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

Alder and Salmon

The comfort of smolder tendrils over red flesh—
a salmon, deboned and fileted and arranged
atop a steel rack, gradually, ardently, inflames.

The poet chooses alder wood fresh from the edge
of Alsop Pond, the one the tree’s been sucking
as it spills its yellow catkins into April’s rain.

Cut into kindling, the timber bleeds red sap,
pleads once again to be a warrior shield or bowl,
but its destiny is to burn today and feed.

This poet does believe the first man sprang alive
from an alder tree long ago—both dripping blood.
A man who would trace to her, who would provide.

Sweet, wet, greenwood smokes what will nourish,
cures the rawness of an ocean into edible bits
the way the early crocuses soften a cold winter.

Caught in the smudge of a blackened alder’s soot,
the salt of the Atlantic is preserved, and the vigor
of muscle remains. The fish’s migratory perseverance
can retell a poet’s own history of resolve.

There lies the wisdom of the salmon—its story—
fluid-transparent, elusive, shadowy at best,

then, a clean evisceration, its skin pink, green, silver.
It’s been sacrificed to the hardened steel and fire,
but it’s still able to speak ancestral myths. Truths.

Through burned-blood fog, this is what the poet bites.

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