Some Rough in the Hand, Some Smooth by Marge Piercy
“Some Rough in the Hand, Some Smooth” by Marge Piercy On the sill of the window beside my desk, a row of stones sits, collected on travels. Like builders of stone circles – some grand like Avebury or Stonehenge most small, just the local rocks that could be easily moved into place, but special in their way— I find some stones liminal, giving off power like radiation. Some from famous sites –the Akropolis— or...
The Laughing Place by Tara L. Masih
“The Laughing Place” by Tara L. Masih You need a place like this to go to, I tell her, like my sister and I had when we were young. It’s called the Laughing Place. You cannot be in that place without laughing. No matter what is going on in your world, in that space, only laughter is allowed. You start in the spring, sowing morning glory seeds in a circle around the sticks you’ve erected to form a teepee. Part...
Black Cat in a Field By Beverly Lafontaine
“Black Cat in a Field” by Beverly Lafontaine If you see a black cat in a field, stop, let the world go by while you and the black cat explore the field. Smell the morning air, suburb air, full of traces of gasoline, burned wood, diesel, dog shit and the raw remnants of wandering skunk. Smell it, inhabit it. Know that you are alive. Know that you, the cat and a dozen mice occupy this field, where the long...
Airy Humus by Lynn Tudor Deming
“Airy Humus” by Lynn Tudor Deming So it goes on a good afternoon, screening this top soil by the drive, jostling it over the mesh so the clean loam drops through, sifting out delicate cobwebs of roots, tendrils of weeds limp in slime, my sweat salting the collards of this stew until everything unwanted— little green bowls of splintered pignut, broken twigs, earth-caked stone, is left behind; better still to sift the...
Saint Flower by Ann L. Carter
“Saint Flower” by Ann L. Carter Zinnias are like some special kind of saint smiling in the face of my transgressions. They forgive me when I don’t water them though the Kansas sun beats down like hell. They accept it when I uproot them to some godforsaken spot I need to brighten. They keep face when I cut them down in full bloom and let them slowly wilt on my sunroom table while the cat nibbles at them and the vase...
Familiar by Sue Churchill
“Familiar” by Sue Churchill The stray cat in the loft owns the barn. Though the farmers shoo her, she returns, claiming her place through her own knowing. She knows its long blanks of silence. she knows the fullness of its motion from swallow to owl to snake to mouse to spider to fly. She has caught what moves in the soil under the manger. She knows how to slip behind the barn door in a pinch. She knows the...
Snake Molting by Lora Keller
“Snake Molting” by Lora Keller The itch starts at her eyes and sweeps down the pulsing muscle of her body. She swells and shimmies around fossil-pocked boulders, silvered driftwood. When she can’t find a bristled surface, she loops into her own strained and crusty flesh and peels herself from herself. She’s a single-limbed ballerina tugging off her tights, a wrinkled pool of inside-out skin coiled beside her, traces...
Look for Raven Pairs Flying in a Pre-Mating Ritual by Karen Skolfield
“Look for Raven Pairs Flying in a Pre-Mating Ritual” by Karen Skolfield How they would nest in our bones if they could. Inhabit a skull, wind-scrubbed, sterile, line it with the high desert plants, that extra hour of sunlight, the elevation. Bones bleach because there’s nothing better to do, no books waiting to be read. Ravens love every little dead thing, a fur-sack smashed against the road, a body curled...
The Cows by Elizabeth Jacobson
“The Cows” by Elizabeth Jacobson Now that I have read this story about the cows I think of them at night when I cannot sleep, how they are so still in their grassy field, seemingly suspended like animations of themselves. Even though there are only 3, I count them over and over, envision them as if I were floating above their pasture, observe the different stances they choose: the 3 of them standing bottom to...
Snake Pit by Berwyn Moore
“Snake Pit” by Berwyn Moore Tote-‘em-In Zoo Wilmington, NC Camera clenched in hand and pencil wedged behind my ear, I followed him in – Samson the Snake Handler wearing enchanted khaki pants and a safari helmet, and me, daring reporter, in summer sandals. Not one stirred as we entered, their stillness tangled in shadow. Heads, tails, indistinct. Sleepless eyes guarded every corner –...
Greenman by Maureen McQuerry
“Greenman” by Maureen McQuerry It was this way, in the heart of the forest: green sea deep and light, leaves like rippling water, a steady heartbeat of silence. It was this way, a mere tickle an itching of the scalp and suddenly every movement becomes a rustle as tufts of hair unfurl to leaf, a flourish of jade moustache sprouting and curling from raw, nude skin. My legs and fingers swollen wood, ridged and...
Jaguar Foretells His Own Extinction by Suzette Bishop
“Jaguar Foretells His Own Extinction” by Suzette Bishop “Our fragile ego drives us to possess the beauty and strength of the jaguar, so we kill it, then hang it on the wall, walk on it on the floor, or wear it like an ancient Maya King . . . the jaguar, despite its strength, is no match for the jungle-eating machinery of man.” Alan Rabinowitz,...
Break Beauty by Lisbeth Davidow
“Break Beauty” by Lisbeth Davidow The lights of lower Manhattan shone in the night sky beyond the bank of large, paned, arched, uncovered windows. In front of the windows, the other eight members of June Finch’s dance company stood quietly in the dark. Wearing a pale yellow leotard and matching tights, I danced alone under a spotlight in the center of the broad, sumptuous Merce Cunningham Studio on...
“Look at that, you son of a bitch” by Peg Duthie
“Look at that, you son of a bitch” by Peg Duthie In the world I want to believe in, we would greet hard truths with the gentleness born of water long gone under the bridge, milk wrung out of mops whose grey-clean strands also soaked up the tearfalls slicking the hay and slopping the mud against our came-by-their-age-honestly boots. Meanwhile the moon, which our schoolteachers said didn’t have water, turns out to have...
At the Interface by Renée E. D’Aoust
“At the Interface” by Renée E. D’Aoust “Catch fire, move on.” —Gary Snyder, Turtle Island If it all went up in flames, what would I do? Before her right hand shriveled to a claw, Mom tilled soil around her son’s Paradise lily. Once my brother, then a flower. Mom carried on, weeding with her left. What would I do, if the log cabin burned down? The oregano patch round the house should be defensible...
Keep Calling My Name: Frogs, Circles and Climate Change by Jocelyn Edelstein
“Keep Calling My Name: Frogs, Circles and Climate Change” by Jocelyn Edelstein On a sticky evening in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I sat behind a tripod, peering at the screen of a small HD camcorder as my friend and his mom let me interview them about life, dance and surviving in Brazil on a very limited income. My friend, who I’d known since he was a skinny 18-year-old boy wearing oversized...
There’s No Place Like Home by Rebecca Hart Olander
“There’s No Place Like Home” by Rebecca Hart Olander Finding the screech owl holed up below the canopy of the spindle tree, auburn feather fist in austere bark, my father suggests we turn back for binoculars. I had never seen a daylight owl, only heard the dusky cries, feeling as mice must, quivering in a field beneath wing-blotted stars. Through doubled glass we focus on the russet bird, casting her as an...
Vanishing Point by Melissa Grossman
“Vanishing Point” by Melissa Grossman It is not miles ahead of you where the road narrows. It is not a mountaintop covered by low clouds. Nor, the columns of trees that grow smaller farther down the street. It is a gam of whales swimming just below the shimmering surface of the ocean, and you are whale, and you are water. It is that cloudless blue sky when birds disappear into the deep brightness, and you are...
At Butcher’s Slough by Simona Carini
“At Butcher’s Slough” by Simona Carini (Arcata Marsh & Wildlife Sanctuary) No ducks ply the slough No great egrets glide. Wrung out clouds pattern the marsh in light ink. Air as crisp as cave-cooled watermelon. Silence ambushes me in this quiet place of still water, wood pilings— remains of a mill— an old railway track. If my worries could ride away! My lungs catch a scent I am an egret sensing fish just...
Cathartidae by Lynn Tudor Deming
“Cathartidae” by Lynn Tudor Deming They were feeding on its torso, a yearling By the road in its mottled winter coat, Long hair grizzling the face so its muzzle Was thickened, more like a dog’s–the eyes open. Drawn from their thermals by the scent of death, They straddled the ribs with their talons, White beaks plucking the flesh, a flock Of silent purifiers with no syrinx. When a car passed they rose...
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Witness Nov 29, 2024
