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

Today a River

 (after Mountain River by Lisa Curry, oil on canvas)

My feet know the glass tingle of cold waiting there in water
that used to be peaked snowpack, views of cragged horizon. Born

in July, my body craves always sun-doused prairies and beach
sand radiating from footsoles upward like a griddle. Tree-

climbing brings my skin that much nearer sun. But not
all beauty is heat—some is fish-chilled—as if warmth equals rot.

To stay cool as snowmelt is purity liquified,
reflecting heavens—their snowishness of cloud

their crystal blue or black black spacecold speckled in starlight.
My ankles anticipate the leaden cold water there waiting to

weigh them to the riverbed, as if fixed into ice bricks—chipped
from Lake Erie’s January, wagon-drawn to hay barns. Calf-deep

I would wish I knew how to fly-fish, whooshing line whirligigging
round and round my sky to plunk sinker into frigid ripples

and tempt the icy bodies flickering there in silvery zags
and zigs. The mountain peaks will always be nearer sun than I am

and the redwood trees’ uppermost scraggly needles like
unanswerable prayers. Were I to scramble up those peaks

skree would slip and skitter down to the river. Were I to climb those
trees, resin would gum my fingerprints. Today I am low

in lavender frost of what’s grounded and underground. Sun tries
to green what needs to be green here. Today the water is

a river. Today I am a woman, feet on cold stone, face to sun.
I probably didn’t climb trees as often as I remember doing.

Share!