Award-winning author and Mesa College creative writing coordinator Scott Starbuck shares four poems

• Recycle
• politicians 
• into nameless moonfish
• inside their mothers,
•  
• teachers
• into students
• of students,
•  
• businessmen 
• into birds
• saving skies
• flying places
• thought
• impossible.

• Laugh Out Loud Café 
• (first appeared in The Raven Chronicles)

• is so quiet it makes history museum 
• seem like carnival ride.

• “What’s up with the name?” I ask. 
• “Previous owner,” I’m told,

• and think of bad storms 
• that change coastlines,

• Titanic lifeboats 
• leaving half full.

• Ancient Forest 
• (first appeared in The Analog Sea Review)

• People stare at iPhones 
• but what about listening

• to voice of sea, 
• geese migrations,

• salmon splashes, 
• cedar arms in wind,

• like ages before
• when men and women knew

• quench soul hunger 
• first thing in morning

• before saying anything 
• to anyone.

• Oceans Away
• people are affected by what you do, think, feel, believe.

• You toss your computer, and Chinese people get sick 
• from lead and mercury.

• You think climate change is a hoax, and Marshall Islands sink.

• You feel entitled because of your hard work, 
• and people everywhere starve.

• You believe this poem doesn’t matter, 
• and are reincarnated as a cockroach.

Scott T. Starbuck’s  Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems was a  July 2017 editor’s pick  at Newpages.com, and was selected from over 1500 books as a 2018 Montaigne Medal Finalist at Eric Hoffer Awards for “the most thought-provoking books.” His new book of climate change poems Carbonfish Blues features art by Guy Denning whose works on activism, refugees, human vulnerability, and realism are known throughout Europe. Starbuck’s climate blog  Trees, Fish, and Dreams has 45,000 views from over 40 countries, and his Manifesto from Poet on a Dying Planet is online at Spit Rock Review. Starbuck, a Mesa College creative writing coordinator, will teach his fourth Honors Climate Change Poetry Seminar spring term 2020. The poetry course can be taken in a first-term Eng 247A section, and higher-level second term Eng 247B section. Starbuck will host a public screening of  The Reluctant Radical about Ken Ward and other Valve Turners at Mesa College, May 1, 2:30-4:30 pm.