The Peace of Cows

Laura Grace Weldon

I forget to be wholeness
on this cold afternoon.
Mired in tight circles
scribed by our species’ crusade
to greed-eat the planet, I feel despair’s thick
vines root in my gut, climb into my throat.
I remind my body
to relax into gratitude
but that door stays shut

so I open another

walk out back
where winter pastures entice our cows.
They stand complete in themselves,
stoked by inner furnaces, thick with calm.
I lie close to them on frosted grass,
face skies layered as skeins of gray wool.
The peace of cows holds me
like gravity, settles in my cells,
while something in me lifts,
trembles into light.

When I was a kid.

BY Christopher Wick

When I Was A Kid

Most yards were full of gravel,
machine crushed granite from some other part of the state.
Ours was native dirt
decorated with the sparse planting of prickle pear and yucca,
mesquite and cholla.
I did not know their names at the time,
slowly crouching down and hugging my knees to watch
fire ants clamber around my baton of desert grass.
The fine yellow needles of the cactus pads
with ancient black honed tips
like rays of light
passed around the magenta fruit
which had tiny almost-invisible spines of its own.
I was a patient six-year-old
waiting for the slow turn of air
a wave of heat tickling the leaflets of the mesquite.
Feeling my small legs tighten and relax
I would lift my shoulders and sigh
and rest my chin on the other knee
to catch the scratch waddle of a tree lizard
blue-throated, ever vigilant,
raising the full length of its body
just a bit off the earth
and back again.

This Little Light

BY Brandon Krieg

This Little Light

Soy leaves yellowing,
October almost.

Osage orange,
softball rolled in a ditch,
its game abandoned.

Like gristle, this
marble cube
of commissioners’ names
wedged in
to the rebuilt bridge,
teasingly holding 1853 up

above the high-water Saucony
leaping like a dog in frenzy.

Nearby,
a sign designates
this corn this ragweed this road
State Game Lands 182,
name American

as Tintern Abbey is not, and every other tree
is stapled with
handbills proclaiming
our one commandment:
No Trespassing.

I bike a side road through
the gold-
brown, yellow-gold
patchwork of
hill farms, pass one barn
whose stone puzzle-wall lies in a neat heap,
needed piece
I place in this day
of golden-hour ditches
crossed by hundreds
of walking lantern flies
seeking trees of heaven.

They came, I heard, from across the world
on pallets of
goods stacked
in the new fulfillment centers

stretching from Allentown every direction.

On Main Street daily
I see adults show children
how to grind them out with toe-tip,
the little invasive lamps.

Who can blame them?
They have everything they need.

From the High Point of Old Mission Peninsula

BY Shelley Smithson

From the high point of vineyard land
Between East Bay and West Bay,
Shimmering blues are seen on either side,
Framing the peninsula like two hands
Coming together in prayer.

Dazzling Michigan blues, deeper than the sky,
An alchemy of robin egg blue and teal and aquamarine,
Lap up against the edges
Of the soul, soothing and life giving.

How to calm the pulse that is raised
At a sight that sucks out breath and holds one still
In the silencing beauty?

The peninsula stretches out long between the bays—
A nourished land of knotty old maples;
Sturdy trunks unyielding to trials or tribulations
But showing their unrelenting penchant
For steadiness and peace.

And always those blues, eye bursting blues, rampant with possibility,
Their lullaby of the current rolling endlessly to shore.

Retrench

BY Arlene Downing-Yaconelli

Retrench

I am from what used to be a
small suburb of Sacramento,
California

I am from a lush golden valley
a place of horns and hoofs,
bears and foxes, coyotes,
hunting eagles and soaring vultures.
Where water runs wild in
sweetly raging rivers, guided
between steep canyon walls
to fertile wild-flowered flatlands,
pausing on the way
to water ancient sequoias,
and butterscotch-scented Jeffrey Pines,
Where the snow melt pools
in crystalline granite-bowled
icy lakes and spreads over miles
of wet land to nourish
feathered migrating millions.
Where the salmon ran each year
uphill for leagues into
the heart of the land, offering
themselves to a people we
have decimated and
confined to casinos.
A place we have slashed, washed out,
burned, dug through, drained, cut,
desiccated, over-worked and sold
for a mess of pottage.

No more.

This year we begin
in earnest to honor and succor
this home, the planet
that has given us birth
and a place among the stars.

The Sound of Silence

BY Barbara MacKay

The Sound of silence

not a bird chirping
not a breeze stirring
not a voice whimpering
nor an ocean wave curling
just the sound of
silence
in the surround

you can hear it
as it caresses your
overburdened mind
silencing
even the whisper of a feather
as it falls to the ground

Foothold

BY DANA DELIBOVI

That first warm week in April,
I stood barefoot in the garden,
pink-polished toenails caked with mud.

The faults in the polish,
little pink chips cracked-off by a
telltale entropy,
reminded me that bits of my feet,
their skin, nails and bones
were sloughing inexorably
and flaking down into the silt.

Foot quanta
flowed through the ground,
ready to feed
grasses and crabapple trees—
because the energy of life is not our own.
We borrow it,
then return it scrap by scrap.

To be barefoot outdoors
is to tempt fate.

Moreau

BY Marilyn McCabe

Arrive again at this angle,
this bend and curve up
fractured ridge

of ice, rock, time, weather.
Moss blurs edges here,
a granite ledge, a log aslant.

As a shoe’s sole slowly
wears its wearer, some land’s
the mirror of its daughter.

Rauks

BY Ingrid Andersson

Rauks

rauk – a column of fossilized rock formed
as softer geological material erodes away;
from Gutnish, a language of the Baltic
island of Gotland

Born in warm synovial seas,
the towering giants once
were living
nerve centers, teeming coral.
They rose from their ancient
beds, sedimented in life and death,
fundamental forces: sun, water,
wind, gravity. Today they stand
along a Baltic coast, speaking
a native language: rauks—
earth’s best poems.
They look to me like
fossil brainstems, freed
from softer matter.
I love to go
and dangle
my naked feet
below one:
midbrain,
pons,
medulla
oblongata,
feeling
happy.

Neighborhood Violence We Never Talk About

BY Ingrid Andersson

Neighborhood Violence We Never Talk About
(dropping my child at school)

Streets as wide as landing-strips.
Sidewalks never laid.
Cars at stop signs over-running zebra stripes.
Pedestrians scattering like prey.
My son’s locked school.
No guns allowed (a sign on his way into 6th-grade).
Weedless playgrounds.
Weedless lawns.
Unswimmable blue-green lake.
The ghost-white bicycle where a boy was killed.
The Starbucks barrista: Have a good day!
Re-entering morning traffic under
another flooding rain.