Journal

Postcard from March

I write to you amidst a great thaw—not quite
the advent of spring, not yet quitting winter.
Some mornings
I am a thought barely there,
an island hovering in the mist, a mirage
you can’t reach. This is what I’m telling you:
it’s as if the ground beneath your feet
is a hardpan floor, and hours later,
all fecund with a bitter pungency.
You can’t straddle that place forever, where dawn
is but a stutter step, a hesitation waiting
to be unplugged. The whole world is a door ajar.
Icicles melting. Crocus stuck between seasons.
You stand at that threshold, in the mud
of your own limbo. Midway between here
and the frontier ahead.
Go ahead, take the first step.
It won’t come to you.

Connie Soper lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. She often finds inspiration while hiking or beachcombing. Her poems have received recognition from the Oregon Poetry Association, Calyx, and the Neahkahnie Poetry Prize. Her first full-length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, published by Airlie Press in 2022, celebrates walking and witnessing her native terrain.

The Migratory Seasons

Golden plovers, in the migratory seasons,
fly for days, seemingly tireless,
over open ocean,
from Alaska to Hawaii,
no place to land along the way.

Yet they know it’s time to move on,
to balmy, green islands.

It’s a wonder—few creatures
are capable of this. A slow-wave drowse,
catnapping in flight, this curious trick—

keeping one eye open,
one brain-hemisphere alert
while the other side drops into sleep,
letting the other eye close down.

We humans can hardly approximate
this state—and only in our troubled rest—

one hemisphere slow-sleeps while
the other half-dreams in shallows
of a turgid river, going nowhere.

In such states, the body feels
so restless that by morning, we
scarcely feel like ourselves
and can’t move easily into the day.

On good nights, sleep wants us
to discover how to find an old friend,
and on what search engine. A deep-dive
into our interior rooms—

and we probe the possibilities
for a new relationship,
a fresh start,
or a way to solve an old problem.

Not often, we feel an airy uplift,
and are quickly carried aloft—the start
of our own migratory season.

San Marcos Springs

Each time I dive into the green pools
toward the white rocks
legs kick and tangle in chilled ribbons
of spring water and
plunging down and down

I force open my eyes. In the flash of the dive
I might as well be blind
water shifting and bubbling, fingers
tearing on fossil imprints
at bottom, the cost

for just missing my skull
and rare blind salamanders
I’ve sent turning like verses on the water’s vellum.
This is a rough register of what it feels like
to live extravagantly

at the end of an era—
never the same body disappearing into the green
or holding its breath, then beginning
its rise to surface. Bits of it
sloughing

into the springs, feeding the source,
the uncommon life forms
collected under cypress knees on either bank,
sun drawing freely from these springs
into thunderheads above the shoals.

Rebecca A. Spears, author of Brook the Divide (Unsolicited Press, 2020) and The Bright Obvious (Finishing Line Press, 2009), has her poems and essays included in TriQuarterly, Calyx, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, and other journals and anthologies. A writer, living in the Piney Woods of East Texas, she has received awards from the Taos Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, Dairy Hollow House, and most recently, the Open Door Poetry Fellowship at Porches Writing Retreat. Brook the Divide was shortlisted for Best First Book of Poetry (Texas Institute of Letters).

Hard cover accordion-bound twist boxes. Papers: recycled commercial, sumigami, origami, momigami, botanical photo copies, shizen. 5”x18”.

Your Photo I Took Inside Simon Prim’s Bookshop in Kinsale

Here you are, a supplicant, genuflected at a row of Irish books
with one hand reaching, as if fingering relics among the books.

Not that you knelt to propose marriage years ago, more like we
assumed our union after discovering our mutual love of books.

Inside Simon’s shop, we found poetry, “The Stinging Fly,”
and an early Salmon Press volume, “Gonella,” among the books.

With quirky upstairs, this one of many shops with book jackets
in windows to lure us in, to devour Galway and Dublin books.

How grand then, to enjoy designer soup and sandwich next door
at the Poet’s Corner after buying a stack of Simon’s books.

Leaving Kinsale, a most propitious purchase, one lilac blossom
duffel bag, now needed to haul homeward bound books.

We found each town had bookshops that to us were so like
museums we had to drag ourselves away from shelves of books.

Back home in Seattle, surrounded by unpacked treasures,
I, Mary Ellen, recline with you to read amid our shelves of books.

Hiking to Snow in Summer

She climbs over slate and shale of an old avalanche chute

‌            Cold air from the falls mists her face
‌            as summer water dances over lodge pole pine

Roots and boots do their thing as switchbacks scissor the hillside

‌            Raspberries vermillion‌     Leaves viridian
‌            She dodges a slurry of horseflies in hot wind of the rise,

rubs a cluster of snow crystals into the bark of her skin
as tingles erupt into goosebumps
She collects huckleberries in a spent water bottle

‌            and stops to scan a vista of peaks beyond
‌            Down the hillside, she eyes the spent zigzags of her path,

inhales the fragrance of damp cedar branches

‌            The tight-knee return descent is part of the bargain
‌            Branches joust in the gusty wind and slanted rain
‌            Palms of her hands could be pinecones and needles

Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have been published in Gyroscope, Deep Wild, Willawaw, and Banshee among others. Her poems have received three Pushcart nominations. She has three chapbooks: Postcards from the Lilac City from Finishing Line Press, Taking Leave from Kelsay Press, and Infusion online at Red Wolf Journal. Her website is maryellentalley.com.

Fragments

1.
Parking lot of a Florida motel, after dark
Humid smell of swamp, diesel, approaching rain
Moths battering the buzzing mercury lights
Car engine ticking as it cooled

I was a boy when that trip was made
Old now, this is all that is left from that night
No answer to why I was not inside, asleep
Why the memory holds a thrill and a threat

In Antarctica once, I watched an iceberg flip
Its huge hidden bulk rise into the sky
We waited to see if the wave would drown us
The door opened, my father stood in the box of light

2.
Beach of a fishing village in Mexico, 1965
Twelve years old, bare feet, ragged shorts
Skinny and brown, I was taken for a local
Shrugged, smiled in Spanish, ran away

Inland, the pit of an opal mine
A boy on the rubble pile, hoping for a stone
Startled to see an American kid, shy
Held out to me a rock slivered with fire

Now, I hear that the village is gone
The boy I was and the boy I met
Are now old men, as long as we live
The gift still heavy in my hand

3.
We waited for the days when snow covered the roads
Cut us off from school and all outer voices
Granted us the cold sanctuary of the attic
Where we enacted journeys ending in feasting and celebration

Sister, what silks you conjured there, what gold and rubies!
My imagination faltered at the tresures you could name
But I played my part, and our sailing ships and caravans
After many perils came at last to shelter, always

Rolling your wheelchair through the Tranquility Garden
You called out the flowers, cosmos and columbine, peony and rose
Never doubted, or admitted to doubt, the adventure’s end
That other world, safe behind shivering panes of glass.

Pepper Trail’s poems have appeared in Willawaw, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, Ascent and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He writes and explores the world from his home in Ashland, Oregon.

Our Father as Actaeon

Just after we were fed and bathed, safely
sleeping in our rough beds, he’d wake us

to go back into the forest. We could feel
with our noses where the path was,

where he walked. We knew him, even when he’d soak
his vest in urine, call every creature in. We’d get to chasing,

carry turkeys in our mouths back to the cabin
where he’d gut them, hollow their bones to make calls

which sounded just like those turkeys.
Imagine being called by your own bones.

Is this the part where we are supposed to thank him
for the rest he’d give us after, the plates of roast turkey

placed lovingly at the foot of our beds, for the old boots
we’d chew into nothing. How long until he called us

with our own empty bones. We’d curl into him,
still. I don’t know why except

there is always something beautiful about a man who wants
so little: good dogs and open land, a man who can take

a gun and fire and hit something, a man who looks
into a chink in the trees and finds a clean body of water.

What did he sully, you’ll say. When our father changed,
even though we did not see what happened, we knew his body.

He lengthened, thinned out, his face sharp, those eyes–
what he’d sacrificed to run wild. Yes, we knew him,

and we tore his heart out with our teeth,
our sister cut clean his head and it rolled like a drum

of wine, split open. We broke our father, or so
our grandmother says. Looking back, it was our nature,

what we did to our father in the woods
when we did not recognize our father–stripped him,

our coats wild tendrils, rubbery and unwashed,
as we always were when he’d return us to our mother.

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, 2022) Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies. Find her at saramoorewagner.com.