Mike Maggio

Green Cathedral

My mother in home hospice phones crying 
but let's not talk about the breast cancer. 
Her tears for a tree are nothing new.
Now she's 97 but she was doing this in 1962 
when she read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
It's the next door neighbors, she complains.
They cut down my green cathedral.
That old tree deserved to live.
They blame it for roof rot, 
they say moss got into the shingles.
But that tree was here before their house.
The tree was alive before Mildred built the house.
The majestic tree was alive before she was born.  
It's older than me 
and could have outlived us all. 
That old tree's so huge, a crew of three men 
took all day to bring it down.
I'll never lay in bed again gazing into its branches. 
I've loved that old oak most of my life
and don't want to be here when they decide 
to cut down the other big grand tree.

Copyright 2025 Ingrid Bruck 

Bio:

Ingrid Bruck lives and writes in Pennsylvania Amish country. A retired library director, she writes haiku short forms, grows wildflowers and makes jam. Four Pushcart nominations, two for Best of the Net. Current work appears in Failed Haiku, Spillwords and  Poetry Hall. Poetry website: www.ingridbruck.com

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For Emily Whenever We May Find Her

Bio:

Sally Toner (she/her) is a Pushcart nominee whose poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in Northern Virginia Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Watershed Review, and other publications. Her chapbook Anansi and Friends was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. She received an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia. An empty nester with two grown daughters, she lives in Reston, Virginia with her husband. You can find her at sallytoner.com, salliemander70 on Instagram, and on X at @SallyToner

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

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30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Donation Appeal:To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

The Red-Eared Sliders at Morningside Park

You tell me that these turtles who swim here,
throng this green pond and give us joy, were pets.

One by one by one, people set them free,
for school was over and childhood was done.
 
Turtles seem happy with ponds to swim in,
fish and weeds to eat, warm rocks to bask on.

Or do they throng the shore, look for the one
who gave them names, gave them food, gave them love?

All in vain. They dwell in this pond, all ponds
in New York City, make them stale, murky.

They’ve driven out the wild ones. Large snappers
who hide beneath rocks, who flinch at noises

humans make once we see turtles swim past.
Sliders don’t mind loud voices, lights at night.

They know us. They know us all too well.
It's why they can live with us, give us joy.

Copyright 2025 by Marianne Szlyk

Bio:

Marianne Szlyk and her husband sometimes go up to NYC for part of their summer vacation. Her most recent book of poetry is Why We Never Visited the Elms (available on Amazon and from the author), and she is also publishing fiction these days, mostly in Mad Swirl, Piker’s Press, and Impspired.

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Let’s Not Talk About Cancer

Don’t answer that phone
If the disease comes calling
Beyond irritating it is 
Debilitating 
Appalling
Let’s Not Talk About Cancer
Like it is the all and all
Like it has unchallenged balance purpose deemed supreme
Like it could walk a tight rope and not fall 
Let’s Not Talk About Cancer
Like it’s a real conversation
Something wanted, yearned for, desired
Aspiring to be sought out it in the deepest meditation
Worthwhile the price of lifelong savings
Its pain protrudes past pleasure profusely
All the goodness of our cravings
Let’s Not Talk About Cancer
The cost of what we’ve lost in people, love, and time
How who they were, or growing to be
Distortedly defined 
Let’s Not Talk About Cancer
Anymore 
Let’s just have an answer
A cure 

Copyright 2025 Andre Taylor 

Bio:

Brenardo the ‘singsong’ poet is known for poems of power and insight. A veteran of the United States Navy, and of stage, radio, and television, his presentations are far reaching. His poems have appeared in print in magazines and anthologies throughout the world.

Brenardos’  latest book, “Bridges Over Aggravated Troubles”, is available by reaching him @ deotp123@gmail to order your signed copy.

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

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Predators

It started with the plastic containers.
We stacked them high, balanced unwieldy towers
like a unicyclist holding another human – 
what skill, what steadiness.

We recycle, but we know from news headlines
a good many are buried: 
contaminate soil, release toxins when burned, 
run off into rivers. 
Polymers don’t degrade, so
are best reshaped into a different form,
remade into a different killer.

Our ancestors died from diseases because 
doctors didn’t yet understand germs, 
how bacteria and viruses spread,
how a good hand washing can quell much disaster.

We die from our love of, our addiction to, convenience.

Try to find three things you use every day,
three things you’re using right now, that aren’t made from plastic … 
Go!

And then there are the pesticides.

The broccoli we eat, our strawberries,
sprayed with chemicals to kill bugs,
to increase profits, not farmers’ faults,
those in power - regardless of aisle side -
always side with the mighty, the men who built
our country with banks and laundered opium-laced money
through colleges and art galleries, they need three quarters of
   farmland
to feed the cars that feed the oil industry that feed their offshore 
   accounts.

And this is the food that’s good for us.

What about processed food possessed by our poorest –
lining the shelves of discount stores, the genius killing off 
of our nation’s undesirables by making them desire and ingest
    carcinogens, 
feeding their kids spoonfuls, cash cawed by colorful canaries on
   cardboard boxes; 
this way we don’t have to wait for poison to seep into soil, wash
   into water, absorb into pores, 
the poor can …
Eat it! Drink it!

In communion with – one bread, one body, one congregation, one dying
    nation under God,
indivisible, invading cells divisible and divisible, on Earth not in
    Heaven, giving us on this day, 
our daily dead, oppressed and betrayed by all. 

Copyright 2025 Kathy Cable Smaltz

Bio:

Kathy Smaltz’s poems appear in journals and in her collection, Pieces. A VCCA creative fellow, she served as Prince William County’s Poet Laureate from 2016-2018. A wife, mother, and educator, Kathy and her husband have four (almost) grown children. She enjoys spending time outdoors – writing poems on mountaintops and beaches.

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The War Within

What they cannot see are the damaged thoughts
punctuated in the dark,  the sweet erosion amplified, 
and the salt of silence, broken, 
 
It all implodes, and blossoms again, in the infinite 
landscapes and riverbeds of our minds, a wilderness 
running through itself like tumbleweed, 

The quiet chaos, the war within flowering the darkness, 
distorted as silk sheets raised above the breastbone of a 
mattress,	
the heavy things they leave behind,
we cannot lift in the dark,

The sacred interruptions of love and acceptance and sorrow 
are the bright shadows that still hold church in us, 

The mind is a vulnerable thing stretched and bent, a nomad 
of soft voices clothed in  black dresses,  echoing the silent 
shells that cannot hear themselves break open at night,  

We cannot control the unfurling thoughts, no more than we 
can control the disruptive greed of yellow irises, stitching their 
roots in the tender earth, spreading their seedlings across 
ageless abstraction. There are no boundaries here, only the
sound of hope drumming the earth, as it paces back and forth. 

Who is tending the wild horses traversing the uneven
grasslands shaking loose in our heads?

When can we remove the pestilence from  the open 
fields of our defenseless mind?

The mind is a vulnerable thing, stretched and bent, a nomad 
of soft voices clothed in  black dresses,  echoing the  silent 
shells that cannot hear themselves break open at night,  

And if we become dislocated from the frayed edges of 
erupting thoughts, and locked inside the hems of our own 
bodies,  let the flesh of our papers write us as unfinished songs.

Copyright 2025 Diane Wilbon Parks 

Bio:

Diane Wilbon Parks is a visual poet and artist; she was brought in as an Expert Consultant to the National Trust for Historic Preservation through a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and has a permanent installation of one of her poems and artwork at the Patuxent Research Refuge, North Tract in Laurel, MD.  Diane is a USAF Veteran and Sr. IT Program Manager. She resides in Maryland with her family.  

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Dear Cancer,

Wherever you are, I’m not sure, 
I do thank you for not coming into my body 
though you certainly have come into my orbit. 
Not even a year ago, we learned you 
were having your way with someone close to me, 
worming your way in, causing pain that still haunts her, 
though her medications have gotten the best of you.

You’ve tortured others close to me, 
both family and friends, some multiple times, 
and I want to scream, that’s not fair! 
You’re responsible for the massacres of their bodies.
One was stopped from having a second child; 
at least the other has announced one on the way.

Why do you deserve to be so colorful–
the bright hues of children’s toys
more colorful than healthy cells.
Perhaps there’s an advantage–you’re easier 
to target in bright pink, purple, and periwinkle
In spheres and splats and tentacles of overlapping 
tints and tones, occasional amorphous blobs.

Now you’re in cahoots with MAGA and DOGE, 
destroying our hopes–the research 
we’re counting on to assassinate you once and for all. 
Don’t get too comfortable. I assure you, 
we will succeed in reinstating research and funding. 
We will succeed in obliterating you! Get out of my life!


Copyright 2025 Cathy Hailey

With thanks for the idea to the Eastern Shore Writers Association’s 
Epistolary Poetry: Arriving at “Truth” by Different Means–with David P. Kozinski

Bio:

Cathy Hailey teaches in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing Program and previously taught English and Creative Writing and sponsored the Eddas Literary/Art Magazine in Prince William County. She serves as Northern Region Vice President of The Poetry Society of Virginia (PSV), co-hosts Virginia Voices, and organizes In the Company of Laureates. She administers the Student Contest and Young Poets in the Community Program for PSV and the Jacklyn Potter Young Writers Competition for The Words Works. Her chapbook, I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth, was published by Finishing Line Press. Recent and forthcoming poem publications include Little Free Lit Mag, First Frost and Foto Specchio.Visit cathyhailey.com.

Donation Appeal:
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Breathe life in

Breathe life in
Let things out

With your rooms overflowing
It's hard to stay light

Let life in
Breathe things out

Have a rest if it helps
Have a walk in the wild

There's no need to go far 
Nor to escape from the crowd

Let life in
Breathe things out

Put your feet on the street
And go seeking the world

Which is there to be found
And to fill your soul

Greet the light
as day begins 

Breathe things out
Let life in

Copyright 2025 Mario Badino

Bio:

Mario Badino was born in Turin in 1975, grew up in the Alps and then moved to Apulia, in the South of Italy, where he lives with Silvia and their children, Emma and Riccardo. He teaches Italian in middle school and is the author of three books of poetry (“Cianfrusaglia”, “Barricate!” and “Santificare le feste”). He’s a member of the poetic collective SlammalS, that promotes spoken-word poetry in Apulia. You can read more about him on his web site cianfrusaglia.wordpress.com.

Donation Appeal:
To help victims of cancer and to help foster continuing research into this deadly disease, please consider donating to either The American Cancer Society or The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Thank you.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review