Red River Gorge

Somehow we find our way back,
diamond blazes winking stars in skies papered with bark.

Without our packs, we are wood thrush darts at dusk
along Rough Trail. All feather, soft and furious.

The last needles of light prick us
and we cry out to creek bed moss, to our nest

beneath the do not camp here sign
hammered into pine.

Our tent waits, water thumping
like the tail of a dog circling camp.

Cicadas play accordion rhythm.
Blood pumps, my body a sharpened weapon.

We call out mile markers, each a lottery ticket number
held in our fist. 4.5 miles. We count down the sun.

At Gray’s Arch, I don’t want the memory of a picture only.
In the orange light, you tear open a Clif Bar,

uncap the camera lens. Too much to capture,
sculpted by wind and water. Instead you beckon me

to crouch over white-haired goldenrods,
shy patches growing in sandstone shadow

below the navel of the arch. Endangered species.
The forest drains of light as we step over softened logs

to safety. We click on our headlamps,
snap high branches, pull trash from our pockets for a small fire.

We flicker, bright floret of a matchstick.
Smoke carries us into another day unzipped.   

Shelby Newsom is a writer and editor residing in Michigan. She is the Associate Editor and Social Media Manager at Autumn House Press, the Poetry Editor of Coal Hill Review, an Associate Editor of Deep Wild Journal, and a Fact Checker for Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She received her MFA from Chatham University. Her work has been featured in Flyway, Pilgrimage Magazine, Deep Wild Journal, The Hopper, and Hawk & Whippoorwill. Discover more of her work at shelbynewsom.com.

Featured image “Gray’s Arch” by Sean Underhill (filters applied) CC BY 2.0

Day Three in the Polar Vortex

The trees shoulder hoods of ice.
The rooftops sweat beneath sheets

in the great silence before cracking.
Just a few degrees + limbs
will shatter our shadowy footsteps.

We want jarring to emerge better
but keep eyes to the ground,

slogging the well-trodden
rather than risk

glassy white + toppling.
The trees bow their hoods of ice.

They want to emerge better,
to release the accretion
of days, the icicles that hang 

arrested while wings
slip overhead.

When not teaching, Devon Balwit stocks her Little Free Library and chases chickens in Portland, OR. Her poems and reviews can be found in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Barrow Street, Tar River Poetry, Sugar House Review, Rattle, Bellingham Review, and Grist among others. Her most recent chapbook is Rubbing Shoulders with the Greats [Seven Kitchens Press, 2020]. Her collection Dog-Walking in the Shadow of Pyongyang is forthcoming [Nixes Mate Books 2021] For more, please visit her website at: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet

Featured image by Devon Balwit

Hushed Voices

In the narrows we speak in hushed voices,
if we speak at all.
We follow the canyon’s contours
east, south, west, north,
in solid shade or white blaze

or light reflected once, twice
so that the very air burns crimson
and we burn too.

The wall is smooth, smooth, smooth
where the stream has buffed it,
or notched where rocks have pummeled it
in times of flood.
We run our palms along it.

We glide upon the broad backs of boulders
or crunch through gravel,
the sound a thunder in our ears.

Our whispers pool in the recesses
where the walls are undercut,
and evaporate.
We speak less, then not at all.
There is nothing we have to say.

We follow our feet
through curves and straits,
in and out the buttresses and bays.

Ah, my sweet wren! Cast your song
upon us like a silver thread,
guiding, goading us
ever deeper
to whatever confluence awaits.

Poet, essayist, and inveterate hiker Rick Kempa is founding editor of the journal Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry (deepwildjournal.com). He has edited two anthologies about the Grand Canyon, ON FOOT: Grand Canyon Backpacking Stories (Vishnu Temple Press 2014​) and, with Peter Anderson, GOING DOWN GRAND: Poems from the Canyon (Lithic Press 2015). Rick served as Grand Canyon Artist in Residence at the South Rim in July 2010 and the North Rim in June of 2013. rickkempa.com

Featured image by Rick Kempa

Helvellyn

Not the liberation I’d imagined – chest iron-banded
tight as a barrel, windpipe seared to wheeziness
and lactic acid lead-heavy in my legs. I lower
my carrier bag of sweater, sandwiches and drinks
and pause, my feet stretching the downhill side
of loosening shoes. I can only nod to a walker
whose taut legs, rucksack and faded shorts
rapidly diminish up the flank of Brown Cove Crags
and disappear.

I follow, haltingly, to the summit
then clamber on to Striding Edge, apprehensive
of the scree that seems to be frozen in a glissade
down to Red Tarn. No time to stay and enjoy the view:
shadow is creeping up the gentler path from Patterdale
and cirrus wisps are thickening from the north.
I scramble back to Helvellyn’s peak, then descend
the steep, still sunlit slope to my parked car,
overnight bag and tomorrow’s fresh-pressed suit.

Mantz Yorke lives in Manchester, England. His poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and e-magazines both in the UK and internationally. His collections Voyager and Dark Matters are published by Dempsey & Windle.

Featured image “Helvellyn: Striding Edge” by Michael Day CC BY 2.0

To Himself in April

(after Maurice Lesemann)

Ben Brenman Park, Alexandria, VA

The hard gray goose
is no longer hungry
a brief, living statue 
then boys arrive 
and ruin him.
He has seen tundra.
His moves do not
surprise you. 
These boys want
him clutched 
in their small
unforgiving hands. 
To feel the neck of him.
Perhaps he will escape,
perhaps into the lake.
What if the morning
forgives them for all
they will do?

Eran E. Eads was born, raised, and excommunicated from a religious wilderness commune in central Alaska. E graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and now teaches in the Washington, D.C. area.

Featured image by Derek Wright

A Date with the Moon: Limulus polyphemus

before dinosaurs
and flying insects
horseshoe crabs
drawn from the deep
at summer's high tides

Late afternoon in early July. The air is thick with heat as I join several others for the crab walk at Kimble's Beach on Delaware Bay. Sand crunching under sneakers, we gravitate toward the shoreline and our guide, in khaki shirt and shorts, wiry gray beard.

Beyond him, near the curl of crystal water, birds peck with long beaks for horseshoe crab eggs and sand flies. Large white birds behind us dot bleached snags and skim the jade-green salt marsh. Someone asks what they are.

“Birds!” our guide says without a glance. “I'm Ralph, by the way. Probably the only naturalist at the Jersey Shore who doesn't give a hoot about birds.”

He scans for horseshoe crabs in the purling water that licks the beach. These armored arthropods are why I'm here. As their May-June mating season winds down, I've come to help turn over crabs. And to try to imagine their peak spawning, on evening high tides under full and new moons . . .

ancient mariners
charting by light and dark
thousands
throng this beach
biological clocks ticking

First to surface, clusters of males wait, humps in the shallows. Egg-laden, each arriving female heads for the beach, releasing pheromones, the Limuli love potion. Males jostle to hook to the back of her shell. At water's edge, she digs, lays thousands of pearl-like eggs, and pulls her mates across to deposit their milt. They move on, do it again. And again, leaving each clutch to incubate in warm beach sand.

During the season, volunteers walk the beaches to flip any crabs left on their backs by the tide. “They won't hurt you,” Ralph tells us. “Pick them up by the sides of the shell – not the tail. If it breaks off, next time he washes ashore, he'll be a dead crab. He needs that tail to turn back over.”

The naturalist extends a lifeless male horseshoe crab and points out ten walking legs under its shell. Its first pair has pincers for grasping the female's shell. Not a true crab, he adds, it's more closely related to spiders and scorpions. A direct descendant of now-extinct trilobites.

Merostomata
legs attached to the mouth
mysterious
under your armor
in a class all your own

We walk, swatting at greenhead flies. An hour passes as I look in vain for a live crab to rescue. And listen to Ralph. To know when to mate, he says, some of the crab's nine eyes detect changes in moonlight. Even its spear of a tail has light sensors.

As we retrace our steps, someone spies dark shapes in the amber water. At last.

We watch in a hush. Markedly larger, a female digs into the sand with two males hanging on. A third, trying to attach, slips into the waves.

birds, turtles, fish
consume her roe
a few hatchlings
will live to follow
the moon

As a writer, Susan Weaver follows where curiosity leads her. Before retirement, she was a bicycling, fitness, and travel journalist and magazine editor. A dozen years ago she discovered the Japanese poetry forms tanka and tanka prose. In 2018 she became tanka prose editor for Ribbons, journal of The Tanka Society of America, and this year, its editor. Her recent work has appeared there and in Atlas Poetica, Golden Walkman, HARTS & Minds, Moonbathing, red lights, Zingara Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Weaver lives in Allentown, Pa., with her husband, an artist and writer, and their two cats.

Featured image by Susan Weaver

A Place in the Forest

                        (along the Appalachian Trail, Hardwick, NJ)

What can be done
with the love that is left
after a loved one dies—
for time is short
and love outlives
the living.

Find a place
in the forest
where the rocks are solid
and strong,
where the trees
endure shadow
year after year. Sit
among the leaves and listen
to the wind.  Sift the soil
through your fingers.
Feel
how the earth mulches

and richens itself
through the cycle
of seasons. 

So much is transformed,
so much remains—

for time is long
and love outlasts
the living. 

Find a place in the forest,
and take it there.

Elaine Koplow, retired English teacher and union organizer, is Director of the Sussex County Writers’ Roundtable and Associate Editor of The Stillwater Review.  A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in the anthology Voices From Here Volumes 1&2, Spillway, Edison Literary Review, Wawayanda Review, Adanna, Exit 13 Magazine, U.S.1 Worksheets, Tiferet, Journal of New Jersey Poets, The Midwest Quarterly, and elsewhere. 

Featured image by Derek Wright

September Night at Red River Gorge (I trace the stars alone looking for a warm memory)

You can’t see the sunset from the forest. Not really,
just a strip of orange behind a green and black stamped
sky, but oh, oh, the spot where the canopy opens.
From there, you can see the universe beyond a velvet leafed skylight.

Somewhere nearby, a father explains stars to his wildling daughter.
Those four stars, those three. Connect them. Can you see a bowl,
the handle? Uninterested, she runs off hunting fireflies.

Last year, we came later in September. The moon came out
of hiding much swifter than tonight aligning itself with an
old oak, a break in its branches, shining right onto the campfire.

It warmed with the wood you split with your hatchet. And the flicker
and twitch of flames curled up into smoke to tickle our eyes before
rolling on and up, up through the trees chasing starlight.

The moon is hidden tonight and fall’s chill sneaks ever closer.
You have wandered off somewhere for kindling and the dog followed.
I sit in a sinking camp chairs trying to connect three stars to four. 

Danielle Fleming was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, but currently lives and writes in Louisville, Ky where she lives with her husband and works as a therapist often using stories and poetry in her work with clients. She can be found on Instagram as @havendf or twitter @danismalley10

Featured image by Danielle Fleming

Autumn Soundscape on Gilbert’s Hill in the Time of Virulence

A band of colors
jazz the day—

copper, bronze
and butterscotch,

vermilion, carmine,
bittersweet,

descants of fluted golds
and mandarin modulations,

plum saxophones
and bongo reds

as if
our lives depended on it,

as if we needed to hear it,
the crimson defiance

and tangerine trumpeting—
I am a tree. I have no reason to fear that other blaze.

Pamela Ahlen is program coordinator for Bookstock Literary Festival held each summer in Woodstock, Vermont.  She organizes literary events for Osher (Lifelong Education at Dartmouth) and compiled and edited Osher’s Anthology of Poets and Writers: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years at Dartmouth.  Pam received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of the chapbook Gather Every Little Thing (Finishing Line Press).

Featured image by Derek Wright

Devil's Hole

Standing on a catwalk above a pool,
I look through chain link. The cage prohibits falls,
dives, or descents down sharp rocks for dips.

The pool once lay underground until
a violent shifting of earth exposed it to sky.
Descending into the cave's warm broth, several

divers once drowned in its deceptive depths,
one not found, like the hole's bottom, deeper
than five hundred feet. I stare at algae—

pupfish food—created when sunlight angles
in to touch a rock shelf during the longest
days of the year. As rising water swallows

more of the shelf, alarmed scientists study
a declining pupfish population. My cage
sways in hundred-degree wind, my eyes

hypnotized by green rectangles of wires
my fingers have wrapped themselves around. I hang
from them as inner waves make me crave

solid footing. The fish below zip
from shelf to rock face, oblivious for sixty thousand
years to the world reeling above, to the naming

of their home for a fallen angel, to
another species’ investing itself in their
protection. Vertigo, like time, spins me

above this ancient fissure where survival
within a deeper, warmer pool pertains
to us all.

Beverly Boyd taught literature and writing for many years in Southern California before moving to the Central Coast. Until the pandemic ended such gatherings, she curated a quarterly poetry reading series at a local library for ten years. Her poems appear in American Journal of Nursing, Healing Muse, Miramar, Poem, Slant, and Slipstream as well as in Voices from the Porch (Main Street Rag), Corners of the Mouth (DeerTree Press), and Still You (Wolf Ridge Press). She is co-author of Where Our Palms Rest (Coalesce Press) with poets Carol Alma McPhee, Joann Rusch, and Bonnie Young.

Author photo and featured image both by R. D. Bowlus.

Winter, Taking Root

A fugitive blue sneaks through
 the robe of dusk, mauve and purple
trembling in mist. Magnolias spy
 with cardinal eyes, and I eavesdrop
as stars hum a sickle moon into the sky.
 Abelia perfumes the air
and shadows calico the yard:
 Wait! Wait!
The edge of summer, the lip of change
 kisses this hour,
and we’re all bewitched by whispering
 stones and starshine.

KB Ballentine’s seventh collection, Edge of the Echo, is scheduled to launch May of 2021 with Iris Press. Her earlier books can be found with Blue Light Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in Crab Orchard Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also appears in anthologies including In Plein Air (2017) and Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

To Bloodroot Gap in February

  “You cause the wind to blow and snow to fall,” Michael M. Cohen, A Letter
From America            

At a powdery trailhead 
we strap on snowshoes,
tramp past a wooden lean-to.
Flakes settle like gnome hats
atop fungi sprouting
from birch, our own

black caps camouflaged
white. High among the treetops
a call and response, perhaps
a warning or a challenge.
The distant hymnal hum
of wind and river.

Niveous shawls cloak
bridges and brooks.
Flimsily blanketed conifers,
leafless poplars—clustered,
block the chill.
Mount Horrid looms,

moosewoods stand guard.
A dip in the forest
and a hand painted sign—
Bloodroot Gap. We pause
for water, orange slices,
bits of cheese.

Dusk approaches.
Through a flurry
we retrace our steps.
The earth—downy
soft and silent.

Laurie Rosen is a lifelong New Englander. Her poems have appeared in Sisyphus, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Beach Reads-an anthology from Third Street Writers, Peregrine, Oddball Magazine, and other journals.

Vision

I did catch a glimpse
Of the mountain peaks
Bathed in sun

They were white
And glittered in gold
The vast blue behind.

I am writing this down
So I don’t forget
The Himalayas came

To me this morning
And I was ready, for a moment
Before the snow melted.

Amlanjyoti Goswami's recent collection of poems River Wedding (Poetrywala) has been widely reviewed.  His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies around the world. A Best of the Net nominee, his poems have also appeared on street walls in Christchurch, exhibitions in Johannesburg, an e-gallery in Brighton and buses in Philadelphia. He has read in various places, including New York, Delhi and Boston. He grew up in Guwahati, Assam and lives in Delhi.

Featured image courtesy Wirestock.

Franklin City Park in a Pandemic

a park the size of a sonnet
where I shelter, close to home
with my pup; people pushed away
like same-magnetic poles as though

winter never left. I stop
to pick up a fallen poem on the path,
the puppy doesn’t understand,
sniffing at a social distance, so I tug him in;

the walk is bordered by an empty jungle gym,
a skeleton against an overcast sky;
a desolate soccer field, a baseball diamond
frozen in a Field of Dreams with imaginary

players; people peering through their windows
anticipating Spring, and reawakening.

Annie Klier Newcomer lives in Prairie Village, Kansas with her husband, David and Aussiedoodle, Summit. She has a poetry chapbook with Finishing Line Press forthcoming; Comets: Relationships that Wander.

Annie teaches poetry and playwriting at Turning Point, a Center of Hope and Healing for people with chronic illness. She is also a poetry editor and contributor to Flapper Press.

Featured image by David Newcomer.

DOUTHAT STATE PARK, MILLBORO, VIRGINIA, 1984

In two years he’ll be gone, and something
in her camera knows it. That’s why shots like this
are called candids. He’s surprised—or at least
annoyed—by his wife snapping pictures 
from one endof the small aluminum boat, 
its shine dull, but still a shine in the August
overcast. His jaw set, mouth a narrow
horizon tilting justdownward at its ends, 
perhaps indicatingthe Earth’s curve, 
an inkling of the vastjust beyond the here. 
We both wear sunglasses,because we’re fishing
in daytime, butwork the symbolism too,
if you like—I’ll workthe diagonals
slashing the frame every which way,from rods 
and lines, a sloping shore, the edges 
of the boat, his golf shirt collar. I’ll work 
how the lake has pieces of haze in it, 
and the sky has it all. I’ll work our hats. 
His:Piedmont Airlines, where he’ll work until 
they’re bought in five years, but his pride will persist 
for decades. Mine: Lockwood Carpets, where 
my step uncle sweats installation 
and delivery the summer before 
becoming a state trooper. I’ll work 
my father looking at my mother 
from behind the dark lenses, and her 
looking at him through the viewfinder, 
through which I now look, and try to help 
you see, too, though none of us see what’s really
there, except maybe our posture: his upright, 
vigilant, mine slumped, cupping the cork 
handles, marveling at monofilament 
unspooling into the man-made lake, how clean
its cast and easy its fall, how supple it lies
along the lake’s still and ashy surface, how
it threads the euphotic zone to the darkness
with such integrity, and it won’t snap 
with just any trout’s thrash, either. “Abrasion
resistant” reads the package, and perhaps that
is my awe, how smooth it remains regardless
of what it goes through. And I have since learned
about line memory, what every angler 
could use less of, when line sits too long 
on the spool, and curls, loses casting distance,
tends towards the tangle and snarl. But this line
lets me rewind and recast, straightens and flies, arcs 
and drops, sinks and rests and waits. It’s a good line 
with low memory. There are many branded
like that, but no such thing as one with none. 

Andy Fogle is the author of Across from Now and seven chapbooks of poetry, including the forthcoming Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. His work, including a variety of nonfiction and collage, has appeared in Anomaly, Blackbird, Gargoyle, Image, Pine Hills Review, and Right Hand Pointing. He’s from Virginia Beach and the DC area, and now lives in upstate NY, where he teaches high school and is the recipient of a 2021 Individual Artist Grant from Saratoga Arts to write poems related to abolitionist John Brown.  

Featured image courtesy Andy Fogle.

Expectation

[If viewing on a cell phone, please rotate your phone to landscape mode to see the poem as formatted.]

it takes ten weeks to plow

the Going-to-the-Sun Road

the “Big Drift” can be 100 feet deep deep silence in my head

rife with the possibility of a “quiet slide” sound of one snowflake

the snow is burdened with rocks icicles sear holes

from slides down 1000-foot cliffs in my heart’s stone

plow crews drive with spikes unspoken words etched

and chains on their wheels by frozen branches

over the narrow road burn red on winter skin

as sections are cleared cardinals streak to the fir tree

they are opened to cyclists kinnikinnick berries splash hope

and hikers first on a wall of unnamed feelings

after the steady crescendo of work cadence of life quickens

and speculation that started in April your voice emerges

the road finally opens in June from dense counterpoint

and guardrails are reinstalled of subtle lies and undisclosed truths

kinnikinnick flowers sing

an avalanche of wishes

cascades down the rocks

 
I string red berries on a necklace

to keep from going over the edge

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and lives in Kingston, Ontario. She has worked as an editor and also teaches piano. She enjoys taking photos and being active outdoors year-round. Her photos, poetry and prose have been published in various anthologies and journals such as Eastern Iowa Review, Poetry South, Sequestrum and Ruminate.

Featured image by Meg Freer.

Viera Wetlands

Arrive before
Atlantic sun skims wave crests golden
owls return to burrows
gator roars subside to lurks
sudden song scrolls bright
through green and brown swamp
and reedy wetlands where grebes,
and purple gallinules gather
in Monet-scapes of weavy-water.

Stay through
sparking pink and yellow and long-necked
silhouettes stalking
feeding fish and into
afternoon stillness
that polishes weavy-water
to mirrors doubling trees, reeds, clouds
and wings: soaring birds bring
late meals to nests.

Remain just
a bit longer until pink again
flashes into twilight buzzing insects,
humming with enthusiastic flurry.
Prey-seeking predators become
prey for night swimmers and flyers.

Time to leave.

Marian Blue’s writing has appeared in magazines, anthologies, and newspapers for over 45 years. Her writing often focuses on the natural world. She has work forthcoming in Snowy Egret and just had her newest book Sailing Off the Hook, a short story collection, published by Cyberwit Publishing in India. She retired from teaching writing in 2016 and currently lives on her small farm on Whidbey Island, Washington. www.sunbreakpress.com

Featured image by Cherie Ude

Distance as forest scape

It is here I find vines of longings;
not everyone can decipher geography.
I stumble on the protruding roots and
get my soul scuffed
I bleed hueless,
what becomes and what rises from nascency
of prayers is as different as ember and smoke
and similar like good omen and star fall.
It is difficult to reabsorb,
light streams through canopy set to bespeckle 
the emerald earth, this is the gorgeous metaphor 
I stepped onto to find your still economy
how my body contains your absence seem to be
a seed-burst wavelength synonymous to sounds 
of sad ghazals grown tall in you 
as if this is not the language that demands rent 
from tongues. Witness the water go through invincible
landscapes, how could I consent, theatrical tree 
shadows wrap me as if to make me lose the parts
of myself when called to moss of despair.
Nothing in the world thrives shapeless,
even bird calls can be sculpted like boulders,
fossils muck up their rhythms while winding patterns
as this tangled  tapestry opens up revealing
fragments of me emitting green flares of
intactness of you in me 
of me in you...
along wind that marvels, mouth 
of rain expanding fertile definition for 
distance breathing between us

Purbasha Roy is a writer from Jharkhand, India. Publication credits include Rigorous magazine, Golden Walkman magazine, Eye to the telescope, Teesta journal, The Raven Review, Everything in Aspic and elsewhere.

Featured image by Purbasha Roy

Hunting on the Potomac

Quiet morning, before the world rises
before I ate
breakfast, a rare occurrence
now - rarely awake before noon
either out of sadness or boredom

laid off and laid up, I guess.

But I heaved myself from bed to hike

wildlife management area, no - Accokeek
take the riverview trail, blue blazed
it’s already 85 degrees, 56% humidity 
air so thick it hurts

swamp weather for a swamp town

I’m sick of the news, thinking, being awake and inside
and a bumblebee passes by, hovering above the clover - 
on the farm in earshot a rooster crows

he’s late.

dawn was hours ago, I know
I forgot to put my blinds down last night,
east-facing window watching the rainstorm from
the 9th floor, lightning preceding thunder,
preceding panic, preceding sleep.

Out on the boat dock it’s still, the occasional
thump of a fish getting a fly

Then, pips and a screech -

bald eagle in the tree
I think - 

I don’t have my glasses and can’t afford binos

But I can tell the way it’s perched it’s hunting.

Because I am too - 

hunting for contentment

peace, quiet,
safety, nature,
love, rest.

And I ask it -

what is it you’re hunting for?

Katie Eber is a graduate of Fairfield University's MFA program and Roanoke College. Her work has appeared in Hobo Pancakes, MadHat Lit, Quail Bell Magazine, Spry Literary Journal, Sum Journal, DASH, White Stag, and Garbanzo Literary Journal.
Katie lives in the shadow of the Metacomet Ridge in central Connecticut, and served as the second poet laureate of Wallingford, and enjoys good beer, good music, and good sandwiches.

Featured image by Derek Wright

For an Anniversary

Love's histories aren’t mysterious.
In the Holocene meadow
slow carved by snow’s retreat 
kinnikinnik reddens at summer's end. 
Tall grasses press in where elk rest. 
Between shoulders of sun-flecked granite, 
sky colors expand in last asters 
and bee-throated gentians. 
Moss colonies marry water and rock.
By the creek, two homesteaders— 
clavicle and breastbone—rest under stones, 
half clutched by a conifer lost to lightning. 
Each night we lie down to disintegrate 
in the meadow, our lives make shadow paths 
like fallen firs sunk in grass,
bark peeled back to heartwood—
10,000 summers collapsed 
and held in sapling roots.

Radha Marcum’s first poetry collection, Bloodline, received the 2018 New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She is a graduate of Bennington College (BA) and the University of Washington, Seattle (MFA), where she was awarded the Klepser Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including FIELD, West Branch, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Iris, Chelsea, The Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Taos Journal of International Art and Poetry. She lives in Colorado where she teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

Featured image by Radha Marcum.