What do you know about water?

by Emily Ramser

Did you know that in 5th grade,

I sang my very first song 

in a school presentation 

and that it was about transpiration,

and did you know that 

my father doesn’t know how to swim

and did you know that my little brother

will only drink soda or sweet tea

and did you know that my mother 

lives in a state that doesn’t have any available water 

and did you know that there are trees 

called tributaries 

with branches made of streams?

Capsized

by M.J. Iuppa

Beneath a black willow, a wooden boat
stuck in sand & snakegrass appears
broken by years of work on water
that trembled with weather, ripe
& ready to diminish any net’s haul,
leaving you with rain in your ears—
marking the place where you stopped
irrevocably to listen to wind’s consuming
laughter that soon became your tears.

Early Santa Ana

by Heidi Morrell

This night the atmospheric caveats
come in gently like Chopin;
a dry breeze lifts hairs
rustling them like tiny leaves.

Santa Ana bathes the skin
with its aerial wash through the canyons,
canyon tongues that spit their gusts
into the huge Angeles basin,
a basin no longer wild with
arching ferns and alluvial fans,
mugwort and lily, tides and spring floods.

But the wind is still here,
stroking or maddening
with its heaves, sighs or curt salutes,
speaking in sepia tones
thrown into the sky.

Lines

 by Joanna M. Weston

a plum falls
into my hand -
empty jars

Harvest

by Clinton Siegle

Harvest falls time changes orange to black colors sways
arrival of remembrance of the past days.
Reality seeds growing taking 100 days.
Vegetables cooked in 100 and one ways.

Eternity sprouts seeds of hope during these day's
season changes from green with orange to black day's
time for some spirits to be forewarned of past time's ways
harvest time prayer time on its way

almost winter time
real life to death time
vivid color changing time
eternity of hope in seed gathering time.

Seasonal difference time to harvest
time to harvest seeds for next harvest

An Untended Field

by Taylor Graham

A poor harvest from the garden
this year, water rationing
because of drought. Deer ate the few
just-ripening tomatoes.
The squash never blossomed.

Today, in November’s first soft rain
that derelict field – burned sun-dry
in June and left for dead – is suddenly
fragrant with the sweet plain scent
of life. Cheatgrass, chicory, wild oat.

Visual Aid

by Karla Linn Merrifield

Complexity is underrated,
the trees teach us.

Lines

by Kelley J. White

twilight—like clattering
bones, dry branches of winter
hint of pinecones

Playing Dead

by Peter Branson

This autumn’s late, treescape and hedge dolled up
in party clothes. Dead wood’s been cleared, assailed
by snarling blade, teeth pulling torque and chain,
ploughed out, yet here’s an elm, its time well spent,
the sun-bleached corpus overlooked, as stark
as lightening tempered by a winter sky.
Like antlers, mast and gallants glow as white
as bone; some velvet bark clings on below.
Though dry as honeycomb in crumbling boards,
woodpecker holes beyond, like eyes in skulls,
the sculpted trunk’s a totem pole of lust.
Inside, where lichen feast and fungi dine,
vast confluence of creatures thrive, for, in
the wake of death, this constant wanton tide.

The Buck’s Baksheesh

by Maureen Kingston

The tar lake that was once our mountaintop is now a vast fly trap, catcher and dissolver of all that passes by. “Our dues have been paid,” the mine owner says on closing day. “Let reclamation commence.” He waves a red flag. A top lander in the distance kneels at the lake’s edge, dumps a load of bait into the slag. As though on cue a buck skull surfaces nearby, offers itself to the crowd: a form of alms, a corroded coin bobbing in an earthen begging bowl.

The brandling worms go to work, lovingly bristle industrial gunk from the skull’s black planes. We watch transfixed as the coal-ash apple is polished slick, as wriggling minstrels tell tall tales of healing in spit gleam, in slime rings, their sole mission to revamp vile with splenetic sieve and shimmy. The script they leave behind unsettles our settled notions of death and decay. And for an instant we almost believe in extended warranty—that deer herds might once again browse our vale; that our gardens might grow deformity-free.

Hope spasms through us, waves of insurgent murmurs, phantom lures, the flutter of old flames we can’t help pining for. We know better. The composter’s creed’s just another in a long line—a salvage come-on—no different than the saloon god’s many promises to intercede, his prayer cards always written in gin song and bluffer’s ink. Or worse, penned the morning after, too late to save enlightenment from its shot-gunned fate. We know. We don’t want to know.

Wasting Potatoes

by David Subacchi

Conformity and consistency
By words of mass production.
The harvesting machine
Wastefully leaves to rot
The too large or too small
For failing to meet
The ‘Supermarket Standard’.

Before mechanization
Eager hands picked
Potatoes of every size.
Food for hungry mouths
Unconcerned with uniformity.
The same still in those lands
Not yet reached by exploitation.

New Mexico Harvests

by Tricia Knoll

Beneath the searing dryness of the sun
the well-padded mestizo man paddled
in the iron pool at Ojo Caliente, recovering
from pressing cider. He moved
his arms as if they knew no other way
to circle. He spoke of blue corn, posole,
and today it was cider. So many apples.

The widow, lips chapped and cracked,
tugs vines in her waist-high vegetable bed
snarled with pumpkins and beans.
Her co-housing partners watch
thanksgiving coming on.

The deer sneak at midnight
to eat apples that thunk
down during the day.
They leave their pellets
and slink off
like clouds around the moon.

Harvest - Book of Hours

by Terrence Sykes

Vellum fertile fields script
our hours of the day
staved upon the stars
parchment of fallowed seasons

altared memories
ambered remembrance
shattered shards
petrified recollections
gathered stones
clutter the cairn
bound to earth
binding fate

tracts of faith
nettle laden
boundary ditches
hail descends
proxied by Judas
mizzle & char
unleavened
humus & hymns

harp silently
annunciating
missal prayers
dreams of harvest
bleeding seeds onto
the very earth

Autumn Treasure

by Bubba Chambers

Beards, mossy grey, sway to the rhythm of chilled breezes,      
trees without leaf, skeletal forms, cryptic beauty casts her spell.      
Hoary forest, aged sleep, unaware my silent trespass.
Oak and ash need repose, dare I disturb their slumber?

An old cow cranes her neck over barbed wire.
she knows where the grass is greener.
Hay field wrapped and tightly bailed,
awaiting the next harvest.

Frost tonight? Maybe, to cover autumn’s beauty.              
But white brings beauty of its own, achromatic color fleeting;
as it melts and hides inside the earth
leaving faces brown and ocher.

Leave the rose and buttercup to those who love the spring.
Naked landscape cold and barren, bring to us delight.
Sometimes things treasured least, conceived through frosted pane
muted colors of the fall, attendant once again.

Plums in August

by Dawn Claflin

This year, our plums
ripen early, unruly summer sun
maturing them by mid-August.

We are not ready.

But, the magnetic draw of tree-ripe fruit
attracts us,
to stand outside on rickety chairs and race
spiders and bees and wasps for
every oval, lovely under their silver blush,
secreted among so many leaves.

Each plum serves:
jammed, dried, or eaten whole,
our house transformed into a perfumery of fruit,
the smell clinging to our hair, our clothes, our skin,
sheets of our beds and even shower water
thick with the heady scent
of plums,
two weeks early.

Hays Coppices

by Peter Branson

Where youth is drilled in ranks, green copse, as yet
un-thinned, or cropped at root, or pruned head height,
stands proud, where Mulch-Dick, elfric, dryad, hob-
thrush, Churnmilk Peg abide, rouse loud hosan-
nas for the lord of light, I raise this psalm.

Late autumn, dawn, a hostage to the night,
has broken bounds, line dancing wild delight
with darkness in retreat, his coppered feet
stirred embers glowing on a charging breeze,
like flick’ring pages from the Book of Kells.

Each step resolves a moving screen, sun strobe
between gaunt, pewter-clad  George Greens, wall-eyed
young squaddies on crusade, who guard, straight-bat,
defy importunate desire, this blind-
ing woodland glade, the midnight fox on fire.

Lines

by Ali Znaidi

they gather
plums...
their own shadows

Lines

by Carl Mayfield

bamboo reed---
          yellow finches
   taking what they need

Lines

by Theresa A. Cancro

starless night --
a wolf's howl breaks
the silence

Cosmic Quiet

by KJ Hannah Greenberg

In space, all is still.
Distant stars twinkle brightly
The cosmos spins life.

A Promised Meeting by the Riverbank

by Taufiq Abdul Khalid

Bring your bigotry and your hooded hate,
And I will find us a spot on the riverbank,

Bring your usury and their collateralized tears,
And I will find us a spot on the riverbank,

Bring your religion and other excuse for hubris,
And I will find us a spot on the riverbank,

Bring your guns and trophies of the hunt,
And I will find us a spot on the riverbank,

Bring your carbon credit and other deceits,
And I will find us a spot on the riverbank,

Bring your good and your bad,
Your cloudy skies and your sunshine,

Bring all your rights and your wrongs,
To a spot I will find on the riverbank,

In the Garden of mercy
Where we all belong.

Piece of Quartz

by Taylor Graham

Glittering in autumn light, it recommends
silence. This October morning,
everything seems to wait like the loneliness
of stones. The dry creek dreams
of sipping water in tiny song. Rain leaves it
alone. Sun sublimates the water-dish
put out for lizards and frogs, too shallow
a trough. No matter to stones,
a decade of drought. Crystal remembers
the longest tales. How young
these creekbanks, undercut, re-carved
each time a flood tears out fences,
overwhelms the swale, digs up old bones.
Ancient naturalist, this stone.

Green House Harvest

by Ed Higgins

Rich tilth of organic mushroom compost
     from the large pile near the barn. Delivered
twice yearly from the mushroom farm
     two miles upwind from us.

An attentive courtesy for when summer breezes
     drift our way, bringing dark scents of mixed
 straw and chicken manure. This morning’s harvest
     snap peas, beets and lemon tomatoes

growing in this fertile medium. Through my
     fingertips I diligently fill my garden trug:
peas first, then beets (shaking off the soil), finally
     lush yellow tomatoes from fruit-heavy vines.

Lines

by Carl Mayfield

after the storm
     two pears
         somehow

Lines

by JS Absher

late October
in the bend of the river
one red tree

Anticipating winter

by Ed Higgins

Today there are definite signs:

grey sky and clouds
their core dark as sorrow

torrent rain driven aslant
against the barn’s side

swollen Yamhill creek
furious with water

another v of geese
over the farm this morning

the plowed field soggy underfoot
fixed on distant May

a hawk hung in chill October air
like a narrow winged thought.

Goldfinch

by Terrence Sykes

pentecostal
cloaked
laden
maple tree
nested
goldfinch
obese
from fallen
caraway harvest
obsidian wings
feathered flock
wild mustard
dancing amongst
evening breezes

Filling The Silo

by Joyce Lorenson

from every farm
up and down the valley
the long drawn out whine
of corn choppers
still air in
a state of fermentation
flurries of fodder fall
from the auger
a ripe liquor drains
from the trembling chute
the season's harvest
from the cows
a flush of fresh milk

Long shadows cross the fields

by Maury Grimm

Long shadows cross the fields, gold against the grey sky. The days shorten with a color so intense even the cottonwoods stark green and intricate blacks of branches stand like sculptures in the slow evening light.

The chickens scratch about in the garden. I talk to them through the open window. We have made some sort of bond now, even Łizhiní cocks his head when I speak to them. I tell him he is a good boy and he relaxes, closes his eyes. He is an amazingly good rooster.

The wind is up now. The newly planted hoop with winter vegetables shivers and the sudden cold makes me think of closing windows.

But I am not ready yet, to close out the wind, the light.

Aspen Trail

by David Chorlton

Summer’s ending in the forest
with its secret ferns and warblers
whose songs come from deeper
than light can reach;
                              ending on the meadow
in high country
that sways between aspens and pines,
and on the path
                          worn into grass
along the way to the edge
with a raptor’s view down:
                                     a panorama
held tight in a claw.

Lines

by Terrence Sykes

crickets & cicada
chant autumnal
secular vespers

Wild Fire

by Marilyn Braendeholm

Fire takes its opportunities.

Wind-burning-whipped bridges 

of smoke on rising spinets of fury. 

Rise and fall, flakes of flame and ash 

scattering weather, then swept

and settled to fall scorched. And 

as fire grows, the wind sings dark. 

The heat endured but not so darkness, 

nor that noise. Aerolites fall into 

throaty pits, as fire draws darkness 

in its parchment heart.

Eleven Suicide Seeds

by Taufiq Abdul Khalid

Where are the rivers mighty?
Where are the lakes serene?
Where are the bears hibernating?
Where are the badgers biting?
Where are the meadows blooming?
Where are the fishes in the sea?
Where are the lions in the plains?
What have you done to them all?
Now who will you seek to blame?
What have you wrought in your greed?
What have you sown in the fields?
I hate but ate your answers!
These suicide seeds,
Your suicide seeds,
Your Suicide...and
Now.... mine.

Full Moon

by Doug Draime

rain drops
on tulips

dark red
as roses

Swamp Psalm of the Water Sprite

by Karla Linn Merrifield

The Fakahatchee is my shepherdess;
I shall not want for canopied swamps.
She maketh me to submerge below profligate
fronds and tendrils.
She leadeth me into still waters.
She restoreth my arid hope.
She leadeth me along slow flowing
strands of wildness for her faith sake.
Yea, though I wade through the valley
in the shadows of fishing spiders
beside alligator ponds, I fear not greed,
for thou, green queen, art with me, in me.
Thy sword ferns and ghost orchids
do comfort me.
Thou preparest a cypress stand before me
in the cool space of my heart.
Thou annointest my soul with dew.
My dream runneth over in liquid light.
Surely chlorophyll and oxygen
shall follow me all the breaths of my life
and I shall dwell in thy habitat
of epiphyte, lichen and moss—forever.

A prism of light

by Maury Grimm

A prism of light graces the San Juans over La Manga pass to the West as the sun breaks through the clouds, a shard. Winter birds line the wires and the horses head to the watering trough.

This overcast sky makes the morning warm as I slip out, bare-toed, to the chickens who are not yet roused awake.

This may be a day of more inside than out, but there is the catching up on cleaning garlic, storing potatoes, stripping the leaves and flowers of the dried herbs, clearing and organizing for the next round of tomatoes, rose hips, marigold and calendula flowers. And maybe after this round of rain, the mountains will proffer another round of mushrooms to dry.

And when to plant the garlic, lay down the red clover seed on the worn potato bed? Another day. Another day.

Valleys of Life, Echoed

by Laurie Kolp

The gods call life
after death
life after
the calling of all things
secret.
Take innocence—
trade it
for guilt after death
after life:
the endangered one
slides down mountain
to death valley
and lives.

Burial for Seamen

by Tom Sheehan

Tonight I think of Jonathan Diggs and how he salts the Atlantic, how the horse of his voice shakes the water from the underneath, cracks the rocks the small fist of Nahant left-jabs in the ocean.

The dory came riding in high and free as a cracker box, the oars gone, locks ripped away as if he had broken all his muscles on them, the anchor gone as Davy’s gift, not even a handful of line left in the loop.

One inconspicuous mark gathered in the final counting: JD9. It was Jonathan’s ninth boat, and the first to outlive him, the first to come back without that oarsman.

Seventy-year old men do not swim all night, do not ride on top like debris caught on the incoming tide, do not materialize on-shore once they are that wet.

They go down like Jonathan Diggs, shaking their fists at the Atlantic, shouting the final obscenity they have waited all this time to use, knowing the exact moment to employ it. They send a sound running along water lines, burst it into sea shells, sing it as a tone of surf busting all September nights when ocean listeners count for sailors.

They become the watery magnet pulling men from inland fields, in turn are magnetized by moon’s deep clutch on the rich pastures of the sea, and sleep then only in tight caves, soundless and dark in their wearing away.

U.S. 50

by Karla Linn Merrifield

A smooth satin road unspools
across the corrugated torso
of Nevada in summer morning,
light rising in a state of cloudlessness.

It unfurls through sage-dusted basin
and over juniper-draped range;
its length unwinds and unwinds.
Onto eight soft-shouldered summits,

into alkali flats of as many
high desert valleys, the macadam
takes on a golden patina as it rolls
above the gold of stone-studded foothills.

The ribbon twists into vast landscapes, finding:
the turquoise ore in me, the copper lode in you.

I Am Meltwater.

by Angi Holden

April’s sun blossoms the hillsides. Its gentle warmth coddles
the icy hollows, and streams dribble through tangles of couch grass.
The breeze drifts over the fells, carries the songs of distant mountains:
Scafell, Helvellyn, Skiddaw. It stirs me, spins me, swirls me.
I tumble down the rockface, gasp for air, splash and splatter against outcrops.
I grasp light and cast aside its fragments, I thrust and whirlpool:
rub, erode, abrase, before plunging on, handrailing across the geology of ancients,
landscapes scarred by wind and weather. Lower there is mud, soft as flesh,
pathways, a tracery of footprints. I am pulled into the river’s eddy,
my chill and rainwater’s sweet balm mingling, flowing, seabound.

Rain, Spark, Cycle

by Richard D. Hartwell

Up-thrust, boulder-rough hills
after late spring’s last runoff;
dirt between veins of granite,
seeded with grasses, flowers
in wild profusion, abandoned.

Such profligate plentitude makes
for a profusion of wildlife fauna:
an overpopulation awaiting their
seared starvation as brittle stubble
expires, scoured by a relentless sun.

Hills turned into fodder for fire
needing only slight provocation,
ignition from outside intervention;
flames eat all to ashen gray, stony
hills turn silver in the orange dusk.

within Roe Wood

by Kate Garrett

your feet pound
   streets, pavements
     bus stops – the urban

  blur heading
for bluebells

   as you slip downhill
 & into the shadow

     of leaves (curled fingers
unfurling green)

   race the brook
along its obstacle
        course:

  forgotten blue
   bicycles, lawnmower
engines & plastic

     bottles without
  a single message inside

Lines

by Theresa A. Cancro

hunter's moon --
a buck blends into
the yarrow

End of Summer

by M.J. Iuppa

By dusk, swallows
disappear–  the barn door
left open a crack.

Now gunshot
marks distance,
close range.

Estranged hour
each second
a lost eyelash.

Work? Anyplace.
A stand of spruce
wears darkness.

Tongue
against palette
issues

small airs
there, there
consoles loneliness–

the clock’s click,
the moth’s
wobble

going mad
for the lamplight’s
humor.

You have named me

by Emily Ramser

At night,
you hold me in your arms,
and whisper my name:

Gaia,
Terra,
Earth,
and
Mother,

and when I awake,
you have named me anew
under the birth of the sunrise.

Lines

by Joanna M. Weston

fall morning …
blackberry jam
simmering

Endings

by Patricia Williams

Baskets of bridal-white begonia and container-grown
red impatiens, convey late summer lushness, yet
indicate human invasion; clumps of daylilies
bloom orange, in messy half-order.
Watery stems and fragile buds go limp,
signal an irrepressible first frost.

Patches of sunlight dapple the driveway
imposed on the land, but broken by natural ice heaving;
the mowed yard, once forest cover, remains a pathway
for undeterred deer on their way from the swamp
and turkey trains that move across north ridges.

The cat makes painful sounds, mourning his companion,
her frail old body found on the back bedroom floor
a few weeks ago, twenty-one years of greeting the dawn.

Hindsight

by Richard D. Hartwell

Once was beauty as the Coos and Coquille Rivers merged
into the sinuous estuarine paths emptying into Coos Bay.

Now deep-water tugs languish awaiting empty freighters as
the lumber industry falters from the ravages of clear-cutting.

Automated ply and lumber companies have driven thousands to
outlaw shake mills, poaching, weed farms, desertion, and suicide.

Late afternoon and gray scud slowly
closes out blue sky and green water,

The world turns slate and dreams are held
together by only the most tenuous breath.

Leaning into Autumn

by Rachel Nix

The cool mornings linger
in the hollows, where the land
dips and divides, waiting
for the day to arrive—

the South cannot shake
the humid breath of sunlight.

Lines

by Theresa A. Cancro

sunflower husks --
the sharp cry
of a kestrel