Something Like Salvation

BY Ingrid Andersson

Whatever is in the world’s water is here in my hands.
-Sandra Steingraber, ecologist & poet

Faithful old limbs half-naked before a basin of water, wash rag in hand, my immigrant mother performs her daily ablution. I know that later, every drop of the graywater will be re-used to slake her heirloom flowers, or if her recycled rain drums are full, to flush her off-the-meter toilet. This morning, she rages over America’s flushing of fire hydrants: well water pumped from one-thousand feet gushing like a gashed artery down her gutter—she salvaged fifty bucketfuls for her raspberries. Sitting in her kitchen now, plucking red berries from a fifty-year-old Tupperware derived from slag of fossil fuel, I see that she’s drummed into me: these are the world’s water too, and each sweet sphere floods me with something like salvation.

Far from Miami I Think of Miami

BY Ellene Glenn Moore

For a few moments I was from—
from in the capacious sense
of borrowed nostalgia—I was from
a concrete condo whose windows, on tiptoes,
just barely glimpsed the ocean.
Some mornings, quarter mile off shore,
a tanker spun,
great mobile caught in a small wind.
I congratulated myself on the color of the water.
Afternoons, the sky boiled over and I imagined
the indigo and cobalt underbelly of the clouds
had something—anything—to do with my regard for it.
You can see where this is going.
Once in a boat I drifted through mangroves, their arms
glowing white in the low light
and only just, in that dusk,
happened upon a heron readying herself to plunge.
Her wide eye stilled.
I saw her see me. I see her now. Her body
is ribbon, light,
slight as a needle from native pine.
She curves inward—it’s always inward—
bill resting on breast,
as though she is speaking
to her own bright heart.

Cleveland

BY Gabrielle

Cleveland Ohio
Trees, grass, flowers, lake Erie
Cleveland Metro Parks

Photograph in my Wallet

BY HUGH MCMILLAN

I heard rural life described
as a comfort on the radio.
Epidemics or not, the land

reclothes, smiles sappily again,
but if anything reminds me
that we are not of the land

it is this photograph of two
girls staring at the Shinnel,
moving to stand on tippytoe

to peer over the parapet
of the weather beaten bridge.
So I know it is

a melancholy time
when the trees are bare
of leaves and the wind flows

through the rattling world
of what’s left, and I know
rivers still move towards

the sea, clouds stream
like flags but unmistakably
something has gone,

like innocence or more,
a rare time of kindness
that won’t return.

Minnesota

BY Liz Rees

Just below the ice
fish stop flying
for a second to listen
to the single midnight
snowplow, pushing around
and round the lake, playing
bassoon behind a piccolo.
And for a moment, I,
too, am a falling note,
must wade straight
into moonlight toward
the plow that paves this rink
in the middle of the night,
pushing and pushing until
the snow skates into a perfect,
spinning fugue.

(originally published in PINYON 2013)

Brothers

BY RYAN HAMMOND

I am from the river valley,
a rail city,
granite embankments and grain silos.

The Patapsco runs to the Chesapeake,
the Cuyahoga runs to Erie,
the Baltimore & Ohio runs between.

Where I’m From

BY NATE M.

I am from the post
industrial midwest
rivers and forests
and rusted factories