Night Hike, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Northeastern Ohio

Night Hike, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Northeastern Ohio

By Kristin Bryant Rajan

Three hours after sunset
we take the Buttermilk Falls trail.
The breeze is gentle
for Ohio in October.
The air heavy with sweet nostalgia
of how quickly seasons cool.
Descending deep into the woods
we marvel at the pantomime around us
how shadows and trees
hold more life at night.

We approach a mound of darkness —
you see a void — the anti-bonfire.
I see a heap of buffalo,
a sacrifice of sorts.
We both see a massive arrow piercing through the textured shade.
We find meaning in the dark shapes of the forest.
As we step closer, our focus sharpens —
a tree has fallen
pulling up the earth and roots with its descent.
We peer beneath ripped earth
the majestic tree on the ground.
Dark, cool, moist
the delicate sinewy strands of roots are white
like stars against the black sky of earth.
We sit beneath in silence.
This tree is protective
even when uprooted.

Kristin Bryant Rajan is a PhD in English, with a focus on Virginia Woolf, and an interest in the nature of identity in modernist literature. She currently teaches at a community college in Atlanta, GA and enjoys writing fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Her writing can be found in: The Watershed Review, The Explicator, The Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review, The Apeiron, the anthologies Moon Days: Creative Writing about Menstruation and Just A Little More Time: 56 Authors on Love and Loss, among others. She was chosen as a 2016 Pushcart nominee and Best of the Net nominee. She finds writing to be an extension of her daily meditation practice, opening her awareness to the wonders of each day.

Featured image by Vladimir Agafonkin / CC

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Spire Rock

Spire Rock

by Karen Berry

Spire Rock overshadows the Squaw Creek ranger station near Gallatin Gateway, Montana.

It rose behind us like broken grey teeth, a fortress
of upthrust granite, casting our cabin into daylight darkness,
our frosted mornings, waiting for sun, inching, climbing,
taking forever to get there, like the future. I came of age
in its stone shadow, dangling my legs over the edge
of a concrete bridge, the raging glacier-fed churn
of the Gallatin River foaming below, blue and white and beckoning.
I roamed alone, singing along with the river’s thrum,
watched the sun play with knives, the razor-flash of rays on water.
The stone castle loomed as I forged pined paths
of my own making, watchful of bears, moose, elk.
The highway was near, where I could stick out my thumb
and lose my life. I was only afraid that life would never begin.
My stone citadel was empty. It held no soldiers.
I stayed on the banks, basking on boulders, skipping stones,
spying on chipmunks, wondering at birds, dreaming of foxes.

Karen Berry lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Goblin Fruit, Indiana Voice, Napalm and Novocaine, and many more print and online journals. This photo was taken during the years she lived near Spire Rock. She blogs at https://karengberry.mywriting.network/

 

Featured photo courtesy the author.

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Yosemite

Yosemite

By Jeff Burt

People reported sightings of a wolf in Yosemite a few years ago, but no wolves exist in Yosemite. A park ranger reported the sighting as the hunger of people to have wolves in the park. I had the same experience.

I thought of raking the dark road’s gravel
with my tires on the highway in south Yosemite
shaking the weathered wheel in my grip
as the white wolf stood helpless,
eyes like new dimes in my high beams,
two feet on the brink of a cliff
and two feet on the brim of asphalt.
Not listed in the literature of the park,
the wolf did not twitch or scurry.
It stood panting as if pursued
by destiny or men to an evolutionary
end, and tired of both.
I slowed, crossed the double yellow line,
passed one yard away in peace,
the wolf too spent to threaten violence
and I too pleased to ask for it.

 

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California with his wife and a July abundance of plums. He has work in Nature Writing, Atticus Review, and Across the Margins, and won the 2016 Consequence Magazine Fiction Prize.

 

 

 

Featured HDR image of Yosemite National Park courtesy of maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com

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Eastern Neck

Eastern Neck

by Kevin Oberlin

Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge is a 2,285 acre island that is managed as part of the Chesapeake Marshlands National Wildlife Refuge complex.

 

Pant legs turned up she wades
out into the Chesapeake,
the marsh quiet around the cold inlet
 
like a dormant lung encased
in vines and felled trees,
remnants of winter,
 
the water’s pressure on her whitened ankles
less a pull than the soft suck of barnacles
on driftwood and broken rocks.

She submerges an amaretto bottle,
a bulbous fish she fills with sand and shells,
the round stones she has gathered,

a still-life captured in glass,
a costless substitute for a souvenir,
the purple label’s edges peeled back

from skin as she draws the bubble up,
water skimming the dark hairs of her arms
toward its free fall from her elbows.
 
The gift is not in this sip of ocean,
but how sunlight streams from her body
like a wing as she looks toward the shore.
 

Kevin Oberlin teaches at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash College, and is the author of the chapbook Spotlit Girl (2008).

Featured image courtesy of Keith Shannon/USFWS

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Breaking Trail At Roxborough State Park, Colorado

Breaking Trail At Roxborough State Park, Colorado

By Iris Jamahl Dunkle

There are days when life juts out red and raw
as sandstone.  Think: glaciers did it. Think: those
red teeth aren’t trying to stain your heart. Here,
the wild reeks of sage and pink blooms.  It hums
in the voices of crickets and bird song.
Unseen snakes spell away in the tall grass.  
But, still you walk forward toward whatever
vista you came to see. The meadow where
pioneer cabins and their stories fall
in on themselves.  Try to not get buried.
Even deer run, longing for home.

 

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the current Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA.  Her latest book is There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (2015). Her debut collection, Gold Passage, was selected by Ross Gay to win the 2012 Trio Award.  Her latest collection, Interrupted Geographies, will be published by Trio House Press later this year.  Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is on the staff of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.

 

Featured photo by Thomas Shahan / CC

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Point Judith, Rhode Island

Point Judith, Rhode Island

By Marjorie Thomsen

Point Judith is a village and small cape, on the coast of Narragansett, Rhode Island, on the western side of Narragansett Bay where it opens out onto Rhode Island Sound. The pond, created 120 years ago, is a shallow, four-mile long salt body of water lying behind barrier beaches and sand dunes. The salt pond is an ideal spot to glimpse the unusual occurrence of bioluminescence. 

On a overnight field trip with my son and his class,
the counselor says to lay flat with our bellies against
the damp wooden dock, our eyes over the salt pond.
The fifth graders can’t tamper with the October
stars or squish the almost-full moon. There’s clarity
to the night making the dock floor feel holy—an ancient
cathedral wall laid out beneath our jacketed bodies.


The counselor-scientist speaks firmly but softly
of plankton’s wonder, the gravity of keeping
our flashlights off. She pronounces bioluminescence
in the language of love. With strict instruction,
we stroke the surface of the water with the tips
of our fingers. Like a magic trick, the water sparkles
silvery light; boys cry out fairy dust! and inches
from our faces are the smallest signs of life.

Marjorie Thomsen is the author of Pretty Things Please (Turning Point, 2016). A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have been widely published and have received awards from the New England Poetry Club and The University of Iowa School of Social Work. Many of Thomsen’s poems are inspired from the south, where she was raised, and New England, where she currently lives.

Featured photo by Dan Connolly / CC

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Shelter

Shelter

By Gabriella Brand

“Shelter” was inspired by Assateague Island National Seashore.

 

At night we hear them.

Not a stampede, exactly, but a rush of hooves.

Determined, breathy, equine. Loud.

Noisy enough to jolt our slumber.

The grandson, a city child, not yet nine years old, squeezes my hand and whispers,

Will they eat the tent?

No, I say, explaining that the wild horses don’t care for the taste of 70 denier nylon.

We talk about the two roans we saw today, off in the dunes.

They were swatting flies with their tails and quibbling over the sparse grass.

Now we lie in the dark and listen to the waves rolling against the shore, slapping, retreating, rolling again.

Where do the ponies sleep? the grandson asks.

For this I have no answer. Maybe the rangers know.

The wind picks up, flutters the guy-lines of the tent, flaps our towels against the post.

The smell of fresh dung rides the island breeze.

The boy moves his sleeping bag closer to mine.

We lie awake for a little while, the two of us alone on this sliver of sand,

this shelter for the untamed,

splintered between ocean and dust.

 

Gabriella Brand’s short stories, poems, and non-fiction have appeared in Room Magazine, Poetry Breakfast, The Blue Line, StepAway, The Christian Science Monitor and in many anthologies. One of her poems was featured in the latest anthology called District Lines from the Washington,D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose. Gabriella divides her time between Connecticut, where she teaches foreign languages, and The Eastern Townships of Quebec, where she hikes and canoes. She has done several solo walking treks, including the 1500 kilometer path called the 88 Temples of Shikoku, Japan as well as the Camino de Santiago. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Visit her website, gabriellabrand.net

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Last Gaze on Desert Outlook, Grand Canyon

By Phillip Bannowsky

Last Gaze on Desert Outlook, Grand Canyon

Two desert ravens over Grand Canyon mating.
Black feathers, clear mid-morning blue,
an immense illusion
in colored bands drops below. They race
above the tourists near the rim
and fly out. Buff plateaux miles beyond
are the tint of Joanie’s skin. She takes pictures
as I gaze down the shrinking juniper and pinion pine:
a green rash upon the distant outcroppings. I gasp
at the height, the space, the falling
of ravens into it. Attacked,
one folds and tumbles sideways
towards the hidden
Colorado.
Endless seconds. The shiny wings unwrap,
catch the dry air and up, up, counterattack.
Farther and farther out they
spiral and dash
until lost in the whorls of heat or perhaps
my sun-dazzled eyes. I squint north.

The river
leaks from a hazy V and disappears.

Wiping the moisture from my lashes,
I turn to Joanie, a back-lit shadow in the glare,
and take her hand to leave, heading east.
At sunset the Painted Desert, tomorrow
the Pueblo ruins, and then the Plains . . .

When I sit again beneath the shade
of beech and poplar on White Clay Creek,
“How will I remember this?”

Phillip Bannowsky is a retired autoworker, international educator, and 2017 Delaware Division of the Arts Established Artist Fellow in poetry. His published works include The Milk of Human Kindness (poetry), Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, and The Mother Earth Inn (novel). He has just completed a novel in verse vignettes, Jacobo the Turko. Currently, he teaches English Composition at the University of Delaware. This poem appeared in issue nine of Dreamstreets,  August 1989.

Photo courtesy of the author.

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What the Fish Know

Ann DeVilbiss wrote this poem while spending time on the beaches of Lake Michigan, just north of Onekama, Michigan.

What the Fish Know

 

The morning lake

is a calm blue nothing,

soft horizon, reaching,

early light cutting

through small waves like

a net scrimmed over

the shallow places.

 

Our feet move,

pale clumsy giants, and

even the hungriest fish

skirt away, shy back

to the murky gloam

among the green reeds,

wait for

better quarry,

 

as if they remember

how we take them

inside our cheeks like

sins or secrets,

 

as if they remember

how fish drown in air:

 

first blood beads up

along the edges of the gills,

the neck flecked pink

with blood’s reaching,

then white with the foam

that gathers along

the heaving sides.

 

Their scales are

sharp as teeth when

we weigh them

in our hands.

Ann V. DeVilbiss has a BA in English from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Day One, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Pangyrus and TAB. She is the recipient of an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, which is supported by state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Louisville, KY. Visit her website, www.anndevilbiss.com.

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