The Playground

 

By Corinna Schulenburg

On the playground the maskless kids crash like stocks.

They scramble up the metal tongues of slides

like names unsaying themselves.

The swings keep reminding us

there is no gravity until there is

so pull with your arms, kick with your legs.

At night, the streetlamps drench the place in a fire

made of bones and a million years of weight.

We moved here to have it be her backyard. City

kid. I grew up with dunes behind me.

But everywhere I love is scheduled to be drowned.

Here is the high ground. Here, the water rushes

out of faucets to fill balloons that smack

against the scalding pavement. Here,

run through the sprinklers and get yourself cool.

One September, she dashed through them every day

after school, drunk on her own daring.

In the pictures, each bead of water is suspended

around her rapture like a flight of liquid stars.

At night, teenagers drift into the seams

to paw at buttons and drag on smoke

before retreating to their shrinking beds.

Now the playground is empty. Now they begin,

the long, dreadful fingers, reaching backward

from a narrowing future to pull on the threads

of the place, all the promises it can

no longer keep. The grown-ups will come

in the morning, and with our bodies,

patch the holes and cover the frayed places,

as our kids climb rung by rung

into the arms of the sun.

Corinna Schulenburg (she/her) is a queer trans artist/activist. She’s a mother, a playwright, a poet, and a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble. Poems in: Capsule Stories, Long Con, LUPERCALIA, miniskirt magazine, Moist, Moonflake Press, Okay Donkey, Oroboro, SHIFT, The Shore, and more. https://corinnaschulenburg.com/writer/poet/

 

Sexually Explicit Skywriting

 

By Vincent Antonio Rendoni

Look up.

Forgive me, mi amor
for this.

This is how I was taught to love— for all to see.

I can feel the blood in your face. I feel it in me too.

But before you bring my life to its ignoble end, let me just say this:

There are only so many good years left in our bodies.

Think of what we’re able to do now.

The things we can’t later.

I know, I am so morbid!

So let’s say yes and shout our intentions
for when we are willing, when we can, and say yes.

Take all the time you need to think.

But not too much.

Look up.

Nothing is written.

There’s time.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is a 2022 Jack Straw Fellow and winner of Blue Earth Review’s 2021 Annual Flash Fiction Contest. He is a contributor to What They Leave Behind: A Latinx Anthology. His work has appeared / will appear in the Texas Review, Juked, Fiction Southeast, Sky Island Journal & more.

 

Familiar Woods

 

By Felicia Bedford

Turned over rocks.

Broken limbs.

A well-trodden path,

That I continue to find beauty in.

Even the dead or dying parts.

 

It’s always been something,

About the frost and cold.

Or the dripping hot.

That forced me into wooded solitude.

 

The little creek,

That runs in muddy clear.

Laps up against my feet.

Causing a jolt

Against my nervous system.

 

It’s grounds me,

To see it all.

It sends me back home.

To my own woods.

 

I feel challenged,

To find my own little piece of familiar,

Everywhere I go.

Looking for mossy spores.

 

Looking for,

Peace?

Searching for,

Myself.

 

Will I find her,

Out there

In the thicket.

 

It’s impossible to say.

 

But I know,

That if forced to choose,

I’d go back,

Before this land we now have

Took shape.

 

And I would live amongst the animals.

Felicia Bedford is a sophomore Biology major at Duquesne, where she also studies creative writing. She intends to complete Duquesne's English MA after Undergrad. Her work can also be seen in the D.U. Quark.

 

And the Grasshoppers Flick All Their Wild Wings

 

By Jessica Dionne

Amid blue flowers, I cried for what I never had.

                                                                                                            A verdant violence.

All of my worries are two-handed and humming.

 

                        The chambers of their abdomen         

                                                                                                            a counting of loss.

The milk-white hands of your mother

 

                        we’ll never pass down. I once called desire

                                                                                                            the wrong title

named it need, forgot the difference

                       

                        and decided the distance was a small bee

                                                                                                            lost in smoke.

There are raptures that won’t come for you

                       

                        And raptures that will. A one-winged

                                                                                                            caelifera

on a path of unconcerned spirals.

 

            Out by the lamppost, screaming bright circles—        

                                                                                                            an infestation.

Each one an anxiety, escaped from the throat.

Jessica Dionne is a PhD student at GSU and the production editor of New South. Her chapbook Second-Hand Love Stories is forthcoming from Fjords Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Moth (IE), Narrative, Forth River, Meridian, SWWIM, Rust + Moth, Banshee (IE), and Mascara Literary Review (AU).

 

Two Little Rivers

 

By Laura Pochintesta

Name the great rivers of the world

You know, the ones you learned

In school – how to spell them,

Where on earth they are,

The direction in which they flow,

Their basin, their source - in fact

All the terms you memorized for the geography quiz

Remember the Nile, the Amazon,

The Tigris and Euphrates, the

M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i

Most of us grew up never having seen

Most of them, just memorizing

Their lengths, their significance as

Feeders of fertile soil on which great

Civilizations were planted.

 

But, no one ever talks about the

Two little rivers

Where my ancestors are from

Their names do not ring a bell on any test

They are so far from grand they sometimes

Dry up all together in the heat of midsummer

When pebbles and rocks pockmark the course

Where their waters will flow again come fall.

 

From these

Two little rivers

Came hundreds, maybe thousands, of people

Some of whom ended up on ships carrying them

Across oceans bound for greater rivers

Far from the people born in the hills and valleys

Formed and fed by those

Two little rivers

Whose names will be forgotten by those who don’t learn

To sing the songs and tell the stories that speak of them

Two little rivers

Whose currents will pulse in the veins of their descendants

Flowing, surging like lifeblood, emptying themselves

Into a future sea

Laura Pochintesta is a writer in Connecticut. She enjoys writing poetry and fiction that examine relationships in a historical context, often with a focus on familial bonds, faith, migration and home. Her work has appeared in literary journals. Her chapbook She: A Small Book of Poems is available on Amazon.

 

Absence of Memory

 

By Robert René Galván

As the mind extends

its tributaries,

so does the body

erode into silt,

 

Or to an empty canyon

where strata record

histories delicate

as the veins of a leaf,

or a tree’s rings,

 

Doomed to return

as rain, again

and again,

to the spring

with an absence

of memory.

Robert René Galván, born in San Antonio, resides in New York City where he works as a professional musician and poet. His last collections of poems are entitled, "Meteors," Undesirable: Race and Remembrance, Somos en Escrito Foundation Press, Standing Stones, Finishing Line Press, and The Shadow of Time, Adelaide Books.

 

Crater Lake

 

By Shannon Spies

No one tells you the blue will assault you,

or that, devoid of motion, the lake

is not a lake, but some dead thing, empirically

beautiful, killed by all that blue.

So when you reach the viewing station

after hours in the car, wedged between

your sisters, who are strangers,

and your father, whose wife has made him

strange to you, you nearly tip headlong

into the water, nearly jump.

In that moment, you must have looked as sublime

as any teenage boy could look, poised

on the edge of his life, windless,

looking down a thousand feet into

a breathless hue. When we pulled you

      

       back from the rail, you must have blushed.

       Or, compelled by love, you must have been ashamed.    

       Even now, I see its mark in you.

       Your eyes have withered in their depth

       and drawn snow in.

       Their blue is halted at the blue of ice. Those savage peaks

       thrust up a thousand feet into your eyes.

       When you returned from prison, you must have wondered

       why I never wrote to you.

       I had the paper but couldn’t move the pen. For months

       I thought Should I send a book?

       But look: there are no pines or mountains. Only blue.

       That which is clear is that which draws us in.

       At thirty-three, brother, you cannot hope to change.

       You are the oldest living thing on Earth.

Shannon Spies earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho, where she developed her taste for rhapsodic prosody and the mysteries of the extra-logical. Her poetry has been featured in Poet Lore and Kestrel and is upcoming in Broad River Review. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she serves as a Director on the Swissvale Farmer’s Market Board, and is the proud owner of four hens (Kitty, Ginger, Iggy and Bowie) who wandered into her yard in the summer of 2020.

 

Of Ancient Tradition

 

By Marissa Alvarez

 

from that first sizzle

as batter hits hot oil

you can smell it in the air

you may crave a certain flavor

but don't make the revisionist mistake

like conquerors or capitalists

with no memory of history beyond

what is frying up today

 

the fact of flour

of so called refined civilization

with its agriculture

should conjure images of colonization

 

for this fry bread

is not the taste of ancient culture

what you savor on your tongue

is the taste of loss

                             loss of language

                             loss of land

                             loss of wild buffalo & wild salmon & indigenous corn

 

imagine sacks of flour

given instead of rights

          instead of agency to migrate over their own land

                                        to gather wild rice in a kayak

                                                        medicinal leaves from bushes

 

confined to reservations far

                                             away

                                                      from ancestral rivers and mountains

a landscape over which someone else's destiny manifested

                                                                                              without sweat lodges

                                                                                                       or shamans

                                                                                                       or three sisters salad

the fact of fry bread is the loss of native diet

 

what you taste is continued colonialism

          the taste of obesity

          the taste of heart disease

          the taste of diabetes

you're tasting a generational smallpox blanket

 

you must learn

                        to recognize the smell of oppression

                call attention as it heats up in the pan

                                                            in the heat of summer after summer

                                                            in the heat of our own hearts

tender dough sinks between your teeth

but the only ancient culture you're tasting

is centuries old oppression

 

we must protest

                          the dams & the borders

                                                                especially those in our minds

 

we must protect 

                          those who are dying

                                                           stop swallowing what we've been fed

 

we must refuse

                         to feed each other oppression

                                                                         and call it tradition

Marissa Alvarez is a Chicana with multiple chronic conditions, who lives on Southern Paiute ancestral land, with her parents (again), shih tzu sister, and three rescued cats. This year her poems have appeared in The Southern Quill, Rigorous, Issue 3, Capsule Stories, Autumn, Anti-Heroin Chic, October and Inlandia, Fall.

 

They Never Lost Power

 

By Alissa Elliott

after Natasha Tretheway

 

The white northern suburbs, clinging to light,

stay clean, their gates swinging closed with a thud.

When Jackson ices over, faucets dry.

I read the clouds. I listen to my blood.

Drive south, to where Ship Island shields the shore,

eat boiled peanuts from roadside Styrofoam.

Purple jellyfish beach themselves in scores,

this silt our shared estuarial home.

Hurricane Cecile washed my great-great-great

grandfather’s bones out of the Union prison plot,

The naiads of the Pascagoula wring Confederate

blood from their hair. For what for what for what.

The guards who died alongside him were Black.

I cringe to see my own name on the plaque. 

Alissa Elliott is Writing Center Coordinator at the Jackson, MS, campus of Hinds Community College and holds an MFA in poetry from the Sewanee School of Letters. Her writing and translations have been published in Pedestal Magazine, Ezra, The Shakespeare Standard, a program on Kurdish Iraqi network NRT, and elsewhere.

 

No Less Than Blood, No More Than Kin

 

By Ami Patel

Your north vein pricks the map     away

from blight & blizzard         expectation

thaws your generational line   vertebrae

a stack of patient villages      fleshed by

the quotidian: sun-dried grass   clay-red

sweat  cow dung  fraying cotton  a river

that deserted itself    even as you mirage

the delight dancing past   it was 5 matlis

on her head  no 7 no 10   more clay pots

than grandmother at that point    after all

she was just a young woman then  when

does myth become mischief    the buzzy

art of shooting   the shit        gapata mar

aka     Google couldn’t       translate this:

Dadi    her first friends    old & precious

chipped teacups       tipped laughs    airy

swats there weren’t as many mosquitoes

back then                  Wikipedia divulges

climate change  stretches       migrations

now they pack & prod  this unassuming

desert for blood    you swallow a chalky

peach malaria pill       settle into dreams

unzipped   cosmic limbs   such ordinary

diaspora feels  ribboning your neck  eye

the jammy beams   of this barking night

your very own    Chitra Ganesh painting

you don’t know      you’ve never known

if you’re upright        or if you’re orange

buckets    of crushed coins from all over

guillotine          your memory’s entrance

tindora leaves    crawl around each other

like your uncles      at the airport waving

hello beti   hello   come come  you wake

clawing at your arms       the unrelenting

green sewn into you   like the final stitch

in the sari blouse          they will gift you

on your last day here.

Ami Patel (she/her) is a queer, diasporic South Asian poet and Young Adult fiction writer. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and Tin House alum. Ami’s poems are published in various places, including perhappened mag, The West Review, and Moss. You can find her online at amipatelwrites.com.

 

Field Notes

 

By Zach Dankert

We watch the herons disembark Time just before the rain, imagining a missed god. A forgotten artist sculpting massasauga stripes, storm ripple gray, fish hunt blue. Apparatus hinged with a terrestrial curve around body of feathered water. Bird, body, old life reversed back into the black eye. 

 

“We live many times on this earth,” you say, “each one a different purpose.”

I wonder whose purpose it is to grip grief, and whose is to let it all fall. 

*

They plod out of the marsh, the wet-footed trees and thicket bushes. Remnant, architecture, civilization. Columns of alabaster evolving into dirt under my sole. These birds resemble gatekeepers. Human-length wings beat back the barrier between water and understanding, skirting the first thought of a sapien mind that is 

we are kept afloat by an abundance of ghosts

there is an intake of breath as one almost descends upon our dock before spurning us.

*

Painted turtles watch protected by logs, bobbing in duckweed. Bullfrogs silent in mud, skin slick as the planet. Catfish pray to the subterranean, heads touching the wet lake’s lips. I didn’t realize we shared the same hymn until I recognized their trepidation.  

*

With the sound of a man breaking (soft release of pleasure) rain burrows into the earth’s scent glands. It’s only an afterthought on the back of my neck and the muscles of my palm. Snared horizons under these streets and cities amass in the depressions of our footprints; dirt, femurs, our masks we’d forgotten to lay to rest. Great Blue Herons, monk-like in posture, don’t move out of the shower. If we live many lives, will I begin as predator, letting the droplets darken the chainmail of my deference?

Though it's not my place to dip my fingers in your grief, I’m suddenly sure this heron stilling the life around us is you, the same self regarding a translation of spirit. 

*

These birds are the lullabies of historians.

*

Visible to every house barricading the lake, a host of herons wade talon-deep, watching the water for an apocalypse or a final Sabbath. The waves, I notice, are lapping backwards. A heron baptizes a fish with air and brings it to a new religion. 

I don’t say anything, but I nod at your observation;

You, who shows me how to kill you over, over, and over again.

Zach Dankert is a poet and recent graduate from Hope College, where he studied English and Biology. Poetry is the medium through which he mixes creative writing with an interest in the planet, and he hopes his work may inspire a similar connectiveness in others. Zach lives in Cicero, IN.

 

Still

 

By sid sibo

The bear stands steady on four deep legs, ears alert against the empty horizon she’s watched for millennia. She knows many secrets of emptiness. She knows the ripe sustenance of overlapping human traditions here. Hoon’Naqvut, Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Shash Jaa, Ansh An Lashokdiwe:  different songs rich with nourishment, filled with energies that have powered dancing feet over centuries.

“You mean like the Energizer Bunny?” My son Sean is Tobacco and Rabbit Clan, and sometimes hears my thoughts. Like me, he’s a terrible dancer. But his endurance is half-way legendary. He can keep going.

“Don’t you have some race you need to be at?” I drop my arms from a sunrise greeting and glare at him. “Some hundred-miler over a muddy mountain. Somewhere far away?”

“I love you too.” He’s upside down, voice muffled as he stretches his long gallina legs, open hands on chokeberry-colored rock. The back of his t-shirt sports a hand-stenciled Water is Life meme.

“Now what’re you raising money for?” My question half-hearted.

“Campaign against importing Estonian radioactive waste to store next to White Mesa. Last thing we need on top of our water system is more hot rock.”

“Huh.” Somedays my word-barn echoes empty. Which, like the space between here and the hazy horizon, is full of pulsing, invisible things.

“I’ll make new shirts tomorrow to resist the upcoming oil and gas sales. Want one?”

“Can’t you combine that campaign with the anti-alabaster, anti-uranium and anti-coal mines? Or the anti-ATV park that dude wants to start in the monument?”

“S’not the monument anymore. Or all this wouldn’t be happening.” He rises, arms over his head as if he remembers. But he’s just stretching. It takes lots of stretching to keep going.

I lower myself onto crystal-rough rock and listen to the wind. Not, of course, that the wind makes a sound, but it plays on the edges of rocks and tips of grasses. On the cartilage of my ear. Instruments, all of us.

Sean runs in place, arms pumping. The earth’s tight skin a resonant drum I hear with my ribcage.

I watch. “Well, are you going?”

His cheeks puff out, and air bursts from him in popping rhythm. “Why do you stay?”

“Pfft. Their shit don’t scare me. She’s still here.” I toss my head a little sideways, toward the bear, without looking at her directly. Eye contact can be unnerving, not to mention impolite.

I catch the flash of Sean’s teeth bursting white in his gotcha smile as he kicks it in gear and lopes away downhill.

The scent of pinyon rises in his wake. Sean’s passage leaves behind dust I can taste, and my feet ache. The sound of a circling jay falls around me. What dance have I ever offered? Stillness rises from granular rock, into my interlocking backbones. I feel the morning desert changing, plateau light bleeding as if at a fawn’s birth. Soundless dancers with dark blue skin shimmy across mesa space, stretching from unseen cloud toward unknowable earth.

Living on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, sid sibo recently won the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award and an Honorable Mention in the Rick DeMarinis Short Story contest. Publications include Evocations, Orca, Cutthroat, Brilliant Flash Fiction and Artscapes. An environmental analysis job seeds a variety of creative work.

 

Lolo

 

By Jeremy Chu

Grandpa shifted his stare

from behind the wheel,

met his daydream where

Fraser River met shoreline

and fed it to me:

 

 you know what’s under there?

 

The word Crab came jagged through

the island consonants of his speech,

though words kept coming,

 

How their many rich bodies

must be splayed under the water’s

edge, How a single outboard engine

and a modest collection of traps

would bring haul to hand.

 

We held the idea like breath

as we passed the slough, entered

the tunnel that bayoneted

through the river

and bled into town,

 

the West

remaining rather unwon.

Jeremy Chu is a Filipino-Chinese poet, writing as a guest on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Chu's work has been featured in W49 and Pocket Lint Magazine. His writing wonders: Does love reveal itself differently, the further one crosses the Pacific?

 

Cave Art

 

By Todd Sformo

Only hundreds of feet into the earth, declining slightly in slope, is time at 45,000 before present, where a placard punched into the permafrost defines a formation called reticulate chaotic. The dark of the cave starves light except for bulbs that carve-out the near, although exact boundaries can’t be pinned. The cave, therefore, retains much of its netherworld quality that comes not from long, arduous exploration like that of the sea, the poles, the Amazon, but from excavation, into a world that was never meant to be, never an explorer’s geography or conquest, never a final destination.

Fog of silt, loess, rises like trapped butterflies on an airstream; once up can’t get down as a liquid breeze buoys the deposits in a drowning, milling fill, a floating quicksand that coats all surfaces and moist linings.  You see this when you blow your nose.  Ice-cemented walls and billowy lithic ceilings inspire the dolorous, the road edges of strewn.  Even the cool of the cave does not stave off odors of ruin, despite perennially frozen. There’s an un-orderly decay at 30 meters where roots, stems of grass (some still slight green), bones of the extinct, rust into this void at 14,000.  I reach for the ceiling, simultaneously touching the bottom of a dulled Martian-photo lake; a drop of melt on my finger loses itself into muddies.  And a few lunar steps away, an ice wedge, a liquid filled crack 25,000 years ago, is a buried waterfall, a statue within, from which bacteria that can come back have been caught in the solid mist of crystalline time, but I move easily.  Four seconds to cross meter 40 to 50, reeling off thousands of years, down to meter 70 at 45,000.

As if trying to fix distant stars, I stare up at the reticulate:  birds’ feet, hopping in mud.  Cuneiform.  Dehiscence in-filled with ice-thin black.  Sutures.  This void integrates with an astronomer’s gaze, but in meter-years, not infinity, into man-made circumference, unlined.  I am behind a mosaic, behind unfathomable tesserae.  My damp hand on the cold wall has soaked up powdery silt, and a stone peels loose.  Loess plummets, a smoky amount rises, air-flung in convolutions and kink, and I stamp on gravel my ancient thumbprint.

Todd Sformo is a biologist in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, working on fish and bowhead whales to support subsistence activities for the Inupiat communities of the North Slope. Besides scientific papers, he has prose poems in Hippocampus, Cirque, and The Ekphrastic Review, and essays in Catamaran and Interalia Magazine.

 

Mistranslations

 

By Emma Miao

after “靜夜思” by Li Bai

 

床前明月光

Moonlight falls before the bed

 

疑是地上霜

Like frost on the frozen ground.

 

举头望明月

Look up at the bright moon,

 

低头思故乡。

Look down, think of home.

 

 

1.

 

the moon falls / like ice. / the moon stands

on the bed / breaks / into so many other

moons. / & fingers. / the night, slashing open //

the day I left // the frost. /

& the whiplashed bones / of the

roadstruck deer

 

 

2.

 

the sky / is a bruise / swallowing

me whole / this house / means a

child, laughing in mama’s arms // means

what is the moon / if not my body //

& the deer / stared me in the mouth /

four years / skidding on the midnight

road / & the eyes / saying turn back /

carve up the bed                      & grieve

 

3.

Snow falls on the snowy moon. Look up, child.

Home is some unreachable thing.

Emma Miao is a poet from Vancouver, BC. Her poems are published in Atlanta Review, Permafrost Magazine, Frontier Poetry and Quarterly West. She is the winner of the 2021 Cincinnati Review Schiff Award for Poetry and The Fiddlehead's 2020 Ralph Gustafson Prize for Poetry. She hopes you have a wonderful day.

 

Barefeet on a Dirt Path or Where Little Girls Still Run in Their Barefeet

 

By Alonna J. Carter

I come from a place where little girls still run in the dirt in their bare feet,

A commonwealth, known for clear country skies and mountain peaks.

The Blue Ridge Mountain holds the secrets.

And to me she never speaks

Except to say, “Hello child you’ve come again.”

And to tell me that buried in her bosom are the bones of my kin.

Africans, Irishmen, Scotsman, Englishmen

And some East and West Indians, and Natives

Collided under Virginia skies

They mixed Brown, black, and white, and created something I’ve tried to identify.

At the Rappahannock river, they tried to wash their sins away.

And those who were landed ignored the that this fertile earth, rocked the “cradle of slaves.”

One night in a dream, my mulatto Nana Annie’s grave called to me,

And told me I could pay homage to her where she was buried amongst the weeds.

Her father was the biggest cattle farmer in land.

But his daughter’s name was traced in cement on her tombstone, by her son’s hand.

And Grandpa Lewis bought land and signed his own name on deed,

Seven years after he was freed.

Regency, Revolution, and Rebellion run like the river through my veins,

And when my feet touch the soil, my history I reclaim,

And turn my back to stone relics that were designed to make me afraid,

 and turn my head toward the future for which my ancestors have paved.

Within the clearing of the Shenandoah, journey and discovery meet and birth hope.

In a land where little girls still run in the dirt in their bare feet

Alonna J. Carter is a freelance writer and Public Historian, who specializes in African American genealogy and history. Her poem Shots Fired was featured in The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by the lives of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Anne Frank.

 

Ask the Highwaymen

 

By Lauren Johnson

What was Old Florida?

Spine-wreaking work

in sweltering citrus groves?

Or capturing

in self-taught strokes of oil

waves diamonded

by holy sunlight,

undying palm trees

laughing with greenness,

and mangrove-framed rivers

drenched in the borrowed royalty

of an orchid-purple sky?

Lauren Johnson is from Orlando, Florida. Her work has appeared in Living Waters Review and The Sailfish Review. When she is not writing, she enjoys reading retold myths, contemplating the meaning of the universe, and baking bread.

 

Autumn Offerings

 

By Lauren Woods

I told her I didn’t need her change, although she sensed enough to turn her unicorn bank upside down and shake it onto my bed. I sent her to play outside. So she sought and brought to me, with such devotion, a brittle stick. A flower chosen because I said I loved yellow. A chalky mushroom fresh from a morning storm, a blood red leaf with droplets still on top, a stew of leaves and grass crushed by rock, leaving smears of green on the wet sidewalk, impressions of past, fleeting lives. A quiet incantation, a nature brew. A secret get rich potion, made up of small parts, chosen because they, too, once sprung up like miracles. A brew of bountiful treasures, discarded by nature and resurrected by small hands. It worked.

Lauren Woods is a Washington, DC based writer, with work in The Forge, Hobart, Lost Balloon, The Offing, and other journals. She tweets @Ladiwoods1

 

Grace of Falling

 

By Xiaoly Li

pear flowers descent

     white stars embellish

         lush grass

     fresh  free   corollas

drawn to earth

     scattered in wind

          broken   restless   yet

     dive into the gravity of

this tenderness

     this decay

          limitless

Xiaoly Li’s poetry has recently appeared in Spillway, American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, Rhino, J Journal and elsewhere; and in several anthologies. She has been nominated for Best of the Net twice, Best New Poets, and a Pushcart Prize. Xiaoly received her Ph.D. in EE from WPI.

 

Huitlacoche

 

By Phoebe Myers

Peeled back, the corn here is jeweled

black. Its side froths into storm clouds

 

firm but spongy - ready to gather.

One darkened kernel renders the ear

 

unsellable, corn smut. Unsaleable devil’s

corn, the velvet truffle of the heartland

 

snuffed out by my tender, unseen nose.  

When combusted it weeps ink, rusts.

 

In all the books of opioids and the death

of industry this earthy resin is unwritten,

 

our fungus scourged.

 

Each evening, after combines winnow

rows of gold, reap and thresh

 

I watch a blackbird wait, wings in arabesque.

Rising moon serrates the wheaten

 

dome of lost day. Only when sky melts

into indigo and the fields butter with dew

 

will the blackbird escape its pastry entremets.

Our own selves, too, mushroom in night rains.

Phoebe Myers is a writer currently finishing her M.F.A in creative nonfiction from Florida State University. Her work has recently appeared in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Adelaide, and The Florida Review. She received two residencies at Art Farm Nebraska where she learned how to use a reciprocating saw.