The mountains with rounded tops

were thrust from the crust ages ago

bold and bladed as javelins to judge

as Excalibur the worth the worthy claim.

Nicknaming themselves after some

awesome or ancient God and wearing

facsimile garb of an Argonaut alive

after myths but before their popularity,

hipster geomorphologists escaping

light pollution in the Appalachians

settle into McMansion tents and trip

harder on mushrooms than the terrain.

Filled silos of psilocybin catching the eye

while stratified limestone stripes

scream out we've only made them trite.

Don't tire Gaia, she's old and had enough.

Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, New York, whose work appears in venues such as The Adirondack Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Heartland Review. He is Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, and his most recent chapbooks are Tomorrow Everyday, Yesterday Too (Anxiety Press, 2022), and A Little Smaller Than the Final Quark (Bullshit Lit, 2022).

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Texas Review, North American Review, Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked.