Preface

As a collective, I believe we yearn for a return. A return and embrace of wildness, true nature, and grounding. A return of deep-seated internal power by directly addressing the things we fear– including wilderness, creation, and death. Rewilding is a return to the natural state of both the environment and ourselves, healing, empowering, and restoring balance.

In addressing the ideas of rewilding and rebirth, we must examine and question the systems we inherit, and how we might recreate them by consciously choosing wildness. In this issue, Ian U Lockaby calls attention to the consequences of our current use of the earth and its resources, what happens when we domesticate or try to bend the land, and by extension our inner selves, to produce. We lose something fundamental. Yet, we keep buying it.

This issue also highlights writing that delves into motherhood and womanhood– profound states of being that sometimes operate simultaneously– and what it means to rewild women, to break out of domesticity and embrace ourselves fully, light and darkness alike. 

In the process of rewilding, and by nature the idea of “wild” itself, we find ourselves wrestling with how to address things of the wild in language. By naming something, are we classifying it and in the same moment stealing away its wild nature? Can something named still be wild? 

One of the most used examples of the wild and wilderness is the forest. Historically the woods have been a source of great anxiety. They have spawned many myths warning of the dangers of the woods. The woods are lawless, the antithesis of society and community. They are unknown. Dark. Violent. They represent our collective fear in both our inner and outer worlds. Inside, animals hunt, kill, and feed. There are rocky ledges to fall upon, flowing rivers to sweep us away, and endless green canopies to lose one’s way in, but we find ourselves drawn there nonetheless. Other often examined wild places are the sea, the desert, and the mountains– things we cannot control. These places require us to let go of control as we enter them. Perhaps rewilding is seeking release. 

Enjoy curated works from Carolann Caviglia Madden, Randall Potts, Rupsa Banerjee, Rita Mae Reese, Chris Campanioni, Norman Finkelstein, and many more in Interim’s Rewilding and Rebirth issue. 

-Kathryn Taylor McKenzie
Guest Editor

Oisín Breen

1 poem

The Tender Ministry of Time

As split gusts sound their transit,

A prelude to that annual libretto of frost,

A last jewelled aerial syncopation of brightly thrashing yellows and reds and greens,

The forerunner of crunching spines and glistening veins co-mingled as a future feast for spores,

A vast nexus of alveoli, sacs of spent breadth gobbled, as each may be the last –

Their canopic raiments giving lease to tunnels of light –

Here, where the parasite of scavengers, strepsiptera,

Forms a base echo of the last breath of youth,

Dying inside the body to give life to the body,

A seed of faith in the death of history,

Most holy is our love.

And here, led by an instance derived from the changes in an amber-coated form,

The slow beating heart of that singular shape opens unto spring

In pink and white blossoms, yellows and hard-worn greens,

And the first of those pink dappled tongues,

now in brilliant gold, red, and orange,

crisp-edged, but tired and bending,

Returns unto ash.

Irish poet, academic, and journalist, Oisín Breen’s debut, Flowers, all sorts in blossom ... was released Mar., 2020. Breen is published in 75 journals, including in About Place, Door is a Jar, Northern Gravy, North Dakota Quarterly, Books Ireland, the Seattle Star, La Piccioletta Barca, Reservoir Road, and Dreich, which will also publish Breen’s second collection, (4² by 5), later this summer. Breen’s third full collection, the experimental Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín will be published by Beir Bua Press, January 2023.

Andrew Rahal

1 poem

Driftwood

cleaved in winter and low-pressure the rain

washing out at the roots

a circulation to the mouth
traveling rivermiles in half-minutes

and bobbing by
defunct docks stranded above the waterline

by infilled channels and channel bars then settling
into the sheer sloping thickets of dune grass salal
salting salmonberry

this is where we take the rip out and time the slow-whip
of a tall young fir against the jetty wall

the tips of the limbs clawing the spit are sinking or rising or sinking

and we paddle over them on long winter boards with the thick leg ropes knotted in
the hood and boots tight and hard as a shell on the skin:

our fingers splayed out combing the seawater
the cold lashes and froths across the face and the surface
flushes these sore and ringing ear canals

but the jetty holding: a shelter from the wind and a bank for peeling rights

but the brackish channel: the nests in crooks trunks and limbs
scattering through the eddies

Andrew Rahal was born in Columbia, MD. His chapbook No New Wilderness was selected for the Rane Arroyo Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). New poems have appeared in Bath Magg, Great River Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. In 2019, he was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series by Martina Evans. He holds a PhD from the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast and he has also received grants, fellowships and awards for his writing from the Centre for Book Arts in NYC, Poetry Ireland, the European Association of American Studies, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Aaron Lopatin

1 poem

Variations in a trapped expanse

i.

you lived in your solitude
as in the sea

more & more softly —

this is no wolf in a wood / this is no wolven wald

— you lived and you lived again. . .

and you lived again. . .

you lived and you disappeared

& here (a murmur),
mered —

ii.

the sea flames today
the wind shatters (chatters?)

the eagerness of mist

do we understand
what this means?

within the clearing (opened out):
nothing, if not, and such, subtle
fear

deception you appeared
to me / appeared to be the —

(snow)

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher from Michigan. His work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Yalobusha Review, Apartment, The Spectacle, and elsewhere.

Sekyo Nam Hains translating Cho Ji Hoon

2 translations

When I stand on a Hill, looking down at the Ocean

When I stand on a hill, looking down at the ocean
I am a small beast.

Life of man always
hides behind a distant cloud.

Because the taste of meat and blood
lingers in my dreams

I am still
an anguished beast.

Like the flower clams, that bask in the sun
on the sand beach

like the sad crabs, roaming inside dark graves
like ghosts,

once the big wave raises its hand
all will be swept away,

so I am a beast, still learning tears
when I stand on a hill, looking down at the ocean.

바다가 보이는 언덕에 서면

바다가 보이는 언덕에 서면
나는 아직도 작은 짐승이로다.

인생은 항시 멀리
구름 뒤에 숨고

꿈결에도 아련한
피와 고기 때문에

나는 아직도
괴로운 짐승이로다.

모래 밭에 누워서
햇살 쪼이는 꽃조개같이

어두운 무덤을 헤메는 망영인듯
가련한 거이와 같이

언젠가 한번은
손들고 몰려오는 물결에 휩싸일

나는 눈물을 배우는 짐승이로다
바다가보이는 언덕에 서면.

In the Field of Weeds                                  

I walk in a meadow where the wind blows.
If I didn’t quiver, the wind would have no sound.
The wind laughs, blows my hair and my sash.
The sound is, doubtless, my soul discreetly becomes the wind.

Wherever I go, new blades of green poke their heads up.
I can’t move like the wind, without stepping on them.
I throw a pebble into the wind. Soon, it falls to the ground.
Since I am waiting for my beloved’s return
I always remain here. 

I fall into the field of weeds.
Like the pebble, when thrown to the sky
cannot stay there; love has no regret.                        
Whatever crime I have committed
I bare the punishment for it to the end.
Oh, alone with my longing, my soul goes with the wind.

풀밭에서

 바람이 부는 벌판을 간다. 흔들리는 내가 없으면 바람은
소리조차 지니지 않는다. 머리칼과 옷고름을 날리며 바람이
웃는다. 의심할 수 없는 나의 영혼이 나직이 바람이 되여 흐르는 소리.

어디를 가도 새로운 풀잎이 고개를 든다. 땅을 밟지 않곤
나는 바람처럼 갈 수가 없다. 조약돌을 집어 바람 속에 던진다.
이내 떨어진다. 가고는 다시 오지 않는 그리운 사람을
기다리기에 나는 영영 사라지지 않는다.

차라리 풀밭에 쓰러진다. 던져도 하늘에 오를 수 없는
조약돌처럼 사랑에는 뉘우침이 없다. 내 지은 죄는 끝내
내가 지리라.아 그리움 하나만으로 내 영혼이 바람 속에  간다.

Born in 1920, Cho Ji Hoon is a canonical poet of modern Korea. and a renowned traditionalist of Korean aesthetics. Although his poetry is written in a modernist free verse form, resonate with the deep root of Korean literati Sijo and has intense local flavor that imbued with sound, smell and color of the Korea before industrialization. In 1939, at age 19, Cho Ji Hoon published his first poem in literary magazine MoonJang. In 1946, he published his collection of poetry, “Cheongnok Zip(청록집),” alongside with the poets— Park Mokwohl and Pak Doo Zin. They were known as “Cheongnokpa,” the Green Deer Poets. A professor of Korean language and literature at Korea University for 20 years, he served as the president of the Korean cultural society affiliated with the university and president of the Korean poet’s association. He received numerous literary awards, published 5 poetry collections, and numerous books related to Korean literature and culture.

Sekyo Nam Haines's Born and raised in South Korea. Sekyo immigrated to the U.S. in 1973 as a registered nurse. She studied American literature and writing at Goddard College ADP and poetry with the late Ottone M. Riccio in Boston, MA. Her first book, Bitter Seasons' Whip: The Translated Poems of Lee Yuk Sa was published in 2022, April by Tolsun books. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken, Unlocking The Poem, and Beyond Words; and in the poetry journals Constellations, Off the Coast and Lily Poetry Review. Her translations of Korean poetry by Cho Ji Hoon are forthcoming in The Tampa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and poetry of Kim Sowohl and Lee Yuk Sa have appeared The Harvard Review, Brooklynrail: InTranslation, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Ezra, Circumference, The Massachusetts Review, and Notre Dame Review. Her translation of “The Dire Pinnacle” by Lee Yuk Sa appeared in The Anthology of Best Work in Translation by The Massachusetts Review. Sekyo lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.

Ian U Lockaby

1 poem

Where in the Morning (Goosefoot)

Water and start the house each morning—
germs, then radishes

How’s it going here, when it came
from here in the first place it’s been
the longest morning having

broken myself in so many ways
each piece of me with its own new measure
of time, it adds up

thinking about where things come from, how
could we chard by the pound when the beet
roots the spinach, or the amaranth fed to pig-

weed— and quinoa in the store forgets where
it comes from the farmers who grew it in southern
climes can’t afford their own crop against northern
demand, so often

time and cardinality break down in the body so
we start seeds, pinch stems, ball
roots, muscle dirty food

towards the sink bays towards the market
asking—what’s going here?   We ask again
and again meaning

what stems can we muscle sprout from
this field furniture into the dirt future nearing
us in acres time and seasonally, what

words will the market harvest mash them-
selves against in the buyers’ mouths—

so expensive, delicious, fresh
  catastrophe
outside, the smoke—

what they bother with

Ian U Lockaby is a poet, translator, and former farmworker. His poems and translations can be found in Sixth Finch, Denver Quarterly, Witness Magazine, Hobart, Washington Square Review, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. His translation of Gardens, by Chilean poet Carlos Cociña, was published by Cardboard House Press in 2021. He currently teaches at Louisiana State University and lives in New Orleans.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

1 prose poem

The Fox

I’m a fox in the woods, my name is Harry. I’m writing a novel, it’s called, “The Fox and the Field.” I spend most of my days looking for food. Yes, by food I mean small animals, like rabbits. But there’s more to me than primitive instinct. I also enjoy classical piano, ballet, and a day off reading Pierre Reverdy. I admire passion at all levels. Us foxes get a bad reputation. Sly, sneaky, untrustworthy. I think I’m more like a saint. Sure, I kill rabbits. But God made me to kill rabbits, frankly. The rest is just fulfilling my duty, playing my role. A fox is a hero. So are you.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Journal, The Missouri Review, Okay Donkey, Poetry, Porter House Review, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry.

Marjorie Stein

1 poem

uses of the kaleidoscope

skirting curfew in borrowed shoes.
be wild & be wildered.
the broken things tumbling in tubes of light.
she said there will be a lot of color corrections in my future.

§

beyond the vague village
a falconer of no rank prepares the live bait
give them some plumage
and small bones.
he said small objects should be placed close to the aperture.

§

…fox slips between the gloved flowers.

if the reflectors are kept separate, annular patterns are shown.

ink spatter of crows in the variegated field.

§

mapping the thermals with kite & wing
perpendicular as breath to the spine.
leaf & folio.
paper cranes.
one thousand folds.

§

quicksilvered
vertigo of loose fragments
brass wire
foil confetti beads
glass & crystallized bodies
between
mirrored slant & slip of
sun shards star chamber
splendor in the sphere

Marjorie Stein’s first book, An Atlas of Lost Causes, was published by Kelsey Street Press. Her has work has appeared, or is forthcoming in American Poetry Journal, The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, VOLT, Mary, and other publications. She makes her home in Northern California with her beloved wife and their elderly cat companion.

Amanda Hodes

2 poems

I would like to be everything and nothing all at once

The cattail stalks grazing their lean backs.

The shy canopy of trees that morse through roots, one endless organ.

To be the television slushed over with moss, expanding the plastic panels, rain-fogged glass.

Mucus layer of dirt, absorbing shards compacted in earth by the pound and pounds of rain, felled from the sky in one long blade.

To osmote that pain through stratosphere, skin.

Yet sometimes, contradiction : I want to be my mother.

Returning to coal country, her lilted tongue excavated from soil to the suction of her two front teeth.

The curvature of her body when it relaxes into a home it’s been excised from—easy, thoughtless.

To sluice through the membrane of my beliefs with a wet hand.

Then chrysalis back into skin, no scar, no seam.

Feeling anything but the two-ness of shame.

To press on Towamensing’s polluted bulge, and not be met with bloated burst, punctured sac.

Then to be that sac, its talc crust, multitude scatter of legs into an earth I cannot harm.

To be as whole as a molecule, already keyed into the structure of lignin, plankton, breath.

As nothing, too.

Scuttling chorus of : sky, sky, sky.

Implicated, absolved.

And at peace with the chance that forms it.

What Remains Unsaid with the Centralia Mine Shaft

—After Centralia, PA, which was condemned due to an underground mine fire that will continue for over 200 years

I can’t pretend I don’t know you
with your open ladder charred attempts
at containing combustion

the way you’re patched but sprawling inside
there’s a woman-ness to you
or rather I can’t pretend I haven’t known
a man drilling a place he doesn’t belong

words only hold so much like no or leave
they fluid between shale and disappear
never block anything at all that
steel-bit hands can’t get through
blood-bunched nails clipped low so I too
am tired of words disembodied voices

but what of your vocabulary
can my body borrow? when you talk about flame
do you say retribution or cleansing
as you burn for the next hundred years?

I want to speak myself back
in ecology with flesh
my fumes from a cold coat of muscle
my tongue stalactite
buds with monoxide

look at you your entrance now
a hut of rotting timber
entwined with weeds
ground murmurs the slow fuzz of dandelion
peeking over the crag

yes I too preferred to chalk
the body’s hold
beneath surface
and forego appearances the way you do
speak only in communion with seedlings
bird-dropped berries and mud

to pretend the past doesn’t
smoke-throat stoppered
as white sky balms
the sharp prongs of trees
here clouds wait to puncture or die out
whichever comes first

the landscape cracks apart
like a Renaissance fresco
smoking and spoken without being opened
for now
the quiet paints itself thick
while birds rest on the line
and refuse
to tear rain from its sleeve

Amanda Hodes is a writer and new media artist. Her writing is published or forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, AMBIT, PANK, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her art has been supported by venues such as the Banff Centre, Target Gallery, Sound Scene Festival, and Crisp-Ellert Art Museum. She has a Creative Writing MA from the University of East Anglia and is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech.

Carolann Caviglia Madden

3 poems

SONG FOR PANIC AS AGITATED STARDUST

Bright light gold entropic mess head
all aglow I tell myself bright I tell myself
gold was made from stars like

me I am stars bright because we
all of us are all of us are gold inside
not metaphorically but the cosmos

formed our guts you see the cosmos
make us float spin and orbit we swirl
in sidereal time on a golden trajectory

all starry and stretched and yes here’s
what they told me that when we fall
it’s because internal collision when

we fall it’s because misplaced heavenly bodies
it’s because agitated stardust because light
is an exploding now the space I am

in is all unbound and unspooling I
am quiet and starry and no matter
what’s good in me I burst however quietly

it’s bursting still and in all dark rooms I am
gold in the belly I am stars in the knees
I am cosmos crashed universe the

constellations inside me rotate
at an increasing speed and when I
stretch my body over the fissures I flood

them with bright with gold with everything
bold light colliding inside of me

LORE FOR HURRICANE SEASON

Already there is loss everywhere already
the floods came and I don’t know this
waterlogged deranged world but I love it still
little bats popping up in the water who are you

can you help me write a love letter today I’m
trying now to treat the world in the right way
with a goodness and yet and yet as the river
says the hour has come but where is the man

to drown for our transgressions it’s time
all that’s left is to find the river a man
throw him in it’s not cruel it’s the way of this
world it’s the storm’s violet sky and that’s

what it asks for blood let blood light blood
sacrifice they say tips the world right they say
when you hear the river sing you might see
animals and lovers leaping into the water

you might see them pulled under by green
weeds you might shake three pebbles from
your shoe and the river might want you
you might see your own body floating

on top of the water if you see your double
there don’t blame the bad year don’t
blame the river bursting its banks find
a man blame the man throw him in all it takes

SONG OF THE UNRESCUED FLOATING IN BLISS

I am writing in the language of the sea the sea
My grandparents crossed to see me born
The sea my father flew above to see me born
Did I tell you he built a ship that could fare
Any sea any storm then let it go the ship
Is my sister and we are filled with water in
The heart I am still completely island surrounded
With that from which I came salt shaped wounds
On the body wrack round the bones crashed
Rocks crumbling bright lichen shells whalesong

I am wrapped in skins I am gilled I am one of them
Of the drowned folk left to sink who arrives in
The world underwater hair rippling behind her
As she drops like a net and if I am if I’m one of them
That means he was able to live because he
Did not pull me from the water as I thrashed wise
Choice now I am floating on my back out to sea
With the seals my ears half-in-half-out geis
Upheld I’m scared of nothing now I’m alive in
A different way unrescued and unafraid of the unseen
Bodies beneath the surface as they float along with me

Carolann Caviglia Madden’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, PANK, World Literature Today, The Stinging Fly, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. She is a Navy brat, the granddaughter of immigrants, and earned her PhD in Poetry and Folklore, along with a Certificate in Translation Studies, at the University of Houston in 2021. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

Kelly Weber

1 poem

HOW TO DRAW YOURSELF AS A DAUGHTER

Begin with you and your mother following the bleeding fox
across the field. No, begin with your mother weeping—
birth this story with your body in the mirror, herringboned
and hemorrhaging into girl. Your mother’s hand
cupped over yours, arcing your arm across red fur.
Voice a new moon
falling into black water. Study in graphite
how girls dress their marrow in blood here,
fasten white buttons across red flannel
and bury dawn behind the sternum. Let’s say
in this little frame of paper
you step toward her
and anything could happen
before sunrise, antlers in your throat. Frost and rust
revealing every father’s tractor on the night highway
a mouth of needles. Grip the pencil
and look into your friend’s eyes
as you both count down to say
the animals you are. The word queer
is barbwire strung across pink sky and snow,
larkspur and lupine rising from pelvis.
Return here to your mother, the fox
dragging itself across frozen grass, the widened eye, the small
red spooling beneath your hands
that don’t know what to call forgiveness,
what to call mercy. Beneath the fur, beneath the ice
you must know how to draw the bones first.

Kelly Weber is the author of the debut poetry collection We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place (Tupelo Press, 2022) and the chapbook The Dodo Heart Museum (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). Her work has received Pushcart nominations and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Brevity, The Missouri Review, The Journal, Palette Poetry, Southeast Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

Rita Mae Reese

2 poems

To Bear

to bear a child means to cover her in fur
provide a future of epic sleeps and a body
so utterly her own entire landscapes slide away
when she comes into view to bear arms
is the circus collar and chain around her neck
as she sits at her desk
the circle of snapping dogs growing tighter
to bear witness the silence of a bear
lumbering through devastation yet hopeful
that honey and rest are somewhere just ahead
her hope almost too much

The First Eviction

was Eve’s conviction
that anyplace
was better than one
always under God’s big eyeball,
and remember how young
God was then?
Like a first-time parent
or a new teacher
overreacting to each infraction
as a matter of policy,

though when God suggests
maybe it was just
to prepare us
for a world
where the punishment
never fits—or at least
never solves (or resolves)
the crime—who are we
to argue?

We snap a picture
of the Sheriff
locking an invisible door
between two trees,
hurl a rock or two,
and set off with glee.

Rita Mae Reese is the author of The Book of Hulga. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She designs Lesbian Poet Trading Cards for Headmistress Press, is in the bluegrass band Coulee Creek, and serves as the Co-Director at Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.

Karen DeGroot Carter

1 poem

THE MEAT OF THINGS

She slid the knife blade down the belly of the trout,
appreciating that thousands of such slices of sustenance
are made by other hands as sure as hers every day,
perhaps at that very moment, in all corners of the world.
Crouched in her dirt driveway next to a bucket of water,
she scooped out the trout’s innards
and dropped them onto an open newspaper,
burying yesterday’s headlines in a satisfying pile
she’d compost after dinner.
She turned the gutted fish to let the late sun’s rays
shimmer along its silvery shanks one last time
before dunking it in water, though not the water
it had gasped for when she’d yanked it
from the Arkansas that morning.
Was it still a fish now that it had been so hollowed out,
diminished to a literal shell of its former self?
She flipped open the cooler packed with ice and other ghost trout
and made one more deposit. Enough for now, she thought,
securing the lid. Enough for a few days.
She wiped her knife on a rag, dumped the bucket,
lifted the cooler by its handle, and turned
to see her two small children still
where she’d known they’d stay,
at the smudged picture window
of her single-wide,
watching, waiting, wanting
what only she could provide.

A native of Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of Syracuse University, Karen DeGroot Carter has lived in Colorado for over 20 years. Her first novel, One Sister’s Song, was published by a small indie press in Denver; her short stories have received awards and mentions from Writer’s Digest and Glimmer Train Stories; and her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in online and print publications, including Literary Mama and Publishers Weekly. She works as an editor in the marketing department of a financial firm and is represented by the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.

Jane Satterfield

2 poems

Spellcasters                                                

…[T]here’s something almost mythical about the Brontë creation story, the idea of these three isolated young women writing so desperately that the words
were almost flung on to the page. Ted Hughes called them [Charlotte, Emily, Anne] the “three weird sisters”, intentionally summoning Macbeth’s blasted
heath to Haworth parsonage.

—Sarah Hughes, “Why those subversive Brontë sisters still hypnotise us,” The Guardian

Weird, you say? Well, fair enough—
seeing how we’re sat, hellbent
at books & candle-lit. Nocturnal
truth: we sweep aside polished                        
cutlery, cooled remnants                                             
of the feast, circling round
the family table to conjure
gothic plots, sometimes walking
widdershins. & weird is
striding out by day?— a steady pace
past all things mechanical, the church
bells marking time & clattering
of textile mills that drove
the fairy folk away. No secret
that we’re no one’s darlings,
just the curate’s girls whose bit                             
of brogue to village ears seems
a heathen tongue. If jumping
stiles is weird, we’ll take it—tired
of seams & taming, watch us curl
into a snooze with foxes, wake up
mouthy & magnificent. Our habitation’s                                                                     
where the air’s grown thin & walls
between worlds weaken, poised
beneath the high stones’
shadows where the atmosphere
is sizzling & supercharged. We grew up
tossing elf-bolts, watched them skim
the surface of the stream, muslin dresses
hiked thigh-high as we shimmied
up the rock face. Weird is marshalling
the high, cold clouds, mastering
all aspects of moonlight & mist,
charms that tear the veil of domesticity—
here’s heather Charlotte plucked at summer’s
height; for wealth & weal, a potent
crumb, a disused spider web. For love,
Anne, would you advise rose quartz
as steady flame? When the east
wind turns malevolent, salt lays down
a protective circle, & I banish bad luck
with a bulb planted in a page’s ash.
From the land we draw the bond of blood
that was our mother’s benediction & call
on all the green ones to bless all those
who fight for crusts. We call on air &
fire, water, earth & spirit: let them lift
toxins from the well, plump up drying
peat, rule the rain to stay the floods &
heal the anchoring hedges. May they
roll back the besmirching smoke
that the ancient forest might rise again,
more real than Birnam wood. Bring back
sweet chestnut, beech, & red oak, rich
soil & verdant canopies, lemon slug,
purple emperor, wood anemone.
We ask benevolence for the bees,
the gift of summer in a jar. What good
are words if they don’t weave a web
that spans the centuries to summon
a sisterhood of destiny? Let them walk
the rugged earth & know we have arrived.                  

Errant Queen

Six ravens are kept at the Tower of London; legend has it that the kingdom will fall if they leave. An official raven master cares for the roost. Merlina, an
admired raven queen, vanished from the grounds in January 2021.

Smart girl, you knew the rowdy moves
that garner gestures of affection,

feathers arrayed to finest sheen,
glimpses of iridescent blue and indigo—

queen of an unkindness bound
by the prophecy your kin’s departure

will foretell a kingdom’s fall. How vivid                                              
the high fashion of your heraldic ruff,

the silver knotwork that edges
your eye—pondwater pearled

with ice. Mischief diffused
your days—acrobatics on the green

and fluent mimicry of assembly calls
that charmed crows down from trees…

you flew toward a hand outheld,
a biscuit soaked in blood. One queen

may rule through war’s intrigues;
another through benevolence,

masked and poised even in her grief.
What summoned you beyond

the staked ground of convention,
the safety of a fox-proof cage, to lift off

through the season’s hammered metal sky,
over the plane trees’ diminished crowns?

Jane Satterfield’s most recent book is Apocalypse Mix, awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. New poetry and essays appear in The Common, Ecotone, Literary Matters, The Missouri Review, Orion, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.

Emma Bolden

2 poems

The Exiled Speaks

Wind-caught, throat a burn, I & my longing
for water, a body of it, if the woman floats
she is a witch & if the woman sinks she is

dead. Well. Wandering never did anyone ill
except those with minds that couldn’t. Locked
into the land, the granary, the gravity of plate

to table, sun to season. It’s impossible to know
you live in a world that turns as long as you
tread the same circles. Tossed from village

& orbit I walked my winters & unto the valley
& even under threat of frost I feared nothing.
So much as survival spoke through the fox’s

femur, snapped. Better to die before the body
tells you every one of its bones. & anyway
the difference between the sainted & damned

is an eye that belongs to someone else. I gave
my attention to woodsmoke tying its threads
together through the trees, no empty, no beast

breath, no clawed nothing a threat redder than
the soft hands of those who sent me out to other.
I tell you, if there is in existence a god it lives not

in the lines of our human hands but in the forest’s dense
circuitry, branch & tooth, pupil as wide as the night
it lets in, the growl that sings hunger, an impulse

purer than those pious words, those pious lips
closed cold around their prey.

GIRLBLOODED

say something          caught in the throat
in the milled wind           in the nothing

house we live           linked from blood
to blood to blood           inside every

ancient augury          lives a woman
who is not woman          any or more

& where          does it cut her, bare
the blade that          hope is, where

does it purple         her bone-down
& deep          a sickness extravagant

as every other          she sweeps the rushes
& throws out the broom          & the night

is a terror         whether her mouth admit 
confession, a tangle, a fist          of dark

feathers, why          the alone harp, why
these notes rising          has spring decided

already it’s sick of it         this frenzied trash
of flowers, a fever          made of every

motion drawn          so carefully under
this careful roof          does she ever stoop

to wonder          if she kept the viciousness
it’s the point of a tooth          how through it

the body howls nightly          a darkscape
a dream of being          a mouth being

a tongue unspeakable           ringing copper
as the taste of blood          with which every

she is familiar          down to the nailed
half-moon of it          down to the evidence

no soap could scrub free          tethered
sister to sister          a moon beast a wild

bride giving her body           to the grass
to the ghosts          who’ll never stop

following their emptiness          aching, the sharp
harmony          of every tree’s needle raised

as a fist those outside           a her hope to raze

Emma Bolden is the author of three full-length collections of poetry -- House Is An Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2018), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2016) and Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013) – and four chapbooks. The recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, and such journals as the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, TriQuarterly, the Indiana Review, Shenandoah, and the Greensboro Review. She currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review. Her memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2022.

Emelie Griffin

2 poems

SEA NETTLE

Immediate red. But red, I offer,

is relative, the drag marks on my arm

not so straightforward—depends on the light—

those welts faded, then days later, in sun,

came back. After all hot day beneath sand,

transparent crabs resurface—delicate—

as drop by drop I turn to your absence.

My first error was not of flesh—I lived,

and the stinging thing thrummed off I think unmarked.

Deeper than flesh. The interior mark.

Which, like an anglerfish with her light, I

hold over my own head in blue water.

CALIFORNIA, POMPEII

Rawness
in the light.

The way it laid itself
down pale
across the mountains

the scraped, dry mountains.

A little fire
to fill the clean mouth
of night as it opened
around us.

Your undressed feet
beautiful as stricken horses.

My conviction
that the raw thing I want
waited in you.

How desire piled
up on me
stem by stem
when I slept,

ash
over white stone.

Emelie Griffin is a poet and editor from Florida. She is currently the managing editor for Gulf Coast.

Abbey Frederick

1 poem

Kasane, After

we both kept at one time either orchids or
a wish for orchids; we wanted either to be
or to have names which mean manifold;
made journeys unbegun; cut paper skies;
we remain.
girl-in-the-moor chases after
a horse to give its rider her image and name—
girl made vanishing point,  
     girl receding, meaning
many; in his gone she has weight, makes
a creak on floorboards; she sets the same blue
cloth on a new table;
she returns to the moor,
empty; her hands break flowers’ wet stems.

Abbey Frederick is a poet from upstate New York and the design editor for Seneca Review. Her writing has appeared in New Delta Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Alexis Orgera

2 poems

You Are a Woman Now

Dictionary Ecology

Lex Orgera is a writer and plant person living in North Carolina. She’s the author of two poetry collections, How Like Foreign Objects and Dust Jacket, and a memoir-in-fragments, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms. Her work can be found in Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Indianapolis Review, Massachusetts Review, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and elsewhere. More at alexisorgera.com.

Benjamin Faro

1 poem

 Buried

landmines / little windows / termite tunnels

into you / like / stars / pepper-dark / dart /

far / through the jungle / hum / little bird /

like / a candle / burning down / to its last

inch / in our outdoor temple / fear-

lacquered / like / a thick slick / of varnish /

like / nemagón / like / poison / nectar /

prayers / like / that thing we're waiting for /

that / everyone / eventually / desires / that /

will never come / like / the bamboo / shoots

we grew / that / splintered in our hands / so

we felt something / sitting / picking / at our

calloused skin / on a Sunday afternoon /

lashing palms / for a dollhouse / for our

firstborn / son / a place to play pretend / as

if / the imaginary / were inevitable / as if /

that / were the only way and / that / thing

we're waiting for / will show at any minute

/ as if / we had / the power to know why /

we cannot ask why / we cannot estimate / a

time of arrival / how / long the dollhouse

will stand  / or / how / in your little heart /

you hold / the whisper of / that / cunning

trick / that / lesson for the ages / which / is

to be stubborn / which / is never to arrive /

which / we must forgive / little thing / wise

beyond existence / already buried before

you break the viscous cap

Benjamin Faro is a green-thumbed writer and educator living in Asunción, Paraguay, on stolen Guaraní lands. He is currently pursuing his MFA at Queens University of Charlotte, and his Pushcart-nominated poetry appears in EcoTheo Review, Portland Review, Atlanta Review, JMWW, and other literary outlets. His prose is forthcoming in the Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology. Find him online at www.benjaminfaro.com.

Chris Campanioni

2 poems

Chris Campanioni is the recipient of the International Latino Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. The film adaptation of his poem “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was in the official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival and his multimedia work has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art and staged at the & Now Festival of Innovative Writing.