that stilled all but the roars 
of the Lhende Khola River it filled.

Seeking cause of this natural hazard,
scientists studied satellite imagery,
reporting that three-plus miles above
sea level, a glacier had "snapped off"
a mountain, sending rock and ice into
the valley below, speeds exceeding
90 mph. As ice melted, the river's water
levels rose, making flooding inevitable.

Not all agreed. "The physics don't 
work," one expert said, sharing figures
indicating seismic activity of 5-plus
magnitude couldn't be from the glacier
collapse alone, its energy not enough  
to cause enough ice to melt to raise
the river above flood levels. Cloud-free
satellite images and drone footage later

cleared up the mystery, confirming it
was a huge rockslide down a mountain —
and the break up of the glacier that
"came along for the ride" — that created
energy during the event that was
greater than the energy released by
"Little Boy," the atomic bomb dropped
August 6, 1945, on Hiroshima, Japan.

But these facts of science, belatedly
relayed, don't help us to see in our
mind's eye the torrents of rock 
and ice, debris and sediment combining 
with rushing water, erasing the border
between Tibet and Nepal, outrunning 
on one side the more than 800 dead,
the 3,000-plus who have gone missing,

screams for rescue no longer echoing
through the Himalayas. We do not
know the names of the 100 workers
trapped in hydropower tunnels,
the five-year-old found after two days,
the 600 foreign nationals who cannot
be reached, the 16-year-old pupil
who survived "by just 10 seconds."

Rescue teams talk of finding no one
alive in Tibet. Most of the pilgrims visiting
Mount Kailash, spiritual home of Shiva
and Parvati, have not been heard from.
Now, days after, the news out of Nepal
is no better. Warnings of more landslides,
more floods come often, the debris
damming the water for miles upstream.

Notes

Langtang Lirung is the highest peak in a sub-range, Langtang Himal, of the Nepalese Himalayas. It is the location of the glacier originally reported as the principal cause of the disaster, which, as the poem indicates, was in fact effected by a huge rockslide.

Words within quotation marks are drawn from various news articles:

Hannah Richter, “How Scientists Unraveled the Cause of the Devastating Flood in Tibet and Nepal” in Science, August 28, 2026; Online

Angelique Chisafis, “Nepal-Tibet Deaths from Flash Flooding Rise Amid Race to Free Workers in Tunnel” in The Guardian, August 30, 2026; Online

Malu Cursino, “Flood Survivors Share Stories of Hope as Rescue Efforts Continue,”BBC News Live, August 30, 2026; Online

Number of those who died in or survived the disaster are liable to rise or fall, given the difficulty of onsite reporting, control of information from China, and lack of sharing of monitored conditions.

Shiva is the Hindu god of destruction; Parvati is the Hindu goddess associated with marriage, fertility, and motherhood.

Mount Kailash, in the west of Tibet, is considered sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, those who practice Jainism (an Indian religion), and believers of Bon (an indigenous Tibetan religion). The site draws international pilgrims. On X, a member of a group of 21 from Tamil Nadu who were traveling by bus and survived the onslaught of water (the whereabouts of of 39 other pilgrims unknown) reported, “We saw Lord Shiva’s face on the mountain as the water came hurtling toward us.” (Video Report on X)

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It has been 25 years since the horrific terrorist attacks of 9/11 that took the lives of nearly 3,000 individuals — not all Americans, not all on the planes used as bombs or in the collapsed offices in the Twin Towers in New York City, not all adults, not all found and identified. For some of us, including me, the event haunts.* It is a day that cannot be forgotten, just as the murders of John F. Kennedy, The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, and all the wars and deaths that have followed cannot be forgotten. The bells still toll. Names of the dead and missing are still read aloud.

In the years since, an official report from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, has been issued; albums of extraordinary and heart-breaking photographs have been compiled; films have been run over and over; plays, political and not, have been performed; cultural studies of personal, cultural, clinical, and…

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In 2026, June’s first full moon of summer or last full moon of spring, depending on your perspective, attracted sky-gazers from across the world, many of whom flooded their social media with images. The moon’s peak illumination in the United States occurred at approximately 7:57 p.m. Eastern time.

One theory is that this moon is known as the “Strawberry Moon” because it reaches its fullness when seasonal berries first ripen and begin to be harvested for our enjoyment throughout the summer. The name is a misnomer, however; the moon does not in fact change color, although, according to NASA, it does seems to take on a reddish hue when rising or setting.

No photographer, I did try to commemorate this seventh and lowest full moon of the year (there will be 13 in 2026) in a fact-based poem that plots the moon among the constellations in the night sky.

Night Sky with Strawberry Moon

Night's natural lighthouse we look to
emb…

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Notes

Quoted from Nibal Khalil, “Life” in You Must Live: New Poetry From Palestine, Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, Eds. and Translators (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), p. 135

You Must Live is a bilingual Arabic and English edition.

Nibal Khalil, Ph.D., Philosophy; Professor, Intercultural Communication, and Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Birzeit University; Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Al-Quds University, Palestine; Member, Teaching Faculty, Graduate Department, Arab American University, Palestine; Researcher and Consultant on Socio-Cultural Issues (Gender Issues, Women’s Empowerment, Violence Against Women, Youth Leadership, Bedouin Communities, Higher Education Systems

Tayseer Abu Odeh, Palestinian-Jordanian Writer, Translator; Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, al-Ahliyya Amman University, Jordan

Sherah Bloor, South African Poet; Scholar; Editor-in-Chief, Peripheries: A Journal of Word, Image,…

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Those new to Collin Kelley’s work will find his chapbook Slow to Burn an excellent introduction. It is a small gem of a collection, which stands out for the authentic voice with which the poet speaks, the selection and combination of marvelous contemporary detail and cultural references that create a strong sense of time and place, and the universality of themes — childhood experimentation, alienation, exclusion, death and loss, growing up, self-identity. The writing is clear, the cadence well-controlled, the subject-matter real life, the opening lines lures that hook you and keep you reading to a rewarding end, to wit:

The day I told my parents I wanted to trade in
G.I. Jose for Wonder Woman must have set off alarms. [. . .]
~ from "Wonder Woman" (p. 3)

Before you made me a witch,
got forced into the basement to pray,
your mother stripping you, whipping you [. . . ]
~ from "Ian" (p. 4)

Mary pops up in the strangest places,
usually as a windo…

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In Part 1 of my interview with professional portraitist Melissa Clements, published on Tuesday, July 14, Melissa discussed her earliest memories of artmaking, her education and training for her professional art career, her mentors, handling rejection, gallery representation, and the business side of artmaking.

Melissa first took up oil painting 10 years ago, and she became a full-time portrait artist just four years ago. In this, the conclusion to our interview, I talk with Melissa in depth about her work as a portrait painter; the settings, themes, and subject matter of her paintings; how her travels and life experiences are channeled into her art; and, following on a recent nearly-sold-out solo exhibition at Linton & Kay Galleries, what’s next for her.

This interview was conducted by email and has been edited.

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Interview with Painter Melissa Clements — Part 1

It is with great pleasure that I had the opportunity in June to interview by email the portrait painter Melissa Clements of Fremantle, Australia. Melissa, who recently had a very successful solo exhibition, Saeculum, at Linton & Kay Galleries, Subiaco, Western Australia, first attracted my attention last summer, when she posted a thoughtful and beautifully written article, “A New Renaissance Wouldn’t Just Be Nice: The Future of Humanity Depends on It,” on her Substack Word & Image. A subscriber, I now count Melissa among the writers and artists whose posts I try never to miss.

In Part 1 of our interview, I talk with Melissa about her early memories of artmaking; her education, training, and preparation for a career in art; her mentors; workshops or other training she hersel…

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This poem, one of number of poems commemorating the holiday or otherwise related to it, was written on July 4, 2020.

The Flag on the Fourth of July

Stars curl
and spiral

this night

O the sight 
of all that

blue
and red
and white

all that
bursting

all that
fire

all that
might

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Kelly Cherry (1940-2022) was one of our most talented, inventive, and prolific writers — in multiple genres. In addition to being an award-winning poet, she wrote essays, memoir, novels, short stories, and literary criticism; she also published translations. Her fiction writing received numerous honors.

Cherry’s tenth book of fiction, Twelve Women in a Country Called America, published in 2015, is a excellent introduction for anyone who is unfamiliar with her short stories. It’s a marvelous collection, beginning with its title and that wonderful Norman Mailer quote Cherry uses as the book’s epigraph: “This country is so complicated that when I start to think about it I begin talking in a Southern accent.”* The former hints at something of the rich range of protagonists and experiences Cherry is alert to and mines; the latter suggests Cherry’s own firm grasp and understanding of the influence of place and how she makes it serve her again and again in …

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Metastatic ~ A Cento


I watch for some sign
it has gone beyond itself:

coiled,
untouchable,

inside your rib cage.


The selfish gene that wants to live forever
is afterimage.


What awaits

— a milky web,
a vast lace of calligraphy —

the knife cannot cut.


In the unknown world,
bodily truths

learn to live together,
redefine normal.


Marks I can't wash off
— like blood —

circle us

frame by frame.

Notes

The word cento derives from the Latin word for patchwork or pastiche. It is the name given to a poem comprising words or whole lines or passages from others poets’ poems. Edward Hirsch, in A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, p. 98), points out that centos have been in existence since at least the 1st Century and have served a number of different purposes: as school exercises, as occasional pieces, as Christian narratives composed from pagan texts.

Below is the list of poets whose lines, words, or phrases appear in my poem, in order of appearance:

Donald Justice, "…

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Solstice

We'll stay up 
late, light lingering
the first day
of summer,
til fireflies flash the seconds
before bedtime's hour.

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