Vol. 7 No. 1

Summer 2024

Red Astral Uterus
Editor's Note
Albanian Folk Dance
In the Barn
Death Cleaning
How Everything And Nothing Changes
The Civilian Conservation Corps
Sunrise and Mountains
GPS
One Spoon or Two
Pando
Matching Blue
The Body of God
Annual Visit
Joshua Tree Yellow Flowers
Neighbors
Artichoke
Centaur
Epiphyte Lessons
Joshua Tree October 14 2023
Invisible Work
Loblolly Pine in August
Enthralled to the Dead
Nothing Compares
The world goes on
Why We Let the Striped Bass Go
Sunset in Joshua Tree, 2024
The Walker
shame and the way it hangs from the body like wet linen
Life Cycle
Unsafe at Any Speed
Today a River
This Man on the Street
Alder and Salmon
Induced by the Ice Moon,
Don't Look
At South Lido Park, When My Husband Has COVID
Ice Cave
Nonverbal Communication
The Making of Horses
Series: Asemic Metamorphoses of Space, (vers. 14)
What Noah's Wife Did
The Pregnancy Pillow
Sunrise, September Five
Even Though My Ulna Popped out of the Skin When I Fell off the 6th-grade Monkey Bar…
Loosdrecht schaatsen
Wood Ear
Foraging for Wine
Wisława Szymborska and the Wounded Angel
Bracken
The Forgotten Tree
If you could be any animal?
When My Mom’s Ghost Comes To Visit Me
Parent's Day
Blues
A Decade of Seasons I
Hairpin
As Highway and Bridge
The Drive Back Home from School with Mom
A Decade of Seasons III
Two Defenseless Haibun
Germination
Elevated Convection
Marigolds
Turbulence, A Zuihitsu
Harmony of Humanity: Evolving Empathy
Missing Persons Report #3
What's It Like To Be a Guinea Pig?
Desert Penumbra
Tangled Yarn: Abstract Elegance in Tufted Artistry, Where Fashion Meets Canvas IV
Keep Child Away From Window
Red Signs
By Water
The light at the end of the tunnel
Starting from Scratch
Bird Singing in the Moonlight
The mnemonic FINISH neatly summarizes the symptoms of antidepressant discontinuation syndrome
Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence
Bad Omens
This is My Impression of a Very Good Girl
Ordinary Nights
Dialogue with the innocent dragon

Artichoke

 While your curved blooms climb higher,
          the beets rest beneath layers of compost heat,
                    egg shell peels, and decaying newspaper headlines
          depicting a stolen girl, a crashed war vessel,
a new vaccine cure-all.

Hard as fists, purpling in the dirt, whether shoved
          in a corner where nothing else will grow or stuck
                    between wild catnip, you grow nonetheless.
          Many times, I have wanted to be you, privy
to the prying tongues of bees,

building layers of buttresses inside a thistle shell
          like a cathedral in wartime. At the center:
                    your heart; a relic, an alter with holy water,
          a treasure made from sunshine and pure rain trickle.
I, a bloom, a single heart-clutched hand reaching up,

a landmine field around me the color of bruises:
          the beets nursing from the dirt. I, a something to someone.
                    I, a word that means people live. I,
          tempered time, I, a scent that says I am ready
to leave, I am ready to see the ordinary,

I am here to survive. I have nothing in common
          with a family with their heads in the ground.
                    I am ready to mark myself as different. They find nothing
          from looking up at the sun, why would they?
Up at the distance between us, up at the color

          of sky’s undivided attention, up at the hungry eyes of bees,
                    up at the benevolent scans of birds searching for seed
          while I build my temple that tastes like sugar
at least to someone; while I open my mouth to drink.

Share!