Issue Number 64, Spring 2024

I’m Rooting for the Human Race

After Cortney Lamar Charleston

by Meryl Natchez

Meryl lives overlooking coast live oaks that line the canyon of Cerrito Creek as it flows into the San Francisco Bay.

The human race has done some shit! And I don’t just mean what we’ve
conjured from imagination and clay, the warm air whooshing through vents to
coddle my chilled feet, the sound of coffee beans grinding for my morning fix,
and the trip those beans made to get to me. Look at the forest, then look at the
city street. Consider cathedrals and string theory. Gotta admit we are
something else. And the way we’ve elbowed the others aside! The list of what
we’ve displaced takes many pages made of trees or myriad screens powered
with cobalt and sparks. Everybody take a moment to applaud. Everybody take
a moment to mourn. We started with rock and sticks and we’re moving fast. I
really hope the human race makes it. It’s not just our structures and
strictures. It’s that apple tree, bursting into fluffy fireworks in the spring rain.
Without us, whose breath would catch just looking at it?

© Meryl Natchez

All Our Words for Melting

by John Glowney

John lives close to the shores of Lake Washington, a ribbon lake formed by the southern flow of the Puget lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet near the end of the Late Pleistocene, looking out at Mt. Rainier, an active stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc.

Once in the great big awful.
That’s how it goes on the ice
floe so thin you can’t. O dear
lover of pack ice, dear tusked
narwhal, O Steller’s sea cow,
heavy-boned, fat and slow.
Great Auk, ext. June 1844,
we’ve reunited your skin
with your internal organs.
O Arctic Tern, O Arctic Fox,
God rest. Each and every
Eskimo Curlew, God rest.
Untended grave of any sea
creature, bless. Passenger
pigeon, ectopistes migratorius
in our living dead language,
we’ll run a race in team t-shirts
hand-stitched by Mumbai
untouchables who work
for rusty tin cans, we’ll
keep the Garden of Eden
in a jar of formaldehyde.
The scientific term for
attendance on this planet
is weeping. In the spring
migrations, the reindeer calves
drown in the thawing rivers.
May our story begin
“In the little village of words
called Inuktitut lives Tuvaijuittuq,
the place where the ice never
melts.”

© John Glowney

Here Now

by Elizabeth Herron

Elizabeth lives in the Atascadero Creek watershed, twin to the Laguna Watershed, both tributaries to the Russian River in Sonoma County, California, where salmon spawn and where coyotes and black-tailed deer are among her closest neighbors.

No matter the sharp clean line
of a roof against blue
between earth and sky
exploding
this bruise-able earth
keeps singing no matter --
the deep pocks
in the eastern wheat fields
no matter the empty bowl of Africa
no matter the bones of Babi Yar
and Stalin’s cold hand at the throat
the stolen wheat
stolen again --
No matter the postman with his bag of letters
scattered across the snow.
A world away
from the blood-lands
a child is walking home
with a pink backpack of books
and standing under the apple tree
the wayward reaching blossoms
of mock orange
in the quiet garden
we are safe
blessed
with this house this spring
the blood of First People
long-since soaked
into this soil. We are here now
with the rich scent of rain
and plenty of plenty.

© Elizabeth Herron

The Woods at Twilight

by Leslie Hodge

Leslie lives near the Torrey Pines State Natural Preserve. It features wind-swept sandstone formations, and its Pacific beaches are favored by surfers, body-boarders, dolphins, leopard sharks, and migrating whales.

If age is a notch slashed into a tree on a path
through overgrown forest, then death is the cliff at trail’s end.
Grieving’s a cloudburst hammering granite, and solace
the wavering rainbow. Memories, mouse skulls coughed up
by owls. The snake writes your name in the dust, sheds
his skin of bright promise. We are learning to read
the signs on the trail, feeling our way as the light fails.

Previously published in The Main Street Rag.

© Leslie Hodge

The Alchemist (A Female)

by Pamela Hughes

Pamela lives in the Hackensack River Watershed, where she explored the meadowlands and marshes as a child with her father, five brothers, and sister.

Little array
of pretty syllables,

on the mouth
of morning,

small torch song,
a tap of air’s triumph,

the peal of your high-pitched
trill thrills.

Tiny sun spell casts magic
on our ears, and eyes.

Thistle thief,
color of colostrum,

creamy mommy.
We, too, are fed

when the finch’s
bright patina burnishes,

the Echinacea’s brown
nipple gold.

© Pamela Hughes

Ode to Garbage Trucks

by Joan Roger

Joan lives near Ravine Creek in the North Eagle Harbor watershed within walking distance to the Salish Sea. On clear days she enjoys strolling to Hawley Cove for stunning views of Mount Rainier.

My son, a toddler, ran to greet you
each Tuesday during breakfast,
calling your name as his Cheerios spilled
with the hum and hiss of your engine.
We’d wave from the porch
and watch a grime-covered man
with strong arms and headphones
upend our waste to mix
with the waste of our neighbors.
Even when you were full, you took
our broken dolls, used pacifiers
and dried-out paint cans,
compacting down the debris.
I don’t know how to do without you,
carrier of rubbish, remover of waste,
bubblegum wrappers, Styrofoam packaging.
You’ve made it so easy to throw things away.
I couldn’t dig a hole deep enough
to hold all you’ve unburdened from me
with your ten wheels whisking away
our byproducts to bury. But now,
when I wake, I wonder: where does it go?
This trash you take. To float as plastic islands
in the Pacific, to clump and clog riverbeds,
to seep into underground springs.
I’d like to learn to live more softly,
to show my son that earth
is in his blood. So I buy less, though this
is not nearly enough. And I keep believing
that if we can roll eighty thousand
pounds of steel around on your wheels,
or fly that same weight through the skies,
then we, most certainly, can find a way.

© Joan Roger

Foraging

by Gabriel Dunsmith

Gabriel lives on a peninsula surrounded by the bay Faxaflói ("Horse Mane Bay") and in the shadow of the mountain Esja, in Iceland.

Hearing the golden-winged warbler and knowing it may seldom sing again,
I lift a rotting log to reveal a colony of pinhead mushrooms

whose distant cousins deep in the trees folks in East Tennessee
used to call woodfish, which they scrounged up when there was scarce any

corn in the corncrib or sausage in the larder, with hog-killing
time still months away. Those frilled and fecund fungi are one of many

things I’ve yet to taste, though my grandfather once led us looking
through the wet-leaf, damp-bark springtime until we hit the driveway,

circled home. It’s true that some treasures will never be found
in time to pull us from the brink, while others name to us our losses,

just as, like countless creatures of the earth, we’re bound
to search for what we love until it’s gone.

© Gabriel Dunsmith

Cormorant Fishing

by Geralyn Pinto

Geralyn lives in Mangalore between the sub-tropical splendor of the Western Ghats of peninsular India and the great expanse of the Arabian Sea to the west.

Shapes shift in a stippled dawn.
Behind a muslin mist
silhouette of man, bird and raft
might just be wood adrift,
floating shoal of silica,
or black teeth of river rock.

Man and bird watch
for what the water may hold
and fire may free.
A lantern is lowered,
flame ignites blue-bleakness,
gashes it into gold.

Dazed by submarine glory
a fish rises, eye fixed
on come-and-go crimson.
It meets an open beak.
But this ‘Jonah’ will not rest
in the belly of the bird.

Day arrives on a curl of pink.
Spoils are shared:
big fish ceded to the man,
commander of the wealth
of land and river;
The bird makes do with small meal,
the wages of collaboration.

Note: Cormorant fishing is a traditional technique in which trained cormorants are employed to catch fish in rivers and inlets. This method is usually employed through spring and summer; the cormorant fishing season concluding in mid-autumn. The bird is fitted with a ring around its neck which forms a constriction and thereby serves as a throat snare. It is thus prevented from swallowing the fish which is then extracted from the bird’s beak. Once the day’s work is done, the catch is sorted out. The men keep the big fish for themselves and give the small ones to the bird as its earnings, so to speak. Cormorants are known, however, to resent being short-changed and refuse to co-operate if not rewarded adequately. This style of fishing was once widely practiced in Vietnam, China and Japan, but is now more of a tourist attraction. The last stanza points to the exploitation of the species by men.

© Geralyn Pinto

The Naming of the Animals

by Jacob Friesenhahn

Jacob lives in the Cibolo Creek watershed. He lives along Elm Creek, a tributary of Cibolo Creek. These creeks are like nature's highways, though without the great destruction caused by humanmade highways.

I don’t know why but I look
long enough to know what

the black and gray rings of a raccoon
the shaggy fur of a dog sometimes wearing a collar
the athletic body struck stiff of a deer
the pointed ears usually alert of an unlucky feline

but sometimes identification fails
in the seconds it takes to pass

but what were you?
who were you when walking running turning
not expecting to collide?
all inside out and red and orange and white

but what name did you hear from the mouth
of Adam when you were first drawn
first painted into existence?
I want to say that name

© Jacob Friesenhahn

The Girl at the Door

by Rebecca Martin

Rebecca lives just outside a small Virginia city poised on the edge of the James River, whose waters run all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay. The four-hour drive from her house to the Chesapeake side of the Eastern Shore feels like coming home.

holds a sparrow
in her hands
the body cupped only
the head visible and still with
no undue wonder
in her eyes just a message:
I rescued a bird (from
our scrappy runt cat who
stalks for play
which we hate while also holding
that strange little feline with
our whole fragile selves)
I have a bird right
here in my hands my
daughter in the half open
door and I don’t think
to worry if the bird will free
itself and fly through the house.
Her sister across the room
and I look each other in the eye
and laugh disbelieving
this girl cupping
a sparrow safe as though why
ever not? Can you feel its heart
beating? I say. Is it very
fast?
She nods.
Yes.

© Rebecca Martin

A Blessing

by James Wright

James was born in 1927 in the small town of Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, on the border with West Virginia along the Ohio River, and he wrote extensively about the place of his roots.

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

© James Wright

Meadow Walk

by Monica Stillman

Monica lives next to the Pacific Ocean where a steelhead stream runs down from the oak- and sage-covered hills to meet the sea -- moving waters, migrating sand, and bird calls.

I wear morning glory
blooms for shoes
so as not to startle
nesting birds

breathe in spicy
warmth of sage

drape loose bees
around my shoulders, hum

pocket-full the flowers -
shooting star, owl’s
clover, pale checker mallow

brush thistle down
from my hair
with a lupine comb

count my riches -
a million golden poppies
crowd around

© Monica Stillman

White Irisette*

by Gregory Lobas

Greg started out on the North Coast area of the Great Lakes but has since migrated to the foothills of western North Carolina in the First Peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

They say we need more energy
here, that our pace will not keep up
with the pace of things to come,
that we will wither on the vine
if they don’t pluck the fiddle from the rivers,
the flute from the peaks,
the azure from these wild mountains
and stitch them up with towers and cables
like a suckling pig for roasting.
I pin my hopes on root hairs
needling through this red dirt
hard as the iron will
of bottom-line thinkers
pale green wisps,
slender brocade
trumpeting
its tiny victory.
Search the edges
of your existence,
the forgotten corners
of accumulation
where trifling things
repose. If you’re lucky
you may find it,
resilient,
composed,
here in light,
there in shadow,
like a slip of movement
at the corner of your eye.
But it hasn’t moved.
It has nestled
there all along,
between the things
you take and the things
you take for granted,
and you wonder
how on earth it got there,
how it managed
to escape your notice.

*The White Irisette is a federally-listed endangered species
of flower which occurs only in four counties
of western North and South Carolina

© Gregory Lobas

How to Grieve a Glacier

by Marybeth Holleman

Born near the Cuyahoga River just before it caught fire, raised in the Great Smokies near the rolling waters of the Upper French Broad, Marybeth transplanted to Alaska’s Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound—just two years before the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill changed her life trajectory.

It’s not something you can hold in your arms.
You can’t rock with its image in a blanket
and keen away the nearing pain.

That white face is distant, and cold, unrelenting
in its forward grind to the sea,
stalwart even as it thins, crumbles, pulls back
into history and oblivion.

The sun itself finds nothing to love,
save soft rivulets of water its rays release
from eons of hard frozen luck.

But I tell you I do love this blue-white giant,
and grieve its leaving, even as I thrill to watch
thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas.

So we sit, you and I, scanning the newly revealed
and imagining what next will show itself,
what balded rock and bared shoreline,
as ice slips and pulls away in great chunks.

We know it is leaving, abandoning us
to what our kind has created,
and we know its gift of rarified water
will only bring more sorrow.

Yet it is a gorgeous deterioration.
Its glowing face turned toward
what the living cannot see.

© Marybeth Holleman

The Birds Make Everything Okay

November 13, Anchorage, Alaska

by Marybeth Holleman

Born near the Cuyahoga River just before it caught fire, raised in the Great Smokies near the rolling waters of the Upper French Broad, Marybeth transplanted to Alaska’s Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound—just two years before the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill changed her life trajectory.

it is freezing rain and it is dark

and there should be snow but no

it’s not cold enough and the bears

are still awake and roaming our

neighborhood looking for food the

salmon and berries all gone and

the snowshoe hares have turned

white are bright against the brown

of climate change’s new order and

I think now of how many are gone

a quarter of them winged away from

us in just my lifetime disappeared.

but there are nuthatches at the suet

and one slips her beak into the ridges

of the gnarled willow, and there is

a steller’s jay winging in low from

spruce to snatch one last peanut,

and earlier I saw, scrabbling for grit

at the edge of a half-frozen puddle,

a downy woodpecker, bright red

crown nodding, yes, and he did not

fly off at my approach. he did not leave.

© Marybeth Holleman

Dispatch from Siberia

by Marybeth Holleman

Born near the Cuyahoga River just before it caught fire, raised in the Great Smokies near the rolling waters of the Upper French Broad, Marybeth transplanted to Alaska’s Chugach Mountains after falling head over heels for Prince William Sound—just two years before the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill changed her life trajectory.

They live and work along the northern edge of land
where ice touches down every fall, later and later now,
and not as far south, so that walrus—tens of thousands
of long-toothed soft brown bodies—have immigrated
farther north and now gather just outside
their towns, beach en masse and wait for the ice
which is later and later, so that these men,
with their wide stances and wider smiles, armed with nothing
but sticks and the sense that generations of northern living
have given them, pray to their spirits and protect those walrus,
at first from polar bears, moving in waves along the coast,
roaming wide in search of food, following scent of walrus
and then carried out on that ice, staying with ice as it
recedes so far that they have not come back, those bears,
to this shore, and are either drowned or starved or moved
to other shores, Canada or Greenland, where ice still stays near,
and now from curious townspeople and foreign tourists,
circling near and clicking cameras and causing stampedes
in which thousands, pups and their mothers, are trampled
to death, so these brave men, armed with nothing
but sticks and a belief in the world they inhabit, carry
the carcasses far from town, leave them to feed
passing polar bears, and the first year, over one hundred bears
came and ate every morsel, but since then, with the ice
carrying the bears away, the mound of carcasses remains
rotting on the tundra, on this northern shore
where these men, smiles as wide as ever, continue to believe.

© Marybeth Holleman

Zion Sleight of Hand

by Sean Stiny

A Northern California native, Sean lives at the intersection of coastal climate and rolling vineyards in Sonoma County. Outside his window is the daily corridor of Merriam's turkey, black-tailed deer, gray fox, and red-tailed hawk.

By the time we bellied up to the support chains along the final stretch of trail, it was late in the afternoon and we were the last on the cliff. The rain hadn’t relented and a light snow took its stead as we journeyed vertically. The chain-railed lifeline was dripping with rain and the Zion sandstone was damp under our boots. The rock wasn’t iced over so we deemed it feasible, if barely. One slip and jettison of that chain meant certain demise, as fifteen souls previous had realized. As the last hearty wayfarers to tempt the angelic vista on the day Spring consummated Winter, we made it a good way in, felt gratified, then turned tail to hitch a late park shuttle and finally back to the rental utility vehicle to warm our keisters.

A Spring snow proved a worthy display in the Southern Utah morning so we trekked into the high country until midday. Hiking with a white crunch under our boots brought a refreshing change of color and feeling to the ochre and terra-cotta familiarity. Making quick work of cheese sticks and mango slices at a powdery overlook, my wife and I (her a third-grade teacher on Spring break, me a corporate simpleton on PTO) headed to the crammed shuttle for its slow meander through the valley to stop six, the Grotto.

There we began to unfold Zion’s hallowed Angel’s Landing ascent on the first day of Spring, one which brought a sleight of hand with a touch of snow. Hiking permit in hand (er, phone), we sauntered up the sandstone cliff until our breath gave way (mostly mine) and we paused to catch it. Waterfalls improvised their way down every cranny, searching the path of least resistance to the canyon floor. Each cascade had a hundred doppelgangers to behold, a hundred veins open in the gorge, all gingerly eroding their bed of cold sandstone. Here, the rock so steep and dramatic culminates at a crest where “only angels might land” but humans must cling to a chain.

We devoured the soothing quiet on that vernal commencement. The brooks ran swift and icy with endless runoff. Thuds hit the white floor as the pine and juniper boughs sprang back to attention after releasing their weight of snow. A Redhead duck floated down the Virgin River, turning into the thin brown current for a meal seeking dive. We desired to devour it all, every pine, every sandstone wall, every mule deer, every clip of flowing water, every moment in the desert rain and snow.

One can only denigrate Zion N.P. by trying to put words to it. I should leave it at that, but I won’t. The Zion terrain is one hard to fathom, so high are the walls, so red and iron black, how can such a thing be forged from a mostly quiet stream plodding along its forest floor. How can a prickly pear take a beating all summer, then bundle itself in a coat of snow all winter. And the mule deer know the shuttle schedule better than we. Like when the tires brace less human weight late in the day, it’s ok to venture nearer the fresher grass adjacent the road.

If Zion touches the peak of natural splendor, then its Angel’s Landing trail is the peak of the peak. The much revered but oft feared (the end section with its chained hand rails) hike follows the canyon wall up and through a narrow stretch of pines that hold in their canopy a small number of Mexican spotted owls. That stretch, Refrigerator Canyon (little sun reaches the trail here), arrives at an abundance of harsh switchbacks which award resolute hikers to a lonesome vaulted toilet. Instant relief for those in dire straits. From there, the feared chain rail section begins and the acrophobia (heights fear) really takes flight.

Similar to the beleaguered Colorado River (where it flows through the Grand Canyon) and the tribal Havasu Falls, Angel’s Landing requires a permit, proof its explorers are competent enough law abiders. My inner Chris McCandless scoffs while my outer law-abiding self enters the permit drawing the day before and pays the six bucks. Putting government red tape on these wild places tamps down the crowds and raises dollars for shuttle fuel and Ranger salary, but feels the same as collaring a wolf or tagging a bear. That is to say, unnatural. However insignificant a six-dollar permit, it chokes a collar around the trail no different than one around a gray wolf.

As we released our merciless grip from the support chains on the pious landing and stepped back onto horizontal footing, a female mule deer ambled across the trail ahead of us looking for forage. She looked our way with disdain, then spotted a graze worth investigating. Back at the car we peeled our heavily logged clothes down to our skivvies and cranked the heat. A buffalo burger was surely deserved and, after a little pitter patter on our phones, we uncovered Bob and his buffalo burger trading post outside Springdale.

Bob’s defeated looking burger hid its remarkable taste. Surely worn from decades of use, the grill seeped a flavor into the patty that made us exhale with contentment after the first bite. Though, what Bob really wanted to tell us about were his pies. Not one to mince words, he turned to three tables in close proximity and announced, “Listen up, I’m going to describe all the pies to all the tables at once.” Key lime (fresh limes, apparently from Florida), banana cream, a peanut butter chocolate one, and his personal favorite, “Frickin’ brownie pie, cause there’s kids present!” Each table mulled over the options, some choosing banana or lime or both, and each choosing a slice of Bob’s personal favorite. He took the orders, turned to the kitchen, and with the children very much in earshot yelled out, “Three fuckin’ brownie pies!”

The advice of old Ed Abbey rings ever true in Zion. Leave your internal combustion behind, get a scant hundred feet off the road, and see the aimless crowds dwindle to nothing. There is yet still wilderness out there.

It’s difficult though to reconcile the wonder of Zion with the tailpipe soot we spew into its chaste air and the endless RVs searching for dumping ports for their sludge. If only the cell phone denizens taking iPhone polaroids from an open window would stay home, tap Google’s images, and save their emissions. But we were there too, on those shuttles, filling those garbage bins, spewing soot from our much-oversized rental. We all hate the crowds, hate the traffic. But we are the crowds, the traffic. Best to recognize and accept it and not fret too much as we wander the trails in our Lycra hikewear that screams REI chic.

Atop Angel’s Landing, Zion admonishes us with canyon walls endlessly inscrutable, a landscape that can’t be corrupted. Our wonder in their presence is inexplicable as it swiftly rises to a tremble.

© Sean Stiny

Tapestry

by Brett Warren

Brett lives on a sandy peninsula in the Outer Lands archipelagic region of the Atlantic Ocean, where she walks in the forests and edge habitats of the Wequaquet Lake watershed. Her house is surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—favored nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway.

The fawn’s head glows, sunlit in its bed
of fallen needles and leaves. The eyes

are gone. We pause to inspect it. Newborn,
maybe stillborn, little skull I could cradle

in my palm, stroke the damp fur with my thumb.
Instead, I find a stick and roll it off the trail.

Maggots veil the underside, this death already
swarming with life. A fawn is treasure, windfall,

found energy in the season of pups in dens,
when the odds are against new life, and endings

are everywhere, waiting. We know all this,
even believe in its rightness. And yet. This small

death. The milk-heavy doe, carrying her losses
as we carry ours, threading among the trees.

© Brett Warren

Willow Beauty (Peribatodes rhomboidaria)

by Ruby Shifrin

Ruby lives near rivers and flood meadows, predominantly an urban environment. But fox bark and owl hoot can still be heard above traffic.

Some say cherish the grief, eat it into you,
like the caterpillar savors Alder, Hawthorn,
Honeysuckle leaves. When it has filled up
and fed on all these greens, slivered memories
of brighter spring days, spun and hung in chrysalis,
it opens wings into the Willow Beauty moth.

Much of the day it rests on tree trunks.
You may not even notice its brown-grey wings,
their delicate central cross-line markings,
indistinguishable against the bark of Birches,
unless some breeze from the past causes them to ripple.

At night it seeks out Creeping Thistle and Ragwort.
It always flies towards any light held in your hand, or heart.
It transforms beyond dream in your mind, as you seek out
the dark garden, the emptied street, willing the moth
to find its soft rest on you, settle into the murmur of comfort,
of permanence. But that is not its habit.

Always it flits away, then fluttering, returns,
antennae always feathering the shadow.

© Ruby Shifrin

Wren

by Ruby Shifrin

Ruby lives near rivers and flood meadows, predominantly an urban environment. But fox bark and owl hoot can still be heard above traffic.

The rains have been heavy.
I watched the river rise,
inching up night and day,
flooding fields and streets.
I wondered about horses, houses
and safety, but not an uncovered
trash-can now full of rain
in which, possibly blown
by the minor hurricane
of the day before, the Wren drowned.
Not a fluffy chick,
so it didn’t skitter off the shed
roof—was it sipping a last drink?

Dead all the same—
its scimitar beak stiff,
eyes open but jellied,
legs stretched behind, stuck
in a final push for the trash-can rim.
It was already all over, that fawn
and chestnut brown flecked tail—
fanned like a hand of playing cards
already played.
Soaked, no air left under feathers
too heavy to beat and lift away.
I doubt the Wren pondered its fate
but strived, writhing through the water,
to live, until it didn’t, like all Wrens,
not wasting time on regret.

© Ruby Shifrin

Spirit Animal

by Connie Soper

Connie is fortunate to live in a city with many public parks and natural areas, not far from the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. She takes full advantage of the rich and diverse environment by walking and taking photographs in these special places.

When a whale dies at sea
it descends with quietude—in death,
feeding the life that once sustained it.
Today, another gray has washed ashore.
No whale fall, this—bloated carcass
buoyed by wind and currents, by the wake
of the ship that struck it.
We have come to witness this enormity,
gazing as if in the museum
of once-in-a-lifetime.

Scientists probe the corpse, exposing gash
and wound. They measure blowhole to tail,
teach us a whale’s heart can weigh half
a ton. That it sings to find
companions, swims the miracle of migration,
Arctic to Mexico.

How lucky we are, how small,
huddled around the barnacled
creature already in decay, bitten by sharks.
Skin loose and slack as a deflated parachute.
Its huge heart, withered within
a cathedral of bones, knock
knocking at the edge of the ocean, waiting
for king tides to reclaim it.

© Connie Soper

She Was Just Passing Through

by Linda Casebeer

For the past twenty-five years, Linda has lived under a canopy of 100-year-old trees in the Cahaba River Watershed near the end of what-many-consider the oldest mountains in the world.

that April day when I found her
unbloodied lying flat against cobblestone
on the most photographed Victorian street
in the city I was walking
two leashed dogs and pulled them aside
to keep from tearing her apart
she could have been any lady of the evening
a little tipsy an autopsy of her stomach
would have revealed sweet berry fermentation
a build-up of yeast like the alcohol measured out
to millennials who flocked downtown on weekends
for cocktail brunches at The Essential
she was brown and dove gray the aureolin yellow
saved for her breast she wore a mask
but easily gave up her identity with waxed red
wingtips and one squared-off brilliant yellow stripe
the museum had been calling out for her
one member in particular with a whistle
ending in a sigh he had courted her with hip-hop
and the ritual of passing a berry to her
with the hope she would return the favor
and she had but now this
I don’t know what killed her
it could have been rampant influenza
or an accident of attraction to the bright lights
big city nights or flying under the influence
in any case North America has three billion
fewer birds than in 1970
a fact researchers keep trying to analyze
they know it’s more than outside cats
for two years Bird Nerd Jessie Griswold
walked slowly at dawn looking down
at these same sidewalks plazas and lawns
collecting carcasses of over four hundred
warblers ovenbirds yellow-billed cuckoos
hummingbirds and cedar waxwings
at the same time she asked us all
to place dots on windows
maybe dots could have saved this lady
who knows but dead is dead
when I passed that way days later
her body lay dessicated
across that same bloodless spot
I scooped her up with a rustling green shroud
that would end up at the dump
I knew my memory of her would be twofold
her weight of less than an ounce
and the length of time her body had remained
undisturbed by numerous people walking
past unaware of the numinous

© Linda Casebeer

Romance to Spring

by Peter Neil Carroll

Peter Neil Carroll lives in the foothills east of Half Moon Bay where the wind off the Pacific keeps the heat waves away.

March the Lion approaches Equinox,
the willow wearing heavy chartreuse,
my lemon tree, massacred by deer

all winter, pushes its shoots skyward;
morning rain dissolves in black soil
around the young rosemary—

these lines I know read like a romance
to spring, but in four years past
such ecstasy sat in quarantine,

awaiting the day of liberation while
we humans waited for plague to arrive
in a day or a week or never or forever,

wondering if the trees survived who would
pick the fruit or remember those bare times.

© Peter Neil Carroll

Cyanide

by Carmen Germain

Carmen lives in a river valley on the Olympic Peninsula, the traditional lands of the Salish Sea Indigenous people.

A stonefly’s a good omen in water
But a stonefly won’t abide where it’s dead
Water. Sturdy black legs, gold-black

Body, sunset-orange on its wayward head,
How it greeted me on a trail, dust in its gills.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him—

Don’t clutch him as a god. Open yourself
To understanding all things. Like the Alamosa
With no soul left, flowing on red-scum gravel.

No rainbow trout flashing shallows where living
Is easiest, no gold eagles sailing thermals.
No spring hatch, no caddis, no golden stoneflies.

© Carmen Germain

Undone

by Michelle Morin

Michelle lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a mountainous oasis at the heart of the Great Plains that is sacred to the Lakota Nation. A scant 70 miles wide and 110 miles long, the viability of the area’s forest and watershed is currently threatened by powerful economic interests that include mining, land development, recreation and tourism.

Maybe,
when we are gone,
they will return:
the endangered, the threatened, the lost.

Maybe,
in some distant springtime,
their passing flights
will dim the sun with clouds of wings
that rain their calls
onto lush and undeveloped plains,
where the only thunder
that breaks the barrier of quiet
will be sage grouse
drumming out the rhythm
of life remade.

Maybe,
the myriad descendants of the few
will softly tread on shadow-roads buried deep
beneath the duff of vast and ancient forests,
as they make their way
to drink from vernal pools,
where blue-spotted salamanders
hide the beginnings of their young,
and leopard frogs
sing vespers in praise
of re-creation.

Just maybe,
in ten-thousand centuries,
when the light we made is all undone
and forever lost,
one of them, aroused from sleep
high among the lavish canopies
of boundless jungle,
will gaze into a midnight
made resplendent by the stars
and ask,
“What am I?”

© Michelle Morin