Tag: nature (Page 5 of 8)

Logging the Land

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Kay Peterson

The 40-acre coulee was
mostly woody slopes
and for the health of
the younger trees
had to be logged,
just like carrots
and beets have to be
thinned to thrive.

She hated even thinning
killing vegetables,
and crashing tree falls
broke her heart.
She hated the buzzing
crack of breaking timber
branches and stumps piling up
ruts trucks were making.

But ruts would fill in
and become trails
she could hike to explore
for wildflowers and ginseng.
And decaying trunks
would support fungi, mushrooms
and prized morels.

So she steeled herself
to the pillaging of the forest
tried not to think like a tree
tried to fall gracefully
into acceptance.

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Dash Literary Journal, Last Stanza, The RavensPerch, Spank the Carp, Steam Ticket, and Tipton Poetry Journal. She co-published Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine (2004-2009) and has authored two chapbooks: Belated Remembrance (2010) and Selling the Family (2021). Visit www.nancykaypeterson.com.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

For the Love of Color: Ochre

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Linda Allison

Ochre is a wanderer
Embarking from deep yellow, it charts its way across the palette,
eventually landing somewhere in the vicinity of terracotta.
Ochre is the paprika in my soup and the cinnamon on my toast.
It is a farm-fresh egg, dark yolk dancing in the skillet,
and a hoo-doo rising from the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.
It is the west Texas sky moments before the sun drops below the horizon.
My memories of Big Bend are all in ochre.

I am a study in ochre. Lids dusted, cheeks rubbed, warm golds and earthy red-browns,
Maybelline Autumn Copper and Almay Sunkissed Bronze
My hair and my sister’s hair, too, different ends of the spectrum: ginger and auburn
both now faded by the years

Isn’t it interesting that what ancient cave art remains was all drawn in ochre?

After forty years in finance, Linda Allison is enjoying a second life as a writer, photographer, and explorer. Her work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Pile Press, 2023 Utah’s Best Poetry and Prose Anthology, and others. Find her photography in Persimmon Tree and Burningword Literary Journal.

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Peter Devonald

Solace has a song for you, waiting, waiting, amongst the torrent.
If you don’t choose a day to relax your body will choose one for you.

Noise corrupts and absolute noise corrupts absolutely,
loud whirr of technology never stops, incessantly, ceaseless,

Instead sit in nature, listen, listen, to bird song and insects
reaffirm connections beautiful and obscure.

Take time to read, enjoy and endure your deeper self.
Be someone else, briefly, brilliant and captivating, memory.

Reconnect with friends, remember, remember, the times before
it all changed with vibrant neon, obsequious pleasures, glinting.

Recall the times before you weren’t connected to the miracles,
when simple pleasures were miracles enough to live exquisite.

You know what you really need, you always did, glimpsed
through endless noise and rain, you saw yourself, standing there.

The noise can wait a week without you, trust me, believe in me,
believe in silence, the seas, sagacious shift to embrace serenity.

Peter Devonald is winner of two Heart Of Heatons Awards, Waltham Forest Poetry and joint winner of FofHCS Poetry Award 2023. He has been published extensively and has two Best Of Net nominations. Poet in residence at HAUS-A-REST. Visit www.scriptfirst.com or https://www.facebook.com/pdevonald.

Blue Jay

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Liz deBeer

A blue jay landed in a planter by my window with something in its mouth. Not wanting to frighten it away, I froze, watching the indigo bird dancing around in a circle —tap, tap, tappity, tap —with what? A peanut?

Why the hell is a blue jay flying around with an unshelled peanut? Google knew: Apparently blue jays adore peanuts. Whole peanuts. In the shell, which they peck open, often gluttonously.

But this blue jay who landed in a planter by my window couldn’t crack the peanut shell. His head shook up and down, trying to puncture the peanut against the plastic planter’s edge: Tap, tap, tappity, tap again and again.

Finally, he turned to face me, peanut still intact. Looked me in the eye and spat out the nut before flying off.

I got up to inspect the planter by my window where the blue jay landed. Nestled among the roots of an almost dead pink petunia lay an unbroken cork-colored peanut hull.

Why the hell did the blue jay leave the nut, supposedly its favored treat? Was it merely a lazy blue jay who couldn’t penetrate the shell of a stubborn peanut?

Or was this a sign, this bird who landed in the planter by my window? A symbol of a guardian angel or my ancestors’ spirit with a message about longevity, fertility, or wealth?

Liz deBeer, an English teacher who resides in New Jersey, divides her time among many passions, including reading, beach walking, volunteering, and experimenting with different writing genres. Although Liz has published primarily in newspapers and teaching journals, she is working on writing YA novels and flash. Liz’s website is www.lizdebeerwriter.com.

This April

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Michael Carrino

Time can be a gentle quiz a dissonant tin drum
Songbirds are silent

It continues to rain Every village road is now
a branch of the river

The past is a vintage red wine
in some dark cellar

The future might only be
black grapes

wasting on a vine as another
ash-stained cloud

creates an illusion Beyond
the slate gray lake

every mountain must be burning

Michael Carrino was co-founder and poetry editor of SUNY Plattsburgh’s literary journal, Saranac Review. He has had nine books of poetry published, most recently, In No Hurry (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Natural Light (Kelsay Books, 2023), as well as individual poems in numerous journals and reviews.

Birthplace

1 March 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

—for W.S. Merwin

Out under clouds in the broad wheatfield
is a certain breed of silence
where only the perfectly hushed
give voice
Wind through the stalks
A sound of colors blending everywhere
in fine webs of shadow and light

After hours here you can start to sense
God’s breathing
like slow shifts in the clockwork
of ancient life
Then you may leave your body

as you lie in the delicate wheat
to return and find yourself
new once more
as you were long ago

your eyes wide
in the freshly formed world

Alexander Etheridge’s poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize. He is the author of God Said Fire (2023) and Snowfire and Home (Belle Point Press, 2024).

And Yet This Life

1 February 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Lisa Low

Is still worth living;
even now the rain is falling, making
mud from dirt around the roots and filling
in the ragged spots where grass hardly
ever shows. Tomorrow, too, the sun
will bring its healing mix of heat and light,
and make the flowers grow, more firmly
capable, their fancy floral dresses
stiff, each new eye glazed with thick black stripe
of paint, each marigold more grandly
dressed, more rich with bright silk fabrics hung,
orange vests and epaulets . . .

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, Pennsylvania English, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

Tanka for the New Year

31 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by K.L. Johnston

cathedral of pines
capturing
light and silence
carpet of needles
shushing our footsteps
our breath
rising white
with songbird wings

K.L. Johnston is an award-winning haiku poet and author whose works have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. She holds a degree in Literature and Communications from the University of South Carolina and is a retired antiques dealer. You can follow her on Facebook at A Written World.

green mountain painting — Photo by Jesse Zheng on Pexels.com

Artificial Lawn

12 August 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Amy Akiko

He flutters past concrete at the back of houses, knows the slabbed rectangles will not feed him. But look, up ahead, a square of green promise, his own emerald city of grass and worms and slugs and larvae. Swooping down, he prepares to peck into the lifegiving soil, but his beak is rebuffed by an unyielding ground―a manmade sheet of death for the fauna beneath.

Amy Akiko is an educator, journalism graduate and writer from South London. She enjoys creating various forms of fiction including poetry, children’s stories, flash and short stories. Her work is soon to appear in The Tiger Moth Review, and she is currently editing her first novel.

Last October

18 July 2023 / Editor

Poetry by John Surowiecki

The mountain laurel is as green as the
maples are orange. Deer visit as if on cue,
hoovering the seeds we left for doves
and newly arrived juncoes.

Anything to do with spring and summer, with lilacs
and irises and that wistful pneumonic yellow,
is long gone, escaped in the raw humidity of

night. The wigs of dead leaves
are already caught up in scattered whirlwinds.
It’s clear we don’t have much time together.

Rainwater that leaks from the driveway gravel
has pooled in unlikely places,
not the swales that engineering has intended.
The silence between a breath and the breath that

follows it seems to last forever. October
is no longer with us: you’ve taken its place.
It needs a new face, yours, a new voice, yours.

It needs your swallows and mourning gnats
your own phrase on the fiddle which everyone can hear:
you, the season of leaving, have your music too.

John Surowiecki is the author of fourteen books of poetry. His latest, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was recently published by Wolfson Press. John is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award, the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize and other awards.

Tag: nature (Page 5 of 8)

Logging the Land

For the Love of Color: Ochre

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

Blue Jay

This April

Birthplace

And Yet This Life

Tanka for the New Year

Artificial Lawn

Last October

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories