emerge from winter cocoon into daffodil spring, the cracking of bones & ice and the slush slipping from pine— the yawns & shhs emerge— duckling dawn earth cleans her scars this way: lifting & washing under the folds, fresh cotton flapping like a surrender to the restarted zodiac, to the irrational golden fleece of Aries unshaven despite the warmth— how the tides deliver a new salt to upper lips, an emerging, a dusting out of all coughs cooped by winter; the pages aren’t clean, the pages aren’t even pages, they’re still trees, still grand along the yet-unbroken sky ! the pinnacle of her year exists in cool mountain runoff the blue dunk & minnows along curious toes after a long creek-side stroll, the relief of the stretch and the new dogwood petals that ferry their way to a better tomorrow, to a brighter ocean shore.
Cassie Hottenstein is currently between Denver and Jacksonville, mountain and ocean. Her poetry and stories have been featured in magazines such as Boulder Weekly, the Talon Review, Every Pigeon, and the Tampa Review Online. When she’s not writing poetry, she’s probably playing Animal Crossing or doing someone’s taxes in exchange for money and tasty peanuts.
Our east coast minister-philosopher leaves god at the railroad station in a brown satchel. Pandemic hikes are recommended, with caution, then canceled. The national state of emergency boards up restaurant, book store, strip club, theater, and bar amusement. The three sisters mountain peaks legend stands. We keep busy online, with books, at the liquor store, and in laundry rooms. Our gender flows like freshwater tumbling from moss.
History Storm | XII
The White House garden buds red and green peppers from Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) language debris. Yellow Post-its dedicate classic innovation to you. Dialectic court calls the whale out to the sacrificial field. The online devil agreement signature line is chosen. We have eaten Emily Dickenson’s grave squash flower. Death shrugs from a Hyundai.
Illuminati
Nearly a century of global economics, two world wars, a cold war, site specific global economic wars, and pandemics and there are still no masterminds, only groups of fumbling narcissists with resources.
Michael Rerick currently lives and teaches in Portland, OR. Their work recently appeared or is forthcoming at Clade Song, COAST|noCOAST, Epigraph Magazine, Graviton, Mannequin Haus, Marsh Hawk Review, and Parentheses. They are also the author of In Ways Impossible to Fold, morefrom, The Kingdom of Blizzards, The Switch Yards, and X-Ray.
I remember being seven years old and still loving Iowa spring, believing it to be all cheap gingham and wild onions sprouting. But as I grew I learned that to be a child in promised Iowa spring is to feel sentimental and uneasy. We would return to patterns marking the nurturing rhythm of time familiar: full brush piles, vinca vines blooming, cicada choruses at sundown, lilac bushes spilling over. And with these easy April lullabies came those subliminal spring hints, trailing towards adolescence, hidden in the blossoming, the ripening. Spring pushed childhood forward; we all became wiser when the monarchs returned north. When the soil thawed from months of winter frost, I would kneel in my garden, rusted trowel in hand, knees muddening while I ripped through roots, sent worms wriggling. Trying to dig a hole deep enough where I could hide from spring and remain a child forever.
One day while I was digging I spotted through the soggy loam a flash of moonwhite, smooth and still. It was a perfect stone of life, a bird’s egg whole and glowing. The egg remained cupped in my care for over a week, placed in an old shoebox under the lightbulb of a table lamp. Every day I checked on my dear April lullaby, waiting for it to hatch, and I announced to everyone the news of my beautiful egg, my baby bird-to-be. When I told my elementary school teacher, she invited me to bring my treasure to share with the class. I knew my classmates would be so envious of the springtime life I carried, and I so packed my little egg to bring to school with me the next day.
I wish I had known how fragile those little stones of life tend to be. It seemed that all the resilience of my bird-to-be was spent fully on its fall from the nest. Certainly not enough left to survive a ziploc bag inside a child’s backpack. When I went to my cubby to get my egg, I slowly unearthed a sickly yellow mess. I held my ziploc high to examine the moonwhite shards, jagged and crumbled, yolk lumping thick in between. I shoved it away and went to the bathroom to cry. To mourn. I had killed my April lullaby, my cheap gingham and wild onions sprouting.
Seasons don’t slow for a shattered bird’s egg. Iowa spring kept passing through; each year the monarchs would return north, and I would cry at their beloved homecoming because I didn’t want to get any wiser. Yet my body grew too big to fit inside any dug up garden holes. I could not stop the blossoming, the ripening; springtime would come to welcome my first training bra, my first kiss. The uneasiness of Iowa spring paired cruelly with the sweet smells of chopped lilac in the kitchen vase, a vision of childhood sentiment. And in the thick of that tiptoe towards adolescence I would think back to my precious egg, imagining a world where it had hatched. I dreamt of my bird growing radiant and strong, big enough to carry me away, so that we may leave spring behind and fly forever towards Iowa winter, chasing those months of still and freeze where life remains unchanging.
Carson Schulte is a senior at Luther College studying social work and Spanish. She grew up in Iowa and recently moved to Denver to complete her social work practicum. On days off from her internship at a child residential treatment center, Carson enjoys knitting, baking, and snuggling with her cat. She is an emerging writer in the field of creative nonfiction, with work forthcoming in the Oneota Review.
It would seem to me
that in the vast
underground kingdom
of the anthill, along
with burrowing and
tunneling, heaving and
hoisting, fending off
outside invasions down
to the very last ant and
conquering rival kingdoms
with no mercy (and all
the various other assigned
tasks and roles from the
home office / H.Q. of
the collective hive-mind),
surely dreaming must,
also, be an
essential
civic duty.
Jason Ryberg is the author of thirteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is The Ghosts of Our Words Will Be Heroes in Hell (co-authored with Damian Rucci, John Dorsey, and Victor Clevenger, OAC Books, 2020). He lives part-time in Salina, KS with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Image: Frog Concerto, Mark BlickleyImage: Bobbie Oliver
“I don’t want to go to school today, Ma. I don’t feel well.”
“You felt well enough to stay over Lamont’s house two hours past your curfew, playing video games. Now get up and get ready for school. And I mean now, Gregory John Burton!”
The boy jumped out of bed. He knew that when his mother called him by his full name instead of the familiar Greg, she could not be argued with and was primed for the yelling that would most certainly alert his father and bring him into the conflict.
As he scuffed his way towards the bathroom he thought about explaining to his mother why he had distracted himself to the point of disobedience at Lamont’s last night. They were both trying to erase the fear and anxiety of what was sure to be the most horrible day of their seven-year education the next morning.
His father flung open the bathroom door, his waist wrapped in a purple towel as he delicately dragged a large comb through his thinning brown hair. “It’s all yours. How’s it going, Sport?”
“Terrible,” answered Greg. “This morning we’re going to cut up a frog. Yuck.”
His father paused his grooming to put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Greg. I remember not being too thrilled by the dissection my science teacher forced us to do, but he reminded us that we don’t kill the frogs, that they were already dead. And if we didn’t learn from their sacrifice, then their deaths were wasted. He also told us to pretend that we were surgeons cutting into a patient. It turned out to be quite interesting.”
“Yeah, well the only cutting I’d like to do is to cut class today. Dissection’s disgusting. I mean, there’s already enough violence in schools.”
“I suppose you have a point, Greg. I remember reading an article about that serial killer who cut up his victims and ate them. What was his name?”
“Jeffrey Dahmer?”
Yeah, that’s him. Right before the prison inmates killed him Dahmer gave an interview where he said that he became fascinated with blood and guts when his school gave him a knife and a dead animal to cut apart in biology class.”
“Gee thanks, Dad.”
His father made a silly face, scooped him off the ground and tossed him into the air. The squeals of delight coming from the boy temporarily made Greg forget about the brutal day he was about to endure until his sister Carol, hearing her brother’s screams of pleasure, trotted into the living room and demanded that her father also give her the chance to go airborne.
Greg’s four and a half block walk to school took on the pace and enthusiasm of a killer being led down death row for a private sitting with an electrician. As he turned the corner he saw Kostas, Selim, and Pascal climbing the steep steps leading to the school’s entrance. When he shouted at them to wait up he thought that they, too, had a sickly look about them. The four of them silently scuffed their way to the classroom.
Everyone except Regina Boloff was inside and in their seat. Greg didn’t think Regina would show up. Every time Mrs. Worton would give a math or spelling test, Regina would wet her pants and cry. When this happened, Mrs. Worton would send for the school nurse and Regina’s mother would come to pick her up and take her home. The day afterwards Regina was always absent.
As Greg settled himself behind his desk, he noticed Regina walking in. This worried him. Because of the terrible importance of the day, even Regina’s embarrassment couldn’t allow her to stay home, and she certainly had made a huge mess the day before during the math quiz. But what really bothered Greg was that none of his classmates (or himself, for that matter) bothered to tease her. The class looked as if their thoughts were a million miles away.
Mrs. Worton strolled in and put on a big smile, even bigger than the smile she gave when the class presented her with a large, multi-colored paperweight, shaped like an egg, for Christmas. Trumella Austin’s father took the seven dollars and sixty-four cents the kids had raised and picked it out for the class from the stationary store he owned. Greg thought it was a beauty.
Behind his teacher’s smile Greg knew she was nervous too because she took roll call before the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Nothing was mentioned about what they had to do in a matter of hours.
For the first time all year the classroom hours sped by. The clock read 10:30 when Mrs. Worton ordered them to lay down their pencils. She then distributed 11×15 sheets of construction paper to each student and told them they were to use it to create a frog map that they would fill in as they dissected their frogs.
Greg raised his hand. “What do you mean by a frog map? I don’t understand.”
Mrs. Worton looked sternly at Greg. “Had you been turning in your homework regularly the past two weeks, Mr. Burton, you would have known that the handouts I gave out in class were to prep you for this project.”
“Why do we have to cut open a frog?” whined Regina. “What’s the point?”
“The point,” said Mrs. Worton curtly, “is to satisfy national standards for sixth grade introduction to organs and organ systems.”
“I get all the info I need about organs and organ systems by sneaking on to my father’s Spice Channel website,” Hector whispered to Greg. Both giggled.
“Hector, is there something you’d like to share with the rest of the class?” asked Mrs. Worton.
Hector shook his head.
“Very well, then. As you cut away the layers of the frog’s anatomy, you will record your findings on your frog map. Everyone draw an outline of a frog using the markers I placed on your desks before you arrived this morning.”
What followed was the greatest shock in a day already filled with much tension and apprehension. The frogs that Mrs. Worton handed out to each student weren’t dead and pickled, but alive.
“Oh my God,” said Habib.
“Gross,” said Sophia.
“This is gonna be cool,” said Badra.
“Your frogs have all been anesthetized so they won’t feel any pain,” Mrs. Worton smiled.
“I bet,” muttered Greg.
Mrs. Worton heard Greg’s remark but chose to ignore it. “The school paid extra so that we could observe the organ systems of a living frog,” she said rather proudly. “Before we begin the actual cutting, please weigh your frog and measure its length from snout to vent and record this data in the lower right hand corner of your frog map.”
Greg waved his arm. “What’s a vent?”
“Had you been studying like the rest of the class, you’d know that the vent is the cloaca.”
“The what?” shrugged Greg.
“It’s the ass, you ass,” whispered Badra.
The moment Greg’s hand squeezed around his frog and felt it inhaling and exhaling, he wanted to run outside and set it free instead of lining up in the back of the classroom, waiting his turn to use the scale. But he figured what would the point of freeing it be? There aren’t any ponds around here. It would just get squashed by a car or some punk would shove a firecracker down its throat.
After all the students measured and weighed their frogs and returned to their desks, Mrs. Worton pulled her desk to the center of the room to talk them through the surgery while slicing up her very own frog. “Our first step will be to decapitate the frog with your special dissection scissors and then pith its spinal cord with the pithing needle on your tray. The frog will twitch. Pithing greatly reduces the incidence and intensity of muscle contractions, thus simplifying the dissection.”
Most of the class scrunched their faces with revulsion as they followed Mrs. Worton’s commands.
“As you hold the frog’s head, “ continued Mrs. Worton, “squeeze it with your thumb and index finger to open its mouth for easier insertion of the scissors into the mouth. Hold your frog against the tray with your palm as it may twitch while you are decapitating it.”
Greg did as he was told and placed the lower scissor blade inside his frog’s mouth while the outer blade rested on the back of the frog’s head. Without applying much force, he was surprised how quickly the head was severed from the body. His frog twitched and contorted so violently that it jerked out of his hand and fell to the floor, where it flopped about like an awkward break-dancer trying to spin into a finale.
Mrs. Worton hurried over, responding to the many shrieks of disgust surrounding Greg’s desk. “Didn’t I tell you to pith your frog?” she asked.
Greg just stared at her as she picked up his headless frog and dropped it onto his tray. It continued to twitch. She handed him a pair of forceps and ordered him to lift the skin of the abdomen with them before cutting into the skin, from left to right. Greg made an incision with his dissecting scissors into the lower abdomen and then cut along the sides of the frog to make a flap of the skin and abdominal musculature. He then lifted the flap back and cut it off, exposing the internal organs that his teacher called the viscera. The exposed innards of the frog were such an appalling sight that it made Greg want to heave his breakfast.
“Now cut off the intestine and urine duct from the hip to free the viscera from the body,” said Mrs. Worton. “Be careful not to touch the nerve when cutting.”
Many nerves were touched in the classroom, and most of them belonged to the students. As he snipped through muscle fascia, hemostats, and the sciatic nerve of his frog, Greg felt terrible. He thought about the trauma he underwent weeks earlier, the day he had to get a stupid TB test. And that was simply a prick of his skin while his frog, who was alive and breathing when he first held him, was now dead and Greg was ordered to remove its skin because Mrs. Worton said the skin represented one of the ten body systems a frog needs in order to survive. One of the ten body systems they needed to expose and explore. She called the skin the Integumentary System, but flaying the frog proved too much for Greg. He lay down his scalpel and put a paper towel over his torn, mutilated amphibian.
“Hey, Mrs. Worton,” said Victor. “What are gonna do we do with all of these frogs after we’re done?”
“Victor, do you know what you call a group of frogs?”
Victor shrugged.” What do you mean?”
Mrs. Worton smiled. “Well, a group of fish is called a school. A group of geese are called a gaggle. A group of birds are called a flock. A group of horses are called a herd. But what do you call a group of frogs?”
“Butchered,” muttered Greg.
Mrs. Worton once again ignored Greg’s comment. “A group of frogs are called an army. An army of frogs.”
Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center whose most recent book is a text-based art collaboration with fine arts photographer Amy Bassin, ‘Dream Streams.’ (Clare Songbirds Publishing House).
They Tap Me on the Shoulder and Say They are Going to Ensure My Poverty Will Erase My Last Name and My Homeland Forever (But the Smiths and the Jones Will Live On)
BY RON RIEKKI
When I was in the military, we marched over the purple coneflower and milkweed and powderpuff and canna lily until they were dead from the war of our feet and later when they haze-crucified me I aspirated on my own vomit and saw death marching through the undergrass and he was a he and he was not as seismic as I’d come to expect and
when I was on the football team, they installed debt in my chest and they drove their trucks on the swamp conifers and carved encyclopedias into the pines and our homecoming king took a knife to his abdomen to spell the words MINING TOWN.
When I worked in the prison, they concreted everything so that the yard wasn’t, and the smell was of feces and lives frozen as poison and
when I worked in security, they put me in an isolated guard shack where there was no heat and no one else around for miles and I’d listen to the wolves and would wonder if they were coming from inside me.
When I worked on the ambulance, my partner would make fun of the patients as soon as the patients weren’t our patients and he would reenact their pain by holding his body in the distorted positions in which we found them and I’d go home and warn my parents that if they are ever on an ambulance to record everything because God can see everywhere but not inside the walls of piss and pus, and
when I was in middle school, they’d put us in lockers and light little pieces of paper, throwing them through the hole, telling us that we were going to experience what it’s like to be the sun and afterwards I’d go outside and stare up at it in the hope that I’d go blind forever and it didn’t happen because I could never take the pain and instead would go home and swim in the neighbor’s empty pool, me and a buddy, just moving our arms and walking in that big useless pit.
When I was in PTSD counseling, my counselor fell asleep so I decided to go to sleep too except I could see the helicopters on fire when I closed my eyes and so I just sat there, staring at him, watching him age so slowly, seeing the grandfather and the great-grandfather and the grand-corpse just begging to come out and
when I was in high school, we cheered the violence and admired the violence and encircled the violence and awarded the violence and moved back for the violence and watched the violence and the violence did its thing.
When I was dead, I realized that the earth was everything, that all there is is the earth, that the people on it are just dots, dips, dark, that we are spiders, that our arms are air, replaced so quickly.
But the earth.
But the earth.
Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book). Right now, he’s listening to Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky.”
The remains were raised by the Mississippi—an old song in shards. Was it burned by accident? Or captured when New Orleans was,
run up to Yazoo River to escape Union hands, ashore in a bend? Lincoln so wanted to roll unvexed to the sea.
Muted pitches in an old steamboat, its firebox is a gaping mouth for coal. The river has the last say.
Each Natchez meant more bales, more boilers. There was no music like the Natchez’s whistle. Heard was the length of the open
valve, vibration in steam—not air but rising steam rarefying in the bell. But music doesn’t give out any answers.
The steam’s been gone. No one’s bragging on the Race of the Giants or Captain Leathers anymore. The floating palace, wood rot come up
for air. The river is the last say.
Heather Dobbins is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of two poetry collections, In the Low Houses (2014) and River Mouth (2017), both from Kelsay Press. She graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her poems and poetry reviews have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Fjords, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. For twenty years, she has worked as an educator (Kindergarten through college) in Oakland, California; Memphis, Tennessee; and currently, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Please see heatherdobbins.net for more.
Emylee Amber is an observer of the stars and an architect of art built on a foundation of words. She is passionate about music and helps her partner construct poetry to the sky with his band, Saeva. While observing the stars, Emylee runs her own Instagram based on the movements of the planets and other astrology-based information @eclipselunairee. Emylee is wandering about the Centennial State. Searching for things and those that peak her curiosity, while finding comfort in the embrace of the mountains and magic surrounding her. She contributed to Thought For Food (South Broadway Press, 2020) by editing the anthology and publishing her poem, Speak to Me.
Remember this place- we watched the skies turn dark and the leaves start their journey away.
The golden hour lasted forever and I couldn’t imagine calling any other place home.
It feels like we were dreaming the whole time- it was as though that quiet would last forever.
Unknown – Found on the bathroom wall at RitualCravt’s old location
What does this quote mean to you?
This quote found me when I was in the midst of an identity crisis. I had been wandering around for what felt decades in a vessel I hardly knew. It was the spring of 2018, after a brutal breakup that left me without many friends — in a city that I was from, but hadn’t grown up in. So everyone, including myself, was a stranger. Anonymous. I desperately wanted to embrace a feeling that felt like home, where I could recognize and understand myself. I was at an Astrology workshop at RitualCravt attempting to use the stars to lead me to this lingering desire. This quote was hanging above the light switch in the bathroom of RitualCravt’s old location.
Upon reading it, I immediately felt seen. Heard. Understood. I knew of this place and it had felt like a “home”. I was saying goodbye to it, over and over again. Yet, at the same time, this reminded me that “this place” has yet to come. I will have another moment of quiet within the golden hour, and again, it will feel but only of a dream that was to last forever; and that’s the beauty of it.
What books have made an important impact on you and why?
Outside of my collection of art, occult, and poetry books — the most important impact I’ve had with stories wasn’t in a book at all. When I was a little monster, I had the hardest time falling asleep. My mother would lay with me in order for me to knock out. Most nights I couldn’t wind down, so eventually my mom started telling me bed-time stories. My favorite one, in particular, was about a little grey mouse who lived in a little grey house. She and I created a whole family for Little Grey, including his best friend Byron Brown. I can still picture the town I imagined in my head for him; I can see his favorite ice cream shop and the baseball fields Little Grey and his older brother, Fred, would practice at. The way my mom went into detail and came up with adventures meant the world to me. It helped me foster my imagination and showed me the importance of words.
At a certain point in my childhood, I had drawn a map of Little Grey’s town. I came up with a story web on how each person in the town was related. I even started to draw pictures of Little Grey and his family. Unfortunately, the drafting of those stories into physical form never came to fruition since I could never fully remember them after a night of sleep. Yet, I will hold those memories dear in my heart. Maybe one day Little Grey’s adventures will be written again but until then I will remember to play in my imagination, use my words to tell stories or open up important conversations and remember sometimes the best stories can’t always be retold.
What is the value of writing and art in the current state of the world?
Priceless. Art has and will always be priceless, no matter the media. It tells a story. It’s a piece of history, of not only your life, but the world that once was and will be. It’s an escape, yet it is also a connection. It’s a song. It’s a smile. It’s that weird meme you came across on the internet that hits a little too close to home. Art is in everything that we do, that we speak, feel, touch, see, dream, and heck, even all of us are pieces of art too.
This moment in history we are living in is the best time to remind society of the recognition art deserves. Let’s put pressure on those that do not recognize the impact of art and remind them that without art, they wouldn’t even be here; yes, corporations and the United States government — I am looking at you. Now is the time to use all of the medians we have at our disposal to break down those barriers, mark our history, and make our voices heard. Make our beliefs seen. Make the world remember that art is in you and me. Art is priceless.
How has writing and art helped to form the person you are today?
To be frank, I wouldn’t still be on this planet without writing and art. As a child, I was constantly living in my imagination. I sang from the time I knew how to make noise, started drawing as soon as my parent’s felt comfortable with me to use a writing utensil, and eventually fell in love with writing and storytelling. In middle school, we did a poetry course and I was enamored by the concept of expressing oneself in word play, exaggerated sentence structures, and without even addressing the topic. Eventually, it was the only way I could cope with my mental health and I found a lot of solace in this space I had cultivated for myself. Writing had been such a private avenue for me. I only shared my pieces to those I felt like would be the most connected to the matter.
When I moved back to Colorado after graduating high school in Illinois, poetry led me to many friendships and opportunities within the Denver community. A professor-turned-friend, Tara Shea Burke, would seek out poetry readings at Mercury Café and Book Bar while encouraging me to not only tag along for the adventure, but to also share my pieces to a live audience. It was exhilarating. Those moments are what led me to having this opportunity to be an Editor with South Broadway Press, while also having the confidence to work on my own art within my astrology work and musical collaborations with my partner. (P.S. You need to check out Tara’s work — it is phenomenal!)
What is something that matters to you?
I’ll be honest, this is the last question I answered in this interview. There are a plethora of aspects within our society and life that matter to me, yet they all result back to people. So, I would say people matter to me. People’s behaviors, stories, opinions, and truths — what makes them so incredibly human; I can’t get enough of how important all of those little tidbits are. To how they will see the world around them and with those perspectives how it will impact their actions, shape their world and mine.
I could spend hours observing people and trying to learn their story, while taking several days speaking with them to understand the shape they hold within this universe. I want to know what has taught them to grow and what they are still healing from. I want to know what they believe in and see if their beliefs are something that could hold truth in my world.
It’s also a pastime of mine to try and figure out people’s planet placements within their natal chart by interacting with them. Since it helps me with understanding one of my passions but it also shows me that people aren’t black and white. As stated before, they are frickin’ art and they matter even if there are obstacles in our world showing them differently.
Anything else you’d like people to know?
You can find me slingin’ cards virtually or in a small gathering of friends almost weekly to play Magic: The Gathering. I almost picked my favorite flavor text, “Your life will set with the sun”, as my quote for this interview. If I’m not casting spells, I can be found listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode while wallowing in my teenage-angst by still being 110% obsessed with My Chemical Romance. Yes, I’m crying because I miss concerts.
The banks look like a Goodwill store washed up, clothes everywhere
Our bodies run down to the surf shells bubble out of the sand
Salt teeth bite at our ankles then our labia, breasts and eyes
We are fifty-six laughing little islands of loamy flesh
We wash up onto the sand pink and glinting in the sun
We find our clothes, soft as homespun, warm as August dunes of sand
Four fire-lords build a circular blaze that sways and rises to meet us
We too rise and sway, huddled like fur weanlings at the breast
our chests rising and falling in sync our smiles lit up and flickering.
We raise a sunny, rubicund cone high, high into and through the fog
We shout, laugh and cry firelit eyes each a salty ocean
We release it with smoke into the chill air and dissolve into dance and drums
and silent pairs, trudging up the banks trailing bits of circle as we go.
Mo Lynn Stoycoff is a writer and visual artist whose poems have appeared in Poetry Now, Rise Up Review, The American Journal of Poetry, California Quarterly, Speckled Trout Review and many other journals and anthologies. Mo works in the performing arts and lives in Central California.
Bristlecone twist upon twist, layer upon layer, like fingers of the crone or braids of her mother, reaching for the sky. Cold air, hot sun. High desert survivor
dared erosions and fires, needed only a few small strips of bark to stay alive, outlive them all. But 5000 years were undone in one afternoon.
We want to know, to name. We are Machiavellian in this pursuit. Prometheus stole fire from the gods, carried it
in giant fennel stalk, gifted it to humans. For this, he was bound to a rock, his liver to be eagle-eaten every day, regrow at night and be eaten again.
To understand the brain’s hemispheres, we cut the corpus collosum. To learn the spread of virus, we cull the herd, open skulls. To know the oldest, we bored the bark,
failed, then cut and sectioned, hauled and processed. Counted rings, counted time. Only then did we understand the ignorance and arrogance.
Still, we kept one slab at Ely casino, then convention center. Respect reserved for the lab or the field, now national park in part because scientist-cum-lumberjack pushed
to protect remaining pine, hobble the folly of men, like him, believing they need to know, no matter the damnation, no matter the pain.
Update: Bourbeau’s poem “Prometheus Felled” is now part of her 2023 collection of poetry, Monarch, forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. You can find a copy of her book here.
Heather Bourbeau’s fiction and poetry have been published in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cleaver, Francis Ford Coppola Winery, Short Édition, The Cardiff Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and Chapman University Flash Fiction winner. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia.
This piece is a part of South Broadway Press’ March issue, Language of the Earth.
south broadway press 