Wild Geese

by Wendell Berry

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

From Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

© Wendell Berry

The Last Flight of a Monarch

by Mary Padgen Michna

You circled the pine trees
that climb the dunes,
then swooped down
to visit milkweed
for a bit of sweetness.
You changed course,
flying over dune grass,
riding a breeze to shore.
I found you
in a mosaic
of sea glass and stones.
You left me
a simple message …
to not count
in months or years,
but in moments.

© Mary Padgen Michna

Forty Feet Up

by Dorothy Wall

In my tight-rope-walking slippers.
To look down or not. To look at all.
I could stay awhile, airy and suspended
above a brilliant sea-water green.
If I dove deep I’d drift
through a sweep of white-out
ashy and frozen as Pompeii.
Brain coral, lobed star coral, pillar coral
waving tubes, delicate fern-fans
crooked high-rises and tunnels
an architecture of bones
burps and gurgles stilled.
A ghost memory of nurseries, shelter
gardens of purple, mustard, pink, ochre
fish mouths grazing their algae coats.
All the wonders.
They could have continued.
They could continue.
They have a millennial patience.
A few, the hardy ones, still toss their larvae
as they did when wooly mammoths
stomped above, cloudy current-carried plumes
perhaps surviving
what’s coming at them
the funereal ash not yet
covering everything.
Wave-lapped and swaying
all of us hanging on.

© Dorothy Wall

Discussing the Anthropocene with a Jellyfish

by Joanne Durham

Turritopsis dohrnii can actually reverse its lifecycle…allowing the jellyfish to regrow themselves in an entirely different body plan – Natural History Museum, London

Your sting: my first memory – four years old at Wildwood,
screaming
as my father plucked each tiny trail from the ring

of red welted beads circling my knee. For years, I fearfully
avoided you.
But now I see you differently, often, sorry to say,

after you’ve expired, your translucent remains sunken
into sand, half naked,
half concealed. You might be surprised how hotly we humans

debate you – jealous perhaps that you survived
five extinctions,
while we busily prepare our first. Our plastic bags gag

your ocean home, strewn with our sewage, ravaged
by our greedy
fishing -- thousands of you clogged water screens,

shut down a nuclear power plant (we tried for years,
but did not succeed)
Your bobbing umbrellas offer tiny fish shelter in the deep.

But some fear your incessant blooms are upsetting
the deft balance
of the sea. Which is it, cnidarians?

Whether you are friend or foe, I want to know
about your near
immortality: how do we too make a clean start?

First published in Feral

© Joanne Durham

Goose Season

by Eileen McLellan

Fall arrives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with the first cold front from the north. Overnight the sullen heat of late summer is swept away. In the morning, I open the windows and feel the house – which has been holding its air-conditioned breath all summer – exhale. In the surrounding fields the cornstalks rattle as they dry. Only a month ago they stood triumphant, the soldiers of a conquering army; now they shiver in the wind, soon to fall beneath the blades of the combine. The fields that seemed no more than factories, planted and fertilized to specification, are reborn as habitats where wild things can live. I too can breathe again.

The next night I hear the clamor of wild geese.

It’s as if they know that the landscape has been transformed for their delight. By day, they can feast on the leftover corn. When they have eaten their fill, they can loaf on the edges of the hundreds of farm ponds that speckle the landscape, glinting in the low sunlight. At night, seeking shelter from predators, they can retreat to the larger ponds, the tidewater creeks, and the tidal coves where the Chesapeake Bay embraces the land. For the next few months, the gabbling of geese is an ever-present soundtrack, a low but unceasing exchange of goose gossip occasionally punctuated by the more vigorous honks that accompany squabbles.

The geese seem to be the essence of wildness. In their honking and yelping I hear tales of a distant land, of arctic ice and arctic foxes, of midnight sun, of a wilderness where no people roam. For they are the Atlantic race of Canada Geese, and they have spent the summer on the tundra of the Ungava Peninsula of far northern Quebec.

And yet their arrival here in great numbers – some 500,000 geese winter in the region —follows changes in farming since the 1950s. In those days, the Eastern Shore produced milk, fruit and vegetables for Baltimore and other East Coast cities, but the loss of farm labor, the ready availability of artificial fertilizer and the post-war emphasis on economic efficiency helped drive a shift to today’s fields of corn and soybeans. It’s ironic that this vast area of productive farmland is in many ways a food desert, in the sense of growing vast amounts of food for animals (primarily chickens) raised elsewhere and very little food that local people can eat straight from the farm.

The geese, of course, are oblivious to this.

*

On a grey morning in late November, I am jolted out of bed by the sound of gunshots. It takes a few minutes before I remember: goose season opens just before Thanksgiving, and I am living in what local boosters refer to as “the goose-hunting capital of North America,” geese are big business here. I’ve heard it said that farming geese is more profitable than farming corn, and indeed thousands of acres of the landscape are managed to attract geese for hunting. Hunters tell me that nothing compares with sitting in a goose blind on a frosty November morning, waiting for the birds to descend on fluttering wings into the range of the gun. “It’s the moment I feel most alive,”, one of them said.

A pity that a goose has to die for it.

*

As a volunteer bird rescuer, I see the other side of the story. Last year, in the days before Christmas, I got a call about an injured goose in someone’s backyard. “It’s just sitting there,” said the homeowner, “and it doesn’t seem right”. When I arrive at her house, the goose has wedged itself into a corner of the fenced yard; it is half-sitting, half-lying, with its head and neck stretched out. A frightened, injured goose can be quite difficult to capture, but this one has no energy to resist. I throw a blanket over it, and as I’m bringing it up against me to check for wing damage, I realize that blood is streaming down the front of my jacket. That’s the moment when I realize that the goose has been shot.

It feels like it takes forever to bundle the goose into a transport crate, wrestle the crate into my car, and begin the drive to the bird hospital – an hour’s drive under good conditions, but with the roads crowded with holiday traffic I realize that this trip will take much longer. Not for the first time, I wish I had a flashing light and siren that would mark my car as being on a mission of mercy, an ambulance for which a route must be cleared. In the back of the car, the goose is making whimpering noises. As sad as they are to hear, I realize that silence would be worse. I’m not sure that this goose is going to survive the journey.

Although as a scientist I’m trained to believe that what matters most for the planet is overall biodiversity, and that survival of a species is more important than the fate of any individual creature, it’s hard to look at this goose and not see it as a being whose life is worth just as much as the human lives around me. And, because geese are strongly social, it’s probably some other goose’s mate, or mother, or father, or daughter, or son, and I picture them grieving for it. The world changes when you look at it through the eyes of a goose.

I finally get to the hospital and hand the bloody mess of bird and blanket over to the veterinary technicians. There is nothing more I can do. As I walk away, I hear one of them say, “Clean shot,” which gives me some hope that this bird will survive.

*

As fall turns to winter, the geese adapt to being hunted. They quickly learn which fields are safe and which are not, and they spend increasing amounts of time at the local wildlife refuge, where the fields have been planted with clover, and the tidal creeks are rich in underwater grasses.

In the last week of January, as the end of goose season approaches, hunters become increasingly desperate, and the geese retreat deeper into the refuge. On the last day of the season, hunters are in a blind at the end of a spit of land only a few hundred yards from the refuge entrance. They are not allowed to shoot geese inside the refuge, but at the sound of every shot groups of geese rise into the air in panic. No doubt the hunters hope that some will drift over the refuge boundary and into range. But as the sun sets, and the hunters retrieve their decoys and put away their rifles, it seems as if every goose on the refuge takes to flight. Silhouetted against the red-streaked sky, hundreds of thousands of birds swirl in a maelstrom of beating wings, a vortex of birds that rises and then collapses, birds drifting down to reclaim the land and water in which they were so recently hunted.

A week later, as I drive into the refuge, I look at the blind from which the hunters were shooting. A pair of geese is loafing on the roof of the structure. One bird turns to the other, and I imagine it saying “Goose season, huh? Now it’s our turn.”

© Eileen McLellan

The Last Status Symbol

by Jenny Maaketo

When the world boils over
the heat of our consumption,
imagine who will be wearing

the last status symbol:
orbs of dew captured
in glass, dangling

from the nape and lobe
of the richest among us.
Instead of a Louis Vuitton,

the Estelle’s of our elite
will wear a plastic pouch
of water, clean and clear!

It will swing sophisticated
from a right elbow akimbo.
Embossed insignia repeating

double H’s and O’s
will be the watermark
for any thirsty among

us to read and weep from
the purses of few: I have water.
I have water. I have it all!

Previously published in the final issue of Ocotillo Review, which is now defunct.

© Jenny Maaketo

Who Escapes?

by Jennifer Phillips

An African Crowned Crane is on the lam in Washington State
— the Phyllis Diller bird. That hair! A local twitcher quips,
"This is the most exciting thing since the zebras
escaped the game park in North Bend."

But why does my brain slip to Flaco, the eagle-owl
that skipped the Central Park Zoo in New York,
only to smack off the side of a skyscraper?
Unexpected freedom confusing, heady, short.

Pain is my night-watchman with insistent crying
of the hours, sharp as rap of stick on stone,
backwards and forwards, through the miasma of dreams,
calling, "It's 6 a.m. Get up. You can't be dying!"

But of course we all are — caught in between
struggle and freedom on our dizzying flight,
the line between hope and panic hazed and foggy,
and the ache of escape that wakes us in the night.

© Jennifer Phillips

The Spell

by Demian Entrekin

I have found a place
a short walk from the house
where I can remain still –
a wooden bench
warmed by the morning sun.
(The rains have not yet come.)

Sheltered by the news stand
from the din of the street,
it’s on the western rim
of the Bay beside the dock.

Ferries arrive – depart
providing signs of travel
in the shape of a rumble,
plumes of diesel smoke
which swirl black and vanish,
and a wave or two
against the rocks. 

From atop the staircase
which leads to the lunch spot,
lone gulls cry out like children –
declaim their sadness
amidst such simple beauty.

Women tend to come here
in pairs and tell each other stories
of where they’ve been –
where they’re headed
and what has been the cost.

As for me, it is a chance
to disappear for a while, for once then
to come away with something.
By noon, the sun crosses the roof line.
The spell cools and is gone.

© Demian Entrekin

October Spill

by Demian Entrekin

Despite the leaves, the bits of plastic, 
the cigarette butt, something comes through.
Shafts of sunlight awaken in water.
The surface is no longer opaque.

Frantic, Coast Guard skimmers still try
to clean the surface in the distance.
There are reports of swimmers
washing their shoulders with gasoline,
and I am here – dreaming over the edge
of the pier – 
a jellyfish
appears through the thin skin,
a milk-white pillow of thought
making its way unencumbered
by the gravity of it all,
an idea of the world billowing
in its freedom, its own
absence of will.

© Demian Entrekin

Epoch Tree

by Leslie Warren

Reclined, reflecting
at 11,000 ft.
air rare, wind sharp
stone shattered
palm presses into skin
feeling
the slow pulse of sap
a breathing being
ancient beyond imagining.
Born as the pyramids rose on Giza’s plain (2481 bce)
here before the Neolithics set stones at
Stonehenge (2200 bce)

here as the Maya practiced agriculture,
mathematics and created monumental structures
(2000 bce)
here while the sages emerged from deep
meditation to speak the Vedas (1500 bce)
here as Zeus' thunderbolts pierced the Greek
skies (1300 bce)
here while Buddha revolutionized religious thought
with teachings on mindfulness and relief from
suffering (600 bce)
here before Plato and Aristotle conceived of
demiurge (387 bce)
here when Yeshua preached love and compassion
(28 ce)
here before Paul declared the Jewish Messiah and
molded Egyptian tales into the cult of resurrection
and salvation (60 ce)
here as christianized Emperor Constantine
enshrined God, empire and the patriarchy. (306 ce)
here while the Prophet Mohammed unified Arabia
and North Africa under the Islamic caliphate (632 ce)
here as Omar Khayyam imagined geometry and
calculated the solar year (1048 ce)
here as civilizations crumbled before the merciless
violence of Genghis’ armies, (1211 ce)

here when China's great Treasure Fleets traded porcelain and
silk across the known world (1410 ce)
and Europe rose in the Age of Exploration and the
Renaissance (1500 ce)
here while the global industrial revolution leveraged
steam, coal and water to shift hand production to mass
production (1840 ce)
here before fossil fuel and deforestation increased
atmospheric concentrations of CO2 (2025 ce)
the effects of which
will cause
this Bristlecone Pine
to breathe its last.

© Leslie Warren

Fisher

by Barbara Parchim

the fisher travels in the dark
even when it is daylight

as secretive as mycelium
creeping through the understory

as quiet as the serrated feathers
on owl’s wings

no rustle of fern or salal –
spirit-like in his blackness

he is a shadow easily missed
at home in the trees

an acrobat over our heads
when all we hear is our own footfall

his is almost a parallel universe –
solitary wraith in deepest forest

even if we never see him,
he is here, carrying his own story

we save space for the invisible –
home ground for what is possible

Previously published in the Ashland News

© Barbara Parchim

At the retreat for vets, we head into the woods

by Ron Riekki

when it gets bad, when we’re haunted, and we’re
haunted often, it seems, we who are here, handpicked
for our fears, nightmares that come in waves, or maybe

come when we have no water, no nature, when we’re
caged in city—an Anishinaabe elder telling me to go
to forest for rest, any time I need to escape the insanity

of city—and so we are here, surrendering to oak, maple,
dogwood, leaves of red, yellow, orange, green, brown,
that fall because it is Fall, a fall like we fell, or, well,

how those we served with did, gone, died, for-
ever, and we are here, to remember, and forget, and
remember. I don’t know. I get confused. My pre-

frontal cortex disconnected at times. My life, so
similar. My memories, fragmented. But the forest
is so still and so whole and so grounding, and they

have us actually sit on the ground, telling us to feel
the earth, telling us that studies show if we’d just
get down on the ground that emotions get regulated,

simply by allowing our body to feel the earth’s
vibrations, its calmness, its holiness, and so we do,
we combat vets and vets with military sexual trauma

and vets with missing fingers and missing legs and
missing hearts and missing those we knew who were
so young and so gone and so quiet and how death

takes everyone eventually, but how we were not
ready yet, teens, wearing camouflage that comically
didn’t hide us from the environment, and such an

odd thing to want to hide into—nature—but it’s what
we’re doing now, hiding, but at the same time, trying
to be seen, by God, saying, We still exist, and we do

and we cry rain and we breathe wind and we sit like
oaks, being told to straighten our spines and to feel
our lungs and to appreciate our breaths and we do

and we smell tree and we feel wet earth and we
are calm now, all of us, I notice, all of us with
all of our traumas, bringing them to the sky and

we try to let them go, but hold on, but, also, let go,
if even just a little bit, a little bit, and a little bit more
just now, and a little bit more, and I swear one of

the cloud takes one of my horrors and promises me
it will carry it so far away that even time will no
longer be able to find it. I pray my thanks silently

© Ron Riekki

Lizard Music

by Doug Barrett

Came back from pissing and found her peering over the back of my rock chair.
Had she been reading over my shoulder?

She stands erect, hands resting on the back of my seat, white underparts presented to me
fine hard little white mouth.

I lean against my side of the rock, put my face down to her
and we talk.
Still she stands, alert to what I'm telling her, making a plausible pretense of getting it.

Now she politely drops down to all fours, hind legs sprawling behind, relaxed.
Could pick her up if I wanted.
Why don't I?

Because I'd never see her again.

You say “her.” How do you know it's a female? Did you check?
No.

Smooth head scale-plates bulging backward over the nape.
Fashionable herringbone jacket: white on black on tan.

Now flips around, faces the other way and sits
very still.
Quantum leaps.

Head down, staring into a crack
flips around out of sight
now peeks back over the rock

pulls herself up and squats, staring out to the west with me.
Then flips up onto the rock's back, scratches chin with hind foot
rhythmically, like a cat

scritch scritch scritch scritch.
Very loud.

Young red-tail comes flying around the hill at eye level.
She scans it.

Breeze comes up, mocking and geometrical.

Now she flits around the rock. On the way, stops and
scratches again

just for a moment
scritch scritch.

Now sits very still, at random intervals
cocking head this way
and that

looking out westward while I write this.

Have to go now. May I see you again, little pulsar?

No.

© Doug Barrett

There Will Be Leaves

by Marianne Werner

There is a certain waiting
she says

her rake scratching among the few remaining garden plants.

The lawn has not been visible for weeks, a yellow carpet
of ash leaves smothering every blade of green, oak and maple
scattering deep red, amber — prelude to haunting season.

A certain waiting

for a tree understands the moment of its releasing —
temperature and daylight determinants.
Shorter, colder days mean less chlorophyll so other pigment
appears, cells gathering around the leaf stem until the leaf falls.

Such predictability is rare
she says

a happening we can depend upon —
those delirious moments of autumn —

cool crisp days; a dog rolling in leaf piles;
the slow tremor of color; burnished leaves
wind-floating; sun deepening golden hues.

This transition is necessary                             she says

as she rakes despite knowing there will be more leaves
tomorrow and the next day, until the wind blows the last leaf —
silhouetted tree branches barren against darkening skies

the preface to winter essential so dormancy can settle in,
chlorophyll self-enriching, deliberate and unbreachable—

this shedding exactly what we need.

© Marianne Werner

Valley Heat Wave, September

by Ann E. Michael

Barn swallows bicker
in the garden under
the too-hot sun.

Wind could be sirocco,
heating surface soil,
scattering pollen not sand.

We wait for rain
in drought’s third year,
our valley changed.

Green ash and beech
going the way of
elm and chestnut.

Even the deep-rooted
stretched near breaking,
and Earth a skillet.

We didn’t think very
far ahead when wagon
trains rolled west,

when men felled oaks
and lodgepole pines,
tilled soil for wheat

or when locomotives
hammered rails and
bridged wide rivers

as industries sludged
swamplands and
rimmed the Great Lakes…

We wanted it:
refrigeration, oil,
electricity,

warmth in winter,
tap water, tropical fruit,
berries off season 

and the swiftness made
possible by highways.
Our human webs.

What good is complaint
that comes too late and lacks
a passionate urge for change?

The wren scolds
whenever we come near.

© Ann E. Michael

Ancient History

by Ann E. Michael

Looking across the water
as a few yellow leaves
float on a quiet surface,
it’s hard to believe Lake Huron
in Neolithic times
was not a great span of water
stretching to the far horizon but,
archaeologists say,
a vast grassy plain
where herds of caribou
or some ancestral bison
grazed and trampled,
hunted by humans.
Long before our time
people lived among whatever
thrived here before water
overtook the valleys
and stony shelves.
The melting ice loosed
vast floods until the lake
settled and what survived
moved off in that
slow evolutionary push
we think we understand—
we who pose theories
and map the past but cannot see
what’s been changing
in our own lives.

© Ann E. Michael

Drought and Blood

by Ann E. Michael

Wild cats get most of their fluids from kill, it says here,
and drink water less often than non-predatory creatures

yet my friends who’ve been to Africa show me photographs
of lions and cheetahs eagerly slurping at watering holes.

I could ask my daughter, a veterinarian, if what I’ve read is true,
but it slips my mind whenever we talk.

Instead I ask about her apiary, her garden, and whether
pinyon beetles have arrived in the Sandia Mountains

the way emerald ash borers have come here, ravaging
deciduous forests as woolly ageldid killed hemlocks years ago.

Trees experience pandemics and plagues—chestnut blight,
Dutch elm disease—winnowing, by the score.

Five years now, our verdant valley’s sustained drought,
green ashes crash to earth, unable to endure the stress.

Feral cats with FIV and leukemia, dogs with parvo or rabies,
add: all our human maladies. Evolution, or ecocide?

The answer doesn’t matter. I won’t be here to see the outcomes,
but as my cat laps at a rain puddle—thankfully, some rain—

I recall the fat bank vole he caught this morning,
filling his body with blood, as predators do.

This is how it happens.
Where there is drought, there will be blood.

© Ann E. Michael

The Privet Hedge

by Cristina White

On a Wednesday in June, an orange truck pulls up in front of the corner apartment where we have lived for nearly twenty years. A fellow wearing jean and an orange vest over an old shirt gets out of the truck. He has a long, narrow hose in one hand and he begins spraying the low privet hedge in front of our place with a clear liquid. This is the same hedge another fellow trimmed two days ago. All along the block, all the hedges were trimmed to a uniform height, and another fellow trailed behind to gather and bag all the cut leaves and branches.

Now there’s a fellow with a spray gun. Is that water? I ask. No, he says. It’s to keep the hedge from growing. It will stay just like this, he says. I don’t say anything more. I don’t ask why—why kill its growth? I don’t ask because I think I know the answer. They’re doing this because whoever sends orders down to the boss probably figures this is a way to increase the bottom-line profit. Those two men—the one who trims the hedges and the other one who bags the hedge trimmings—the company won’t need them anymore. The company can fire them. More money for the company—for whoever owns the company.

It takes only a few minutes on the internet to learn that there are now “growth regulators” for hedges and shrubs—they block the plant hormones that stimulate growth. They can also prevent “unwanted” flowering. The brand with the most links to its product claims to reduce “...trimming, pruning, and clean-up maintenance by 50% or more.” Fifty percent more for the company’s bottom line.

The privet hedge will no longer sprout new leaves and pretty, white flowers—those flowers that the bees visit each spring, hovering over the blossoms, sipping nectar and gathering pollen. There will be no more nectar to turn into honey, no more pollen to cling to their tiny beings. Those mighty pollinators will find no welcome here. The natural cycle that has continued all the years we have been here and long before we moved here will be no more.

There will be no privet scent to sweeten the air. No butterflies fluttering over the hedge. No bees sipping nectar.

No more privet blossoms. More profit.

© Cristina White

On Paddling

by Brie MacDonald

For three days, I rise with the dawn. Bundled and barefoot, I push my board out just far enough that it can float freely before I clamber gingerly aboard, kneeling as I paddle slowly past the stilts of the deck rising above me. The still silence of the bay greets me. Which is to say, the sounds of the waking world emerge gradually into my consciousness as I glide further into its depths. The soft swish of my jacket and whoosh of my paddle parting the water as I propel myself forward. The hollow lapping of the ripples against my board as I pause to take to my feet. The shaking feathers of the buffleheads as they perform their morning ablutions. The near-silent pop of an inquisitive otter’s head breaking the surface.

The first day, the sky is an autumnal grey as I paddle towards the opposite shore. My judgment, when it comes to distances, is suspect at best, but I estimate it will take perhaps thirty minutes of diligent paddling to make my way across. Thirty minutes later, I have come abreast of Hog Island. I had judged this landmark to be the halfway point, and I wonder, not for the first time, how I could have so woefully miscalculated. A tickle of anxiety climbs my spine. I am already so far from land, from the rented cottage, balanced precariously above the depths of the bay. I twist carefully to look back towards the shore I have come from, then forward again towards my destination. I make the mistake of looking down, of peering over the edge into the murky water and pondering how high above the floor I may be floating, what possibilities lie between myself and the bottom. (My fear of heights, the twin to this fear of depths.) I wobble as I waffle, clenched muscles vibrating as exertion and adrenaline twine together. As I turn back, I tell myself it is not just an irrational fear driving me back against the current towards the safety of our temporary home. I tell myself it is at least in part to spare my sleeping lover any anxiety over my delayed return; to avoid any mild skirmish or silent judgment over the time I have taken for myself; to ensure all remains smooth as the glassy waters of the bay.

The second day, dawn’s famed rosy fingers are combing through the morning cloud cover as I begin my journey. While the sky admires the perfection of her reflection in the glass-topped bay, I point my board south, having decided to travel towards the reedy shallows rather than risk the disappointment of another failed crossing. I stay closer to the shore today, not quite hugging it, but within reach should I need the reassurance of that embrace. My heart thrills as an otter surfaces nearby, gazing at me quizzically before submerging again. I kneel to wait, keeping my eye fixed to the spot, willing it to return, yearning to feel again the zinging awe of connection with something wild and unknowable. Those first moments of breathless wonder and hope dissipate as the waters remain unmoved by my silent, greedy pleas. And so I stand and paddle on, reaching the beds of eelgrass in the shallows of the bay. I begin wielding my paddle less forcefully, taking care to avoid the delicate moon jellies that slip and dip past me, luminous against the dense green spears of waving grass. When my paddle eventually lodges in the silty marsh sand, I lean into it, leveraging the weight of my body to push back out far enough to turn my craft for the return voyage. I breathe deeply, brackish marsh air giving way to a lightly salted breeze as I pick up speed. I carry the peace bestowed by my morning communion with the bay back to my lover like a gift; like a renewed understanding of the beauty of his safety; like an apology for forgetting sometimes that he is not the one who hurt me.

The third day, buoyed by my burgeoning sense of comfort and familiarity in this glorious new routine – and with the wistful knowledge that this is my last chance – I shove off from the shore, resolute. Today I will make the crossing. My heart beats quickly, rat-a-tatting a tune of mild panic as I once again reach the center of the bay. I glance sidelong at Hog Island, but this time I don’t look down, don’t stop to let the fear take hold, don’t stop to calculate time or consequences. I race against it, my shoulders rising in tension as I feel its soft breath at my neck. Closer, the shore is coming closer. It feels like an age has passed, but I am built for this. I am built for endurance. Built for survival. Built for powering through the discomfort and the pain and the fear and the uncertainty. Built to keep going, to keep my eyes on the prize, to not exactly forget that the worst can happen (has happened), but to risk it all for the promise of beauty along the way. The nose of my board finally nudges the far shore and I leap to the sand, triumphant. I survey the beach I have conquered, pristine sand littered only with driftwood. Later, I will learn that this is a sanctuary accessible solely by watercraft, and so protected from casual hikers and day trippers and their detritus. (I did not need to know this to make the crossing worthwhile, but it feeds the part of me that relishes the novelty of my experience.) As I make my final return, the fluttering of my heart is full not of fear but exhilaration. It thrums with the knowledge of my survival. I have survived not just the dangers of the deep, but my own fear of continuing despite them. I will return to my lover with renewed confidence; with joy at my great good fortune to be wildly alive in this complicated world; with the reminder that we are privileged to be on this journey both together and alone.

I do not yet know that in one week’s time, a swimmer in the area will be taken by a shark, the attack witnessed by his horrified friends. When I see the story come across my newsfeed – and when my subsequent Google searches reveal the mouth of my beautiful bay to be the feeding grounds of the local Great White shark population – I will be momentarily paralyzed by retroactive terror at my recklessness. I will wonder whether I would have dared to journey onto the bay, or whether that knowledge would have kept me on the shore. Had I known what lurked beneath the surface – so close, so unpredictable, so deadly – would I have ventured out into the glorious morning mist? Would I have missed the otter, the jellyfish, the buffleheads? Would I have given up the secret sanctuary at the end of the crossing?

I have had my world upended by the chaos of a silent secret lurking beneath the surface of my life, unseen and unannounced until its shattering revelation. I have tried to make friends with the shark, to coax it into a different shape, into something else, into something safe. I have told myself I was not naive to paddle out into that water in the first place. I have given up and moved on, put the pieces on a shelf. (Not back together.) Had I known what awaited me – so unexpected, so devastating, so irrevocable – would I have turned and walked away? Would I have missed the joy, the pain, the child? Would I have given up the me that I have become?

I breathe deeply and pick up my paddle. My lover is waiting.

© Brie MacDonald

Brown

by Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki

A horse is a beautiful thing
The world is just a map
of all of these things, really
Somebody holds it in their hands
Not me, I have one glass eye
and a livered tongue
The horse is called Chocolate
What do they eat when the grass dies?
How many more can we bury before we run out of room?
Better to burn the bodies
to dust
than lay strangers
on top of one another
in a strange embrace
We mustn’t speak of the soil
Cloying
It sticks to the back of the spade
and the roofs of our mouths
and makes mud out of words
Hovering
over the stagnant water trough
Sycamore seeds floating
Dangerously close
to the truth

© Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki

MUST

by John Cornish

Manifest, Juno Populonia
is dying, the smell of must in the air.
Above, dragons roar, billowed by the heat
of their breaths. A rainbow in the west
pretends relief from the smokey loot
of us human firebrands. I walk
in the bosque, seeing her, smelling her,
remembering her, aghast at leaves
yellowing in June, the Rio Grande
riverbed cracked dry six weeks, no seventh
week of respite. The pheasant and grouse
are gone. The balloons and the mirage
discolor horizons over which
all life will fall, the piebald magpie
sky counting one for sorrow, the seventh
for a secret never voiced. Cottonwood
bark, cast to ground, curses us,
we snaking toward must like we are gods
resting after making our destiny.

© John Cornish

Inside the Heat

by Mark B. Hamilton

In the tedium
of paddling
to each separate
patch of shade,

to each
leafy shadow
where everything
stays the same,

I am moving,

although there is a real loss
in the in-betweens:

a white pelican
tangled
in old fishing line
eludes me easily
when I try to help,

and a big catfish
is running out the line,
springing the hook
in the night
from its spool
and is gone.

A deadfall
nestling in the mud
nudges the bank,

my body
an imagined shore,
the cool evening
breeze a mere breath
in the mulberries

so juicy and tart,
all I need
is one, or two.

© Mark B. Hamilton

Amelia Earhart

by Mark B. Hamilton

In thistles
a wild canary
flits above the prairie
where I visit
her childhood home,

on a knoll
of the breezy
Kansas sky,
host to thunderstorms,
tornadoes
and other-worldly hail.

The blueness
burns through my skull,
cramps my muscles,
and stiffens my torso
taking my breath away.

Beneath these thoughts
of her wings,
I have never
been afraid
of the heat before.

I’m existing
as a hollow-
eyed presence
through the afternoons

under the sun
in my tent,
hoping to emerge
from my
little sweat lodge

to keep paddling
toward thick-walled
dome-shaped
earthen homes
of the Mandan,

cool in summer
yet warm
in winter’s blue freeze.

© Mark B. Hamilton

A Decision

by Mark B. Hamilton

By now, I’ve probably seen
most things at least once,
and that should be enough.

The water, the trees, the heat,
camped in the mud,
washed by the grit
the entire way across
the state of Missouri,
and surely the remainder
would be more of the same.

So I sit on the bank
thinking of a good way
to end my journey,
this drudgery of paddling
hour after hour,
to decide how much
history and nature
is enough.

Admittedly,
I want to avoid suffering
the additional fatigue
and a possibility of heat stroke
on this river corridor
urging me
continually westward
from sunrise to noon
to sunset.

I sit in the woods
staying a bit cool, thinking
how it might be OK
to stop here, at this point.
How it would be
a justified completion,
a clear satisfaction
after four hundred miles,
while sitting on this bank
listening to my thoughts
rationalizing
a way to quit.

There are so many more
upstream miles left
from here, at Kansas City,
where the river turns north

into the shade
for most of the day.

© Mark B. Hamilton

In The Bhagavad-Gita

by Mark B. Hamilton

I pluck
little plump jugs
of tart juice
dangling in the shade.

Under mulberry trees
my company is the fish,
the snake,
and a turkey up in the woods.

I’d be lost without them
just captured by the heat,

the jabbering
insects and locusts
and grasshoppers click,
click, clicking into waves,
hopping from stem to stem
in a chorus of dry snaps
in the brush as I pass.

Thousands of them
on twigs and stalks of corn
rattling their wings
and legs, flowing away
from my searching bow
nudging forward
with its rippling sound.

Carried
by this huge beast
crackling in the golden hay,
I move in tandem
on its bosom of grace,
my ego ringing
with animism.

Is it my vanity
to realize this belonging?
Or is it my awareness
that escapes into words?

© Mark B. Hamilton

Intercession

by Tamara Kreutz

Bless the wilderness
of my body, the surgical scars
I bear from each birth—roadmaps
of healing. Bless
my teeth and eyes and ears.
Bless my heart and lungs. Bless my children.

Bless the volcano at the town edge,
as flames crawl across her skin
from slash and burn gone out of hand.
She will be fine. One day,
she’ll be green again.

Bless the baby boy who wails to life,
while three floors below, poison
drips into the vein of my friend
with cancer. Bless her
own little boy.
Bless the poison
and the hope it brings. Bless both
children. Bless both mothers.

Bless the slow stream
of what was once the river,
it’s mud-cracked shores, scorched
by drought. Bless the dirty trickle
of water dragging through the riverbed
like blood through a collapsed artery.

When the rain arrives, bless it.

© Tamara Kreutz

Ebb Tide Baptism

by Emily Teitsworth

Sand squeaking beneath my feet, shoals
of fool’s gold guarding sparse colonies of sand crabs
half-buried at the water’s edge

Five months pregnant now, my body
like a waxing moon or a bent-back bow
not quite ready to sing

Kelp glides against my calves, the water a little too cold at first,
a visceral no, the slimy fingers of the sea grasping at my breath,
the waves always too big up close and then

Limbs and core adjusting, balanced around the half-life inside me,
judging the sets as they arrive, timing each dive so the wave breaks above me,
rolls down my back, a sliver of silence followed 

by whitewater’s crash in the already-distant past swirling behind me
So many summers spent chasing the line-up, sunburnt, heartbeat
against my clavicle when the cry of “outside!” echoed up from that row of faces 

squinting towards the horizon, the waves you can sense first and then see,
everyone swimming hard to dive deep before the sea cracks, the current pulling up and out,
an aching affinity for darker depths, then the gravitational roll back towards the shore

© Emily Teitsworth

Collecting Dried Herbs

by Cristina Farinas

I’ve collected seed heads from the coriander,
left them in paper bags to dry—
upside down, stems bound
by a yellow rubber band.
The fallen seeds rest in a white bowl
with dry leaves I should have cut at harvest.

Tweezers wait to pluck seeds from leaves,
drop them in a glass jar.

In the bowl, a tiny spider spins
an invisible web from branch to branch,
floating, landing on a stem
attached to a round seed.

Every shake dislodges
more spiders with the dried seeds,
their world upended, falling into the bowl
like dust caught in threads.

I work around them, granting a few more minutes—
hours, perhaps— of life,
release them outside
with the chaff.

The living
among the dying.
Seeds. Spiders.
You.
Me.

© Cristina Farinas

The Moon In Its Quiet Work

by John Brixter Tino

I watched it lift above the pines, pale as a coin worn thin
by fingers. It had business with the field, with the damp
grass bending under raindrops. I stood at the window,
my breath a small fog on the glass. The moon moved
through its hours the way a nurse moves through a ward,
touching everything lightly, changing the color of sleep.
I have seen it work the lake into silver, pull the tide’s long
hem across the sand. Tonight it finds the clothesline, makes
each shirt a ghost. I think it knows my roof, the crack where
water entered last spring. It lays its white hand there as if
to seal or bless. The dead receive it without flinching. The living
turn away, draw curtains. I remain, watching the yard become
a place I do not recognize, the fence posts casting shadows
strict as sundials. A bird shifts on its branch. The moon touches
its closed eye. I feel the weight of all it illuminates pressing
gently on my shoulders, the way snow will press a branch
before the branch gives way. In the morning I will find the lawn
returned, the trees familiar. I will drink my coffee, say nothing
about the hours the moon held me, about its slow, deliberate
passage across the faces of my children, who slept through
it entirely, their mouths open, breathing.

© John Brixter Tino

The Wood Ducks

by Karen McAferty Morris

She hovers under the nesting box
set a few yards from shore over water
rippling in turquoise and lapis.

A miniature duplicate face appears
in the oval opening and peers down
at its mother and out into the world,
black eyes set inside a comet of white.

After a stop to purchase apple cider
from a highway stand, they urged me
to take the trail to see the wood ducks,
take a break from my long drive, the male
is known for his brilliant color, they said.

Warm sunlight and cool shade flicker
on the deadfall-studded path
of fallen beech and maple leaves.
And then the pond is just ahead.
It sparkles and stretches out of sight
within a swirl of trees.

The iridescent drake is there,
but his brilliant hues are outmatched
by a flutter from the nesting box
as the duckling launches itself,
free-falls feet first, wispy wings outstretched,
splashes down beside its mother,
then two more crowd the opening
and leap, one after the other
with the polished confidence
of the Flying Wallendas,
and more and more leap out,
feeling their first taste of the clean, thin air,
the strange buoyant surface.

© Karen McAferty Morris

The Fall

by Pam McFarland

The oak and juniper
stand in silent reproach
communicating grief
through their roots,
Can nothing be done?
as the men come with
their bulldozers,
their pipelines
their oil
to burn and desecrate
all that is sacred,
a home still,
still alive with songbirds
the baby coyotes and mother bears
who drink from the clear waters
beside ridges of sage and brown,
to come to build a wall
to keep out those who don’t belong
in the land of the great,
a land no one wants to visit.
These men who lead
build monuments
to themselves
believing they are immune,
but the trees know
as they scatter to the ground
You too will fall.

© Pam McFarland

Regatta

by Nick Bryden

Where do I go as Dad lurches toward stagnant-slow?
Collecting no-good-news-forever
Perpetual dog days like divine punishment
For hellish youth.

But Hell cowers low
As he still sings strong in his living room
Tall even without painter’s ladders
And never bargaining with the fall.

Only eye-contact-confrontational,
Staring as I’ve known him to
At words I can’t say
And places I’ve never been.

Every October he’d take me,
Wrapped warm in mornings,
To the Cedar River.

Cold even in the summer,
Its swift-blue seemed impossible by autumn.
But still we’d watch,
As if suffering had no hold,

Salmon swimming upstream to die
So their young might taste green water
And dog days under a more generous sun.

© Nick Bryden

Storm Warnings

by Claire Adderholt

Fog radiates cherryhill across
Eclectic cemetery stones. Birds
Take to air, alarm
Bells ringing.

Something glints out of the dark.
A silver quarter upturned in break
Of earth.

Wind picks up as if rising from a nap:
It stirs in the grass, wary watcher, and then an echo
Of animals follows the stir. Above, gray-white sky
Turns over like sheets churning in a washing machine.

Something cold is coming, and
Picking up speed. Landscape shifts
To bleed sheens of blue, brown,
Wounded silver. Muted tones submit to winter’s cruise
As it banks hard to starboard and comes into port,
Cracking the glass-bronze glaze of fall.

Blue mist enters, seeps, settles.
Here it is: rain framed by lightning.
Thunder singes the skin of the land,
Burning water across pavements and streams
To crackle on river and graveyards.

Damp of shine, quarter in the grass:
All sound is storm.
Coldflash! - Repeat.
Fall dies with an asthmatic wheeze of defeat
And collapses on the cemetery stones.
A crow breathes last in the shortgrass.

© Claire Adderholt

Domestic Geese

—for Mary Oliver

by Rebecca Lawton

You do not have to be good.
You don’t have to walk
on your knees, repenting,
but you do have to survive

for now, the burning
and ice crimes and sparrow
fledglings swallowed
by a neighbor’s cat.

You have to live with prairies
and deep trees, all on fire,
tend your garden though
it fades. Not all of us are
Jesus on the cross—
some of us have to live on.

Some of us hook fish
and bake loaves, as rivers
die like friends who rowed
ten thousand miles beside us.

Some wait longer for a ferry
the gods say we must catch.
Some wait on and when
at last we go, we carry plovers,

one in each palm. We bear
the passenger pigeons
and seaside warblers,
hold hands with mothers
whose sons died in war,
remember our father’s ashes

because he asked to
go home. Not every goose
migrates now; some trade the wild
for year-round nests,

though the stars align
to guide them and their
autumnal hunger remains,
their place forever fixed in
the ephemeral family of things.

© Rebecca Lawton

Ginkgo

by Charlotte Melin

Let the end be
like the leaf drop
of the ginkgo—
all in one day
the yellow fans
falling softly down
from that ancient tree.

© Charlotte Melin