Earth Day 2023 Special Collection Full Text
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Catherine Pierce

The Elements

(with lines from The Girl’s Own Book, by Lydia Maria Child, 1834)

In this game, the girls sit in a circle.
One tosses a handkerchief at another

and calls Air! or Earth! or Water!
and the other must answer quickly

with a proper animal—goshawk,
beetle, whale. If the person fails to speak

quick enough, a forfeit must be paid.
It’s a lively time—the white cloth’s

velocity, the gasping panic
of forgetting every swimming thing.

The girls love the gasping, how it
aches their lungs, makes their hearts

race like the black terrier when he
bullets to the fields beyond the yard.

Their laughter rends the close air.
The girls call Oriole! Tiger! They’ll pay

no forfeit. No one comes to hush
them, not yet. Their older sisters

are stitching in the parlor.
Their older sisters are marrying.

Soon the veal cutlets. Soon
the trousseau. Already the girls know

how to stitch straight, how to coax
the dust from the deepest corner.

Asleep by the hearth, the terrier
stretches. If any one player calls out

“Fire!” everyone must keep silence,
because no creature lives in that element.

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Catherine Pierce is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016); her new book, Danger Days, is forthcoming in October 2020. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere, and has won a Pushcart Prize. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

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Lindsay Lusby

We Do Our Best Work in the Dark

—seen on the side of a Tojo Mushrooms truck
on the highway outside Richmond, Virginia

This is a love poem.

This is the game in which
we bury ourselves at opposite ends

of the same forest.

Even though we’re underground,
we still close our eyes
to concentrate,

hold one arm above the dead leaves
among the jack-in-the-pulpits—

Testing. Testing. 1-2-3.

To wake the network
of small ghosts between us,

these strands of mycelium—
   a string of lights.

Is this your card?

Three sinuous lines
gilled as a death-cap.

            Listen.
     Here.

To haunt each other
across this wild dark,

we must first forget
our bodies—

let my hands
be your forest floor

& let your mouth
be my mosses running over—

            Is this your card?

A five-pointed bloom,
            blunted earthstar.

Yes,
it glows—
greening with groundlight.

This is where we meet
in the middle

of the night,
of nowhere & grow

so still my heart
cleaves your sternum—

a pale clutch of ghost pipe
beneath the slow patience of oaks.

—for Mark

Note: Zener cards are a deck designed by Duke University’s Parapsychology Lab for experiments in extrasensory perception. The series of shape outlines featured on the cards are a circle, a plus sign, three wavy lines, a square, and a five-pointed star.

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Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) and Imago (dancing girl press, 2014), and the winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared most recently in New South, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North and Plume.

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Jane Satterfield

Equinox: A Blessing

As the eagle angles the draft
above the rigging of sweetgum & oak,
I invoke the name of the gods who rule
the one swatch of land left between the campus
byway & bridge to peel back Scotch Broom &
other invasives—
Come forth, cleanse & restore—
In the days of our distress, let heartwood
nourish the living tree, the vesper
sparrow ring out, anthemic. Protect
the small stream where deer come to drink,
racoon to range.

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Jane Satterfield has received awards in poetry from the NEA, Bellingham Review, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Mslexia and more. Her books of poetry are Her Familiars, Assignation at Vanishing Point, Shepherdess with an Automatic, and Apocalypse Mix, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by David St. John. New poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Ecotone, Hopkins Review, Interim, Nelle, Orion and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore.

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Ned Balbo

Night Sky of Another Earth

We didn’t even know that it was gone.
In place of stars, a dark gray curtain
hovered overhead,
half haze, half urban

lightstorm from the ground up. Did we look,
or see it on the news, stars bright
in archived images?
We’d lost the sky

to satellites in never-ending orbit,
programmed from below; to waves
of coastal light ascending;
to the glare

that climbs from roads and airfields everywhere,
the wasted afterglow cast off
by cities, radiant towers…
We made that trade.

True night, I’ve heard, survives where we don’t see it,
home to sentinel drones that guard
            the boundaries of a desert.
Galaxy-swept,

cave-black yet filled with stars, it’s like a myth
we memorized in school or half-
remember from some other
Earth where, standing

under immense sky, we gazed in awe
before the panorama, uncertain
of our place, and bothered
to look up.

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Ned Balbo’s newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), both published in 2019. His previous books are Upcycling Paumanok, Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize), Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize) and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize). He received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and three Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland Arts Council. Recent poems appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Ecotone, Literary Matters, Literary Imagination and Gingko Prize 2019 Ecopoetry Anthology. Balbo taught most recently in Iowa State’s MFA program in creative writing and environment and at the West Chester University Poetry Conference. He is married to poet-essayist Jane Satterfield. (More at https://nedbalbo.com.)

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Christine Spillson

A Sign in Space (Midwest Edition)

I’d come back and there it would be in its place,
just as I had left it, simple and bare,
but with that unmistakable imprint, so to speak,
that I had given it.
--Italo Calvino

When my feet were six, they were sometimes feet
in cement, not stuck, marking it
with me before quick-dryingness became

permanent without me. My feet, my hands,
my sister’s feet, her hands, fingers and toes
pointing deeper into a southern Ohio backyard,

towards two trees—one the perfect distance
from the other to span a hammock, to echo the gap
in the wooden fence that sturdied rosebushes, guarded

tomatoes, rhubarb. Toes pressed deeper than shallow
curved heels, absent arch, show a body leaning
forward, pressing away—poised to run out to grass

not into house. The augury of movement
in the marks is easier than the memory. Done
with either giggles or disgust, the image

more construction than imprint—the image
of wet cement, of unfinished construction
waiting for imprint—a scene observed,

not experienced. They would stay forward
pointing rather than backward looking.
After I left, my family left, the house

emptied, was sold, refilled. I might now
circle back, looking for the sign that stood
for presence but became absence, a meaning

that slid while they rooted and smoothed,
holding smaller puddles in rain, in snowmelt.

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Christine Spillson is a recent graduate of the nonfiction MFA at George Mason University and teaches at Salisbury University in Maryland. Her work has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Diagram, The Rumpus and Portland Review.

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Chris Cocca

The Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on the Ecology of Pennsylvania Highways

We could talk about the road
from Allentown to Bloomsburg,
the nuke plant outside Berwick,
the wind mills in Shamokin.
Or I could say what’s plain,
the pallor of the tree tops
too soon against the still-green valley’s
August.

It’s not latitude or elevation
dressing them for harvest.
The civic body pulsing
the freight metastasizing
the emissions of the tourists
come to find themselves
in nature.
Or I could say what’s plain.
There’s nothing in our handiwork
the dying leaves would envy.

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Chris Cocca is a writer from Allentown, PA. His work has been published at Hobart, Brevity, elimae, The Huffington Post and elsewhere. He studied fiction at The New School (MFA, 2011) and is a recipient of the Creager Prize for Creative Writing at Ursinus College.

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Terin Weinberg

Spaces

I’ve turned June bug infested
kitchen tops into barren
and bleached surfaces.
I’ve boxed and bagged
my belongings for years;
found crawlspaces
and corners to place things
and replace them. I’ve tied
bows to goodbyes, covered
them with paint and spackle.
I’ve thrown clothes out
I once foolishly considered
heirlooms, ties to past selves,
lands I’ve briefly called home,
briefly called me.

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Terin Weinberg is an MFA candidate in poetry at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She graduated with degrees in Environmental Studies and English from Salisbury University in Maryland. Her most recent poems are forthcoming in The Normal School and Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment.

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Sarah Brockhaus

Perennial

My eyelids collapse
against each other and your body forms

flowers in the home-made dark, whispering
their way out of the romance novels I used to

strain my eyes reading. Now I spend my nights
reading you. Let me graft myself

to your floral, braid you into
me. Let me keep this, please. Futures

feel futile anyway, forget
the living room and my hands in
my own hair, your feet finding their way
to the door. Forget the words

I let slip, how we unsolidify
ourselves to become a solution. Forget
how I try to write a poem you can read
and it always cripples itself

into this. Be lips. Be liquid. Be love. You are
rooted into place. Maybe I drench myself
in disbelief just to swim in the same pond,
maybe the window stays open all night,

maybe I never yell, maybe the bed doesn’t ache
and you reach back for me. Hold me
to you and I’ll inherit the aching. We never can
tangle ourselves in a way that won’t be

unwound. I kiss you and you turn to sailboats, to the color
green, to pressed flowers. The air in the room

condenses in on us. I haven’t been buried
like this in years.

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Sarah Brockhaus is a Sophomore at Salisbury University. She is studying English and Secondary Education and hopes to become a high school English teacher after graduation. Outside of class she enjoys playing volleyball and drinking coffee.

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Siobhan Jean-Charles

Dysania

I want to give you a Haitian goodbye. The initial farewell
at dusk while we talk at the table until the ice is beaded dew 

on glass. Stand on the threshold for two hours,
one hand on the doorknob. On the steps until 

the porch light thrusts our shadows to the car
to sit in the driveway, windows down, key in 

the ignition and a miasma of wasted gas. I lie
to my parents and everyone knows where I am. 

The tickle of mosquitos, the blood that pounds
in my shuffling 

feet is my inheritance–the mannerisms of unspoken
pleas, the denial I don’t want to leave.

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Siobhan Jean-Charles is an English major at Salisbury University. She is a reader for the University's literary magazine, Scarab, and a writing consultant for the writing center. She enjoys writing poetry that explores nature, power dynamics and internalized oppression.

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Summer Smith

when witchcraft was innocent

plucking spring’s onion grass, dried earth
worms stuck to sidewalk. when i was little,
i’d chalk in ant colonies and curl pill bugs
in my dirt palms. for dinner, we would make

maggot soup crushed by twig, rainwater elixir,
decayed rose petals. when i was little, the world
was my cauldron— laundry steam seeping out
the side of my house, into the poison ivy. i would

scrape every knee capping memory off of the road;
life hoarded into the mud puddles or back into dunes.
dandelion, butter cup, my yellowed then browned then
whitened skin—when i was little, it didn’t mean a thing.

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Summer Smith lives and attends school in Salisbury, MD. They currently study creative writing with a focus on poetry and nonfiction at Salisbury University. Smith is originally from Baltimore and studied literary arts at Patapsco High School and Center for the Arts.

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Nancy Mitchell

Fallout

Life’s Pictorial History
of World War II, cans of beer
that made Milwaukee famous
sweat rings into cocktail
tables. JFK's blood splatter
black against Jackie's pink
Chanel skirt—oh, that pillbox
hat!—a Pollack painting
in reverse. Friday's fish-sticks
safely chafed, cafeteria workers
wait for the air-raid siren
to shut it's mouth, for the first
and second graders to unfold
knees, elbows, and crawl
out from under desks and come
to lunch—mushroom blooms
looming the horizon forever
to be paid forward—blasted,
bombed, blown away.

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Nancy Mitchell is a 2012 Pushcart Prize winner and the author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut and The Out-of-Body Shop. Co-editor of Plume Interviews 1, her poems have appeared in AGNI, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Daily, Washington Square Review and other journals and have been anthologized in Last Call (Sarabande Books), The Working Poet (Autumn House Press) and Plume 3, 4,5, 6 and 7. She has been an artist in residence at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in San Angelo, Virginia and Auvillar, France, and at Spring Creek, Oregon State University. Mitchell teaches in the CELL program at Salisbury University in Maryland and serves as Associate Editor of Special Features for Plume Poetry. She is the Poet Laureate of the City of Salisbury, Maryland.

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Gary Fox

Ten Thousands Ifs on the Boardwalk

We eat cannoli
water ice and ice cream like
the fading orange over the ocean
and the pinhole dot of the rising
moon are not miracles
like my wife and her two blood
vessels did not burst
with the purpose of blotting out this
family outing like the dripping smiles
staining our kids’ shirts are not answered
prayers like I did not chant to everything
to attach to this very moment
and everyone has the nerve
to keep walking past
like they don’t see the now
full moon leave a rippling trail
over the ocean towards the holy
spirit like love and prayers did not mend
this possible hole in our being
like we do not have to wear masks
because we can be erased
from the script we act
out like we are not one cough
away from quarantined silence

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Gary Fox has poems published in the journals The Bucks County Writer, Toho Journal, The Shore and High Shelf Press as well as the anthology Mass Incarceration in America: Advocacy, Art and The Academy. Also, he had a poem featured online by The Parliament. He has a B.A. in English and a certificate in creative writing from The Pennsylvania State University.

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Shannon Ryan

Fruit Set

Your hands were the size of two
maroon grapes, halved
by the bend of my thumb. Gripping

the slippery pieces, the ache of coulure climbs
as the small berries shatter excessively
from the clusters. We were no longer

a pair of cherries stem-bound to the same tree, cleaved
by time’s hollow mouth, impatient.

They don’t teach you how
a second splits             a seed, 

how a flaw in fusion could untether
you      from humanity, fission

the only option.

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Shannon Ryan is studying visual art and creative writing at Salisbury University. She is the managing editor of The SCARAB. Her poetry is forthcoming in Asterism.

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Cassandra Whitaker

Catwife, in Spring Rain, Flash Flood Alert

Lie where the good world puts you. Lay all day
green-eyed, kept. And outside? Rain and sirens.
The ocean crawls into fields sluiced in reeds
and shredded litter. Flash water laps the curb
while the wind fiddle-crabs a dead leaf across
macadam cracked and macadam blue.
Catwife stretches out, lap wise. Purrful. Don’t be
shy, don’t be shy, don’t be wise.  Rain clouds
forget they have rained and again begin
to pour out memories. Under thunder,
the ocean can be heard trying to catch up,
with each harried breath closer, closer, close.

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Cassandra Whitaker (they/them) is a trans writer from Virginia whose work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Mississippi Review, Foglifter, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Evergreen Review and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle and an educator.

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Tara A Elliott

The World

Ball-peen hammer heavy in my small hand;
lid of the washer shut like a closed mouth.
My chore: hit the knob of the broken Kenmore
with a hammerblow the moment it kicked to spin.
But there in front of me stood the world—
open and outspread, each country defined
in delicate pastel, outlined by thick black borders,
imprinted atop the folding metal table
for which my dad was proud to have paid
three dollars at a yard sale. It summoned
me that afternoon to find the names of places
I’d only heard on TV: Puerto Vallarta, Oahu, Seoul.
In the rusted corner, the compass rose—a small star
pointing out the arrangement of everything. And the click
went unheard as I explored landforms rising like breasts
I didn’t yet have, the Brooks Range nestled
into the neck of the Rockies, the cinching of the Sierra Madres,
the wicked hip of the Andes. Suds slopping out the washer,
whitewater puddling the hard cement floor and me so quick
with the hammer, that corner
so sharp, my wrist so soft as rust bit into flesh
and a dark river rose to stream down my forearm—
a flood of blood on Ayres Rock, Brisbane & Sydney, the Coral Sea
O mop, O bucket, O washer, O wrist,
O map-so-gloriously-unfolded, O aged-white line—
a constant reminder of how this world can scar.

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Tara A Elliott’s poems have appeared in TAOS Journal of International Poetry & Art, The American Journal of Poetry and Stirring, among others. She currently serves as the President of the non-profit Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA) in Maryland. For more information, visit www.taraaelliott.com

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Maya C Thompson

Louisville Supremum (with Glass)

Please, ignore her when she rambles about the KKK
who shoved their Cadillac toward the brush
and kick-turned their tires as if they were one
skateboarder in a group of free wheelers
near the South African chicken joint I thought was Peruvian.
At the canceled bus stop where the man claimed
cemetery tile memorial, the second lieutenant dripped
the methanol juice as he clutched his flowers

on the bench. The chain residuum is hung in smolder.
What do you want? I gave you the footage
tapes of the copper backward swan at the intersection,
its neck turned to the woman on the curb.
Train a highway to be empty long enough,
you can summon a convention to shout where they died
the first time. How they laughed at the oxygen
on the surgery tables after they handed the tourniquets themselves,

flooded hotel pools with chlorine, and taught you to crave
car crashes so far from home you’d never go back.
Who else could slugger bat these preachers into crystal?
A thug witness who just so happened to be on the sidewalk?
When I pass a wreck, I think of her grills glistening
over Appalachia. I got miles on you.
Mince the bullet in her cheek and leave it there.
Divide the maxilla from the ledger,

a two-way echinacea raised under the lead bud.

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Maya C Thompson is a poet from Maryland. Her work is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review and appears in The Scarab. She enjoys playing instruments and watching films.

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Ellie Altman

Inventory

She cleans most mornings,
surveying her house’s wood floors
for her life’s inventory of scratches and scars.

When the iron fell from the ironing board,
leaving a huge gash
on the laundry room floor.

When three cans of coconut milk
slipped from her arms
making half-moon dents
on the pantry floor.

When she was drying it,
she lost her grip and the butcher knife fell,
making a big ding next to the floor mat
at the kitchen sink.

And when the dog barks uncontrollably
and races full tilt from the front door
to the porch door to the back door,
scoring a pattern of scratches that marks the path
for warding off attack from the mail carrier,
lest she dares to enter the house.

Her whole life carved out
on these floors, yet
no blood spilt,
no pain felt—
only the pull of gravity
and its everyday violence.

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After retiring as director of Adkins Arboretum (Maryland’s Eastern Shore) in 2014, Ellie Altman began writing poems. Her first published poem, “How to Peel an Egg,” appeared in The Broad River Review. She is seeking publication of two chapbooks, Within Walking Distance and Thin as Air.

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KJ Li

Aubade at the End of the World

It seems foolish to say so now: I did not imagine ruin
could be so shining. In my mother’s hometown, white
ash melts against cracked tongues, generations
of voices folded into every speck. Here, on this distant

earth, the horizon gutted by a shade of flame
that scours the sky of any lesser light. Bright
as any paradise. When we cast our last misshapen
prayers against the mirrored dark, we did not

yet recognize worship as a slower means
of burning. In sufficient light,
even the gods can become
any common animal. How many lifetimes

we have forfeit trying to undo
this transformation: making
and remaking what burns us, plotting
ways to get to heaven when we die

and no sooner. When the last child comes
upon this earth, may they come empty
of such hunger. Everything we built is brilliant
to no end. We were not made

to think of ourselves as splendid.
When the gods burned among us, animals
touching animals, we could not understand this
as other than tragedy. To exist, to be witness here

amongst so much vanishing, must be a sin
or a miracle. Or every miracle
is also sin. Against what, the shining gods
won’t say.

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KJ Li is an LGBT+ Chinese-American raised in central Texas. She currently lives in Washington, D.C., where she takes long walks and misses the family cat. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shade Journal, Overheard Lit, Chestnut Review and others—more can be found at https://kjli.carrd.co/.

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Charlie M. Brown

The Price of Thread

— after Misery by Kathe Kollwitz

And sunlight knocks at the window,
but doesn’t enter. Grief

waxes a father slowly
into the way he stands.

The eyes of the child he holds
address the unweaving loom.

The walls are breathless. The breathless
are walls—

A mother’s hands pull at her strands
to find a thread of reason.

And the boy waits
below. Patient between inhale, exhale. The note

only played between
the black and white keys. And here

I am waiting,

knowing
soon the child will wake,

and say maybe those who jump from burning
buildings aren’t any less

afraid.
In the end, they know

the ground is the only place we’ll find
rest.

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Charlie M. Brown’s poems and essays are forthcoming or have appeared recently in journals such as Tahoma Literary Review, 30 North and The Scarab. He is currently an undergraduate student studying creative writing at Salisbury University in Maryland. He enjoys film, photography and music.

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Ellery Beck

Augmented Pastoral

There’s the sky, a sinking blue—a can’t-breath, bottom-
of-the-ocean shade—so shiny it must’ve been built
up there, cautiously coded blue-by-blue

pixel. There’s a branch, molded silicone
against sun; there’s the plastic leaves shimmering
in the wind. Watch—there’s the program

that carries opaque clouds across sky, blue
light seeping through, a uniform
drift across our static landscape. Watch the autonomous 

birds, flapping their wings in loops, each following
its script. Didn’t you want this careful reconstruction
of the skyline, one you could pause and repeat?

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Ellery Beck is a graduate of Salisbury University with a BA in Creative Writing. They have poems published or forthcoming in Passages North, Colorado Review, Atlanta Review, Sugar House Review, New Delta Review and elsewhere. Ellery is also one of the co-founders of Beaver Magazine as well as a reader for Poet Lore.

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Shannon K Winston

Mustard Seed

A girl glues a mustard seed to white draft paper.
She steps back to admire her work. This is my origin story,
she announces to her art teacher who will never understand her.
Later, she adds blue-eyed grasses and black hawthorn.

She steps back to admire her work. This is my origin story.
Chatter about the timid, rootless girl fills the halls.
Later, she adds: Blue-eyed grasses + black hawthorn
= my body. In my gut, that’s where alfalfa sprawls.

Stories about the timid, rootless girl fill the halls.
Her art project grows and grows into a landscape
that equals her body. In her gut, she feels alfalfa sprawl.
She works tirelessly. Apricot blossoms and sage leaf make

her art project grow and grow into a landscape
she can finally call home. How it unfurls for acres and acres
around her! Apricots, blossoms, and sage leaves make
a girl from a mustard seed. A draft on white paper.

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Shannon K Winston's poems have appeared in RHINO, Crab Creek Review, The Citron Review, the Los Angeles Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and several times for the Best of the Net. Her poetry collection, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings, was recently published by Glass Lyre Press. She currently lives in Princeton, New Jersey. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com/.

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Kevin Grauke

An Invitation, of Sorts

I whispered in your good ear
about fires burning backward
as the music died around us
and smoke withdrew into my fist.

A cabin on stilts sits in the desert
in darkness and silence and in the blood
of signatures echoing infinitely in a pair
of mirrors cracked in half by an egg.

This is my home, I say. Please be my guest.
Sleep on my green naugahyde couch
while I gather the last mice into a bowl
and finish the skim milk you brought.

Here, night ends when the sun loses
its scab, okay? Be long gone before this.

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Kevin Grauke has published work in The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Sycamore Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou'wester and Quarterly West, to name a few. His collection of stories, Shadows of Men (Queen's Ferry Press), won the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Originally from Texas, he teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

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Gillian Lynch

Of the Little Magothy

To think of the banks
of that place, before

the weather, before
the wilt. Where our river

leaked into the hollow
of the hollowed. Where the warble

would tune with the high school
band in the field lining

our old backyards. Like most things,
I (and probably

you) didn’t notice until
the lull. With each flood

that doesn’t, this is what you remind me
of. But since I wrote it down,

it has probably changed.

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Gillian Lynch is a senior undergraduate student studying creative writing at Salisbury University. She has previously published in The Scarab and has poems forthcoming in Asterism.

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Rachel Walker

Elegy for a Live Oak

Before the riverbed dried and chalked the roots
of the live oak behind your house, wisteria
shocked the grocery store parking lot and
we split a carton of milk against the pavement. 

Before the cracked metatarsal bone, we woke
to pain without the memory of its source.
We dreamed of that choked-up river,
of our thirst, the snarling dog. Before the room’s

bright green walls were lined with crates
of rotting apples, their fragrance curled in our throats…
the day flourished each of its hours: we cooled
our backs on the marble floor, and the oak leaned
into its vision on the water.

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Rachel Walker is a poet from Maryland. She currently lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she is an MFA candidate at UNLV. Her work has previously appeared in Mud Season Review.

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Adam D. Weeks

Penultimate Letter

“but then you say look
and the earth is coming back”
–Chloe N. Clark

I’m sure I’ve said too much, cracked
the speakers with the back of my throat—
then again, a bird can’t help

but sing in the morning. If I promise to keep
a little    quieter, will you stay
to see the early    light

in my eyes? If I say I can’t    stop my shaking
hands and you tell me to try (a little
harder), could we call it    love and blunt

this burning   in the grass?
See, some girls, they want
to collect    their men, and me, I want to be

clovers tacked     to your dash.
Maybe if I stretch myself
into longer notes and chords you’ll lip

the words we wrote together.
Maybe if you count
your little fingers while I keep the rain above

your head, you’ll see      how much I can hold
in the broad of my palm.

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Adam D. Weeks is a junior undergraduate student studying creative writing at Salisbury University. He has poems published in Asterism and a poem forthcoming in Prairie Margins. He also has a fiction piece published in The Scarab.

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Barbara Daniels

This Is the End

The end of growth, the end
of a spider that streaks
from the empty leg

of my jeans, lifted just now
to a hook on a door.
We shall be burned away

like a black star.
This is the end
of mortification of the flesh,

an end to the soft folds
of every body.
The end of windows

curtained with lace. I will
no more smell the decaying
pages of books

nor will there be lilies,
sneakers, lemonade. No winter
leaves, those looped fingers

of white oaks scuffed
on a pathway. Nothing
now will be tethered here.

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Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

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Julia Schorr

Invasive Species

I like how our eyes lock when they shouldn't. I find you discreetly
between the verses of my old favorite songs, in the thick of the spring when the pollen
made you crinkle your nose. You are every red Camaro that
revs past my Volkswagen bug. Had I known
your roots were so stubborn, I never would have crept
into your spreading arms.

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Julia Schorr is a student at Salisbury University. She is an associate poetry and fiction editor for The SCARAB. Her poetry is forthcoming in Allegheny Review.

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Shannon Austin

Autosarcophagy

i. mouth

Fire-breathers & sword
swallowers: drink paraffin to

sound out dragon alphabets, line
their throats with butter.

All they need to say in six
seconds of expectation—

what I sip, mithridatic.

ii. stomach

Contest
of thorns
& wheat. Which
rises to claim a castle?

iii. lungs

the only love/              poem

            is a memory

receive             /           release

pollen from a frond

            wind from a sea

iv. brain

Some cannibals believe
they gain the traits of those they eat.

Which part of me is a feast?

v. heart

This first.
This last.
Repeat.

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Shannon Austin is a writer from Baltimore, MD, with an MFA in poetry at UNLV. Her poems and translations have appeared in Colorado Review, Interim, Profane, American Chordata and elsewhere.

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Ellery Beck

Art

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Ellery Beck is an undergraduate student majoring in English at Salisbury University. A winner of the 2019 AWP Portland Flash Contest and a Pushcart nominee, she is Interview Editor for The Shore Poetry. She has poems published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Sugar House Review, Crab Creek Review, Potomac Review, Arkana and elsewhere.