no boundary, no bank or basin
where air is ambient water
a saturate, a cloud
where mosses swim, tethered by fiber
to the leafy canopy they populate
aerial dancers unlike the crouched tufts
underfoot on the trail
breathe the forest in
half-way up the mountain
where clouds press their wet mouths
to everything
where the dreamlike songs
of orapendula and parrot
loosen from their point of origin
to tint the air you listen into
the air that swaddles you
and disarticulates your will
(Reserva Ecologica Los Illinizas, Ecuador)
J. C. Todd’s current work explores the traumatic effects of war on women, both civilians and combatants. She is author of Beyond Repair, forthcoming in 2020 from Able Muse Press, and The Damages of Morning, a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist. Winner of the Rita Dove Prize in Poetry and a fellow of the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Bemis Center, her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Although urban cemeteries, parks and riverbanks are her most common wild spots, a recent remote wildness voyage was to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula.
