By Lisa McLoughlin

While morning turned to afternoon, I walked in the state
forest. I saw no one, but found a metal tower collapsed at
the dead end of a trail in a clearing of ferns ringed with
sapling white pine. Many trails I’ve walked; few end. They’re
loops, or they go on forever. Nature and culture agree that
this point is the highest on the hill. They disagree what to do
with it. I stand in the anomalous sunny cul-de-sac looking for
a way past the young trees and back into the mature forest.
And finding none laid out, make my own.

Lisa McLoughlin, PhD has been published in Stonewalls II, Religions, and The Ecological Citizen among other journals and books in the USA and Europe. She currently lives alternately off-grid in a forest in Northfield, Massachusetts and in a stone structure in Montréal, Québec.