An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: nature (Page 4 of 5)

Haunted Lake

Poetry by Sheryl Guterl

Local legend tells
a winter tale:
A southbound stagecoach

took a short cut
across the frozen water,
hit a soft spot, and sank,

taking passengers,
luggage, and horses
to the bottom.

True or not, it’s reason enough
for mapmakers to name
this lake Haunted.

In an early September morning,
cooled night air
meets summer-warmed water.

Cotton-candy puffs
of fog roll over the lake’s surface.
Eerie, vaporized visions of pines,

cabins, docks, and beaches
come and go.
Spirits rise from the waves.


Sheryl Guterl claims these titles: mother, grandmother, former English teacher, former elementary school counselor, wishful poet, Albuquerque Museum Docent, alto, bookworm. Presently, she is cozied in a New Hampshire cabin, surrounded by water, birds, tall pines, and myriad critters. She will travel back to Albuquerque for the cold months.

Sweet Moon

Poetry by Ursula McCabe

This morning I sliced into a cantaloupe
with ripe musky aromas.
Orange flesh unfolds as I split
the pock marked rind.
Opening up this soft melon
releases an aria of river floating times.

Years ago I rafted down the Salmon River,
an Idaho primitive wilderness area.
We returned home in a panel van
with too many people and a leftover cantaloupe
that had gone uneaten.

Six of us had drifted down the old river
through canyons with 100 foot basalt walls.
Rainbow trout practically
jumped in the boat, pink membrane mouths
puckering up as we slipped barbless hooks
out with our slippery fingers.

After churning rapids tumbled rafts
we warmed ourselves around campfires.
Flickering orange sparks skipped up to the stars,
where a fat round moon looked down.
That moon was as sweet and soft
as the cantaloupe I’m eating right now.


Ursula McCabe lives in Portland Oregon. Poems can be found in Oregon Poetry Association’s Verseweavers Anthology, Piker Press, The Avocet and Academy of the Heart and Mind.

What a Nature Poem Can Learn from a Love Poem

Nonfiction by Jesse Curran

Here I find myself: ten years into a marriage, seven years into two kids, two-plus years into a pandemic. Eros has gone dormant, a long winter of eating potatoes and squash and quietly reading books before seeking deep sleep. But it’s spring and I’m dwelling in things that used to be. I’ve been digging through the old file boxes, trying to find that poorly proof-read graduate paper. The one from the Romanticism seminar. The one about Shelley hugging the tree. About the roaring inside. About laying your body next to the earth. I was twenty-five and on fire, the libidinous pulse of poetry reached into every mundanity and exaltation of the day. For those years, everything was erotic. Everything was about connection. About a radical sense of continuity. About reaching through the loneliness. It was running and running and running and being not yet arrived. Whitman’s lusty oak. A Georgia O’Keefe poppy. It was the only subject. The tree-hugger was it: a symbol of the magnetic pull toward a forgotten union. Then something shifted. I turned thirty, I got married, I got pregnant, I got tired. For the past half dozen years, I’ve been working on the virtue of contentment—an often Buddhist and sometimes Stoic sense of equanimity. But still I burn. My god, I burn. I steep like compost at heat; a bowlful of watermelon rinds and coffee grinds and a bucket of crumbling oak leaves sparking something in the backyard. The tree is rooted in the earth. It does not walk. We move toward it and it stares back at us. I long for it to tear its roots, stretch its mycelium, and walk toward me. And sometimes in April, when the colors splatter, when the candy tulips and the dayglo maple leaves buzz with a heady fecundity, when a friend offers to take the kids back to her house after the school pick-up, when it’s suddenly quiet—sometimes, in April, verging on May, I take my seat on the porch and feel the maple shoots lean toward me.


Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Spillway, Leaping Clear, Ruminate, Green Humanities, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Visit www.jesseleecurran.com

Afternoon by the Brick Pond

Poetry by K.L. Johnston

The fisherman left his folding
chair under the oak in leafy
coolness where occasionally
it’s borrowed to mind the pond.

Content to view its mysteries,
passed by, to watch the young parents
with their daughter discovering
mud, laughing as she finds something

startling that splashes and flicks
away. They scoop her up, strolling
on unmindful of fingerprints
and red clay. They pass the dragon

elm that is far from home, but thrives,
happy to be surrounded by
the wild natives, cinnabar heart
visible through its shrinking bark

next to sycamores flaunting pale
green and white skins. At their dark roots
the bumblebee sits unmoving
on the swamp sunflower, so tired

by afternoon, with few blossoms
left unvisited, he sleeps on
in the acute angles of stem
and sun while pollen shimmers,

a dust of fantasies on the
waters of the pond where carp rise
up from green and purple shadows,
grazing in brilliance, uncaring.

Fierce, the kingfisher darts by blue
and shaded. Not the most brilliant
or the biggest or most deadly
of hunters unless you are small
and a fish! a fish, a fish.


K. L. Johnston‘s favorite subjects are whimsical, environmental and/or philosophical. Her poetry appears in journals ranging from Small Pond magazine in the 1980s to work recently appearing in Humana Obscura and Pangyrus. She is a contributor to the recently published anthology Botany of Gaia.

Sunday Afternoon on the Eagle Trail

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

On a path towards peace, I wind my way past families, grandparents, children, couples, dogs, bikers — eclipse them and am surrounded by trees, stillness, and sun. Heat rises as I step past fallen leaves, pinecones, branches, roots, mud piles, marsh. Dry stretches crackle under my old tennis shoes, wet patches soggy with mud, leaving smears of earth on my calves.

At a fork in the dirt marked by wooden signs I read ‘Eagle Trail,’ follow the winged path deeper into the trees. Light shines through in spaces, dappling a canopy of leaves overhead, a crochet pattern of glaring green, rust red, burnt brown. I stop, listening to distant sounds of humanity, drinking in the moist scent of warmth. Only the breeze speaks, moving long grasses slow and tender. A rustle now and then, creatures scattering, hidden under fallen logs, months upon months of earth. A silent fluttering of yellow moth, I watch her fast flight. She could have spawn from the sun, she is so bright.

She lingers as the sun settles into my skin. Each step takes me further from the road, deeper down the path, zig-zagging past places where time matters. Into a space without, a space to just be.

There are signs of death among so much life, signals that nature runs a course and falls prey to a cycle. Not one destined by years or months, days or hours on a clock or calendar, but seasons of light and dark, warmth and chill, nourishment and hunger— the steady dawn and relentless night that comes. A tree may live hundreds, even thousands of years, but even it must rest. Like a giant trunk hewn from Earth, unmoored, with a pool of life underneath, even the greatest, oldest tree must sleep. (So many dead things amongst teeming life…the trail speaks to me of sadness and grief yet yields to acceptance and change.)

There is beauty in its space apart from us, in its perseverance to thrive. Wild iris, purple bulbs bursting from tall grass shoots in marsh waters. Ruby red Cape Fuchsia flowers droop upside down in bunches, their bleeding hearts like offerings beside the path. These are few but sparkle within a landscape of green, rust, brown. In the moss and algae covered waters swim turtles, their dark heads peeking up at blue bared sky.

I wait on the footbridge for a grandmother to lift her grandson to see them, exclaim how many he sees. Then he rushes past, small sandals clomping down the boards, grandma following. The turtles scatter as I bid them a quiet farewell.

I lift my face to the sun, breathe in—breathe out. Step forward, rising to meet the life that awaits on the other side.


Stacie Eirich is a writer, singer & library associate. She holds a Masters Degree in English Studies from Illinois State University. Her work has recently appeared in Art Times Journal, Avalon Literary Review & The Bluebird Word. She lives near New Orleans with three cats, two kids and one fish (www.stacieeirich.com).

Why the Rabbits Run

Nonfiction by Lindsay Dudbridge

When I first visited Madrid, just three months before moving there, my Spanish partner and I crossed the central part of the city, erratically dodging and weaving our way through people like bats catching flies. Panicked, I said, “It’s like we’re in New York City. This is too big. I don’t know if I can live here.”

I grew up in the Adirondack Park—with six million acres to explore. I trained for my high-school cross-country team in the footsteps of deer, bear, and coyote and recovered in rocky streams or still lakes set to the soundtrack of loon calls. Born into a life of “forever wild,” I wondered how I could ever replace soft pine and mud with concrete and stone, forests with buildings, and rugged with landscaped?

By the time I was wandering the streets of Spain, I was no stranger to cities. I had been living in the Washington, DC area for nearly 20 years. Though I always sought the wildish spaces, no matter how tiny—running thin strips of trails between backyards and strip malls. The last several years, I lived in the city itself, next to the large, forested Rock Creek Park. I mentally mapped the Park’s trails in ways beyond their intersections and where they led. If I ran up a specific hill at dusk in the spring, I could see nesting owls. If I kept running a little further along the ridge just before dark, I would meet volunteers setting up nets to capture and study bats. I knew where to see the woodpeckers, which rocks to avoid stepping on after a heavy rain, and which trees had fallen with the last heavy storm.

Madrid feels so different—like chaos. It’s an introvert’s nightmare: people are everywhere and everywhere is loud. So I run at the quiet time—the cusp of sunrise—when it’s light enough to not need a headlamp but early enough that it’s not yet considered morning by many here. I start out along the paved, well-lit river trail and head into Casa de Campo, which was once the King’s hunting grounds. There are few people, just a spattering of other runners and dog walkers at the lake near the entrance.

The damp days are my favorite, as a light fog nestles in among the tall pinyon pines. These days, I crunch along the dirt roads because the trails are covered in a heavy mud that cakes the shoes. As I jog along, some of the many rabbits freeze and others bolt, zigzagging to safety. At first, I wondered why they ran. The park seemed so tame. But one morning, I stopped in my tracks as a rabbit came tearing toward me. The fox chasing it slowed to a trot when it saw me, reluctantly turning and heading back into the field in search of more prey. How lucky to see such a thing. I felt guilty for interrupting its hunt and relieved for the rabbit. I continued my run, holding those conflicting emotions and watching the carboneros, so similar to the chickadees of home, flit from branch to branch.

I often feel like I will never fit into this new culture—the late dinners, the lack of personal space, the constant conversation. But these mornings, I can at least immerse myself in this land and understand why the rabbits run and where the foxes hunt. So I run, I learn, and I listen to my footsteps patting a rhythm into the earth. I can almost follow it, like a thread across the Atlantic to the forest where I’m from.


Lindsay Dudbridge is a professional editor from the US who has been living in Madrid, Spain since 2019. When not manipulating the written word, she is outside running, mountaineering, caving, and climbing.

Crumbs

Poetry by t.m. thomson

Maybe the woods are on fire with green.
Maybe wild violets pepper the ground
in the March-cool air. Maybe leaves hang
from rain-drenched branches slick

with October or maybe snow’s audacity
coats ground & breath. Maybe regardless
I choose to sit in a broad-seated swing
pump my legs & sweep back & forth

scraping soil & coming face-to-face
with sky. Maybe I slow-kiss dawn & savor
afternoon & trust twilight, staying out
as long as moon & wearing a red dress.

It would be lovely if women would dance
below me. They could wear red as well
& shout encouragement at me & Glee
would rule the day & night.

Laughter & off-color conversation
would raise temples from mushroom
& moss. Surely the gods of the forest
would hear & come slithering/hopping/

soaring with heads raised & noses
twitching their curiosity at our offerings
of stirred leaves & shuffled snow
revealing black seed & apple rind

shards. We are but crumbs of cosmos
ourselves—why not blaze woods
with the green of our voices, shower them
with ahhh, shiver them with Yes?

(inspired by Niels Corfitzen – “Swimming Between Clouds,” 2021)


Three of t.m. thomson’s poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards. She is co-author of Frame and Mount the Sky (2017), author of Strum and Lull (2019), which placed in Golden Walkman’s 2017 chapbook competition, and The Profusion (2019). Her first full-length collection, Plunge, will be published next year.

Pilgrim

Poetry by Rob Lowe

I like clocks, and books, and music,
Things which structure the way forward,
Are signposts and dwelling places.

Map-reading living is my hobby;
But exploring the nature of being
Requires a compass of faith.

I am waterproofed with hope,
My thoughts are warm but breathable;
I am well-equipped for the journey.

And when at last the sun goes down
After a walk through mountain terrain,
I pitch a tent of morality.

I have no home, nor family,
My friends are birds and beasts and trees;
They talk to me nightly.

I saw a harvest once, of people,
Crowded on a plain below;
And in the midst there was a steeple

And what tolled from its Sunday bell?
There is no lasting peace until
Religion consists of poetry.


Rob Lowe has written privately for many years, but only lately started submitting pieces for publication. Typical work can be found in recent issues of Lucent Dreaming, Libretto, Seventh Quarry, Aromatica Poetica, and some anthologies. He lives in Milton Keynes in the U.K.

3 haiku

Poetry by Joyce Miller

The last leaves fall
from the weeping cherry—
          the farmer sees the city.

 

Blade of green
sharp with spring,
          in winter snow.

 

A firefly alights a light
of bioluminescence on
          a moonless night in June.


Joyce Miller served as a senior editorial assistant for The Cincinnati Review and her work has been published in The RavensPerch, Crack the SpineServing House Journalaaduna, and Venture; Ohio Voices. She currently teaches Italian in the Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Cincinnati.

The Turning

Poetry by Bonnie Demerjian

Sing a song of summer’s end —
crickets in the grass
katydids seesaw away while
locusts buzz of shortened days.
Half moon in the evening sky
veiled with trailing cloud
while the winds shush through the weeds
All restless, so restless.

The cats play ambush in the grass
heedless of the gathering dew.
In the field the dry corn stands
waiting, waiting.

Summer gathers in her skirt
apples, pears and grapes,
fragrant asters plump with bees,
sheaves of scraping insect song, and
waves of birds as they depart.

With a long and backward glance,
step by step she leaves us
soon to sink her body down.
Autumn, it’s autumn.


Bonnie Demerjian writes from Alaska. She has written as journalist and as author of four books about Alaska’s history, human and natural. Her emerging poetry and flash work has appeared in Alaska Women Speak, Tidal Echoes, Bluff and Vine, and Blue Heron Review.

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