Nancy Austin
Birds Not of a Feather
My husband yells drop everything, binoculars in hand,
points to a black bird on our birch: grey bib and collar,
a breast rosier than a robin, heavily blushed cheeks.
A different bird, it hops like a woodpecker, forages
like a flycatcher, dazzles with deep wingbeats of a crow,
stays for days, squeaks a language we don’t know.
We search bird books in vain, consult computers,
learn of its discovery on Lewis and Clark’s journey,
breathlessly tell our neighbors, a Lewis’s Woodpecker.
We laud this off-course avian, study its habitat, set a place
at our yard’s table, host legions of birders who flock from afar,
perch on our treetop balcony to receive this odd bird.
Odd indeed how we open our arms to the foreign bird
yet spurn a woman who walks from Guatemala, a man
who traverses a raging river, their fledglings now caged.
Nancy Austin relishes time to write in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, land of abundant lakes, scent of pine, call of loons. She has been published in various journals including Midwestern Gothic and Portage Magazine. Her collections include Remnants of Warmth (Kelsay Books, 2016), The Turn of the Tiller, The Spill of the Wind (Kelsay Books, 2019), and a collaborative anthology with The PaperBirch Poets, Stitching Earth to Sky (Water’s Edge Press, 2019).
Melanie Green
Fellowship
Sunday morning pale tally ho I try
to write while homeless woman sits
on my corner. Truth it out practicing open
to the is and my lonesome walks me
out of the house. Unsheathed from
solitude now we eye-to-eye.
Columbia pants baggy on her skinny
I ask “How are you?”
…………………………Thirsty hungry
.but won’t stop won’t stop the fight
.for freedom. You?
…………………………“On the other side
.of luck” I say. Read her cardboard
as scripture ANY HELP
MAKES A BIG DIFFERENCE
bring hot water, turkey-jerky, masks.
What if she needs my bathroom?
She asks my name.
Her double-ringed fingers pull
blanket taut drubbing out the cold.
………………You feel the ground shift?
.“Literal or metaphorical?”
…………………………Oh that’s good polarity
polarities bi-polar I might have
a doppleganger. Chalking blue dashes
orange slashes she arts up
my corner. October sun cathedrals
the old walnut tree. We a humble
harmonium a cross current choir hymn of a moment.
Into Consciousness
In our virus-prone bodies,
the pull-down
lightning
of life
any-day-gone,
we sugar-up on connection.
From behind masks
we look strangers in the eye.
Hi. Hello.
On the other side of fear,
fierce love.
Out of all the galaxies,
our one
earth
with elephant, zebra grass,
bio luminescence,
lupine, pangolin,
wind-rustle in the scarlet oak.
Out of eons,
this one
day
journey-summoned from a blue-imagine,
awakening
into us.
Melanie Green grew up in the Pacific Northwest and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of three poetry collections: A Long, Wide Stretch of Calm; Continuing Bridge; and Determining Sky. Her poetry explores themes of living with chronic illness and finding inspiration and solace through the beauty of nature and an interest in the numinous. Her poems have been published in Buddhist Poetry Review, Amethyst Review, Frost Meadow Review and elsewhere.
Felicia McCarthy
Because You Listen
………………..(after Adrienne Rich)
in such times as these it is no longer
necessary to talk about trees, which way
grass grows, how roads sheer to shadow,
abandoned meeting houses, the disappeared.
But here, not somewhere else, as the world
arrives at the darkest of our fears, the dread
is constant, while the invisible has its way
sweeping through the population.
Because you will listen to the poets, we come
together, talk about science, words, and remedies
and women’s work of watching, keeping things
going. We’ve long experience with patience.
The wolf boys cry out and hoard supplies.
The elders, especially the grandmothers,
gather curing weeds and heirloom seeds
prepare to call everyone to the table.
Homage
The giraffes
purr among themselves
at a frequency none of us hear.
Does it matter?
Their affairs are their own.
And what they have to say about us
is irrelevant to anything happening in
the world we believe is the only one.
Or so they say.
We place ourselves above all
the planet’s breathing life forms, we
know little or nothing. Mountains breathe,
did you know? They whistle on the out-breath.
You may think it is the air shuffling about
their peaks. No. Generations of humans
live and die, love and leave to return
again, before the end of one
momentous inhalation.
Sweet living Christ,
Show some
respect.
Felicia McCarthy is a poet living in the West of Ireland. Her poetry and essays have been published online and in print in Ireland, the UK, and the USA. She is the Poetry Editor for North American Time in Dublin’s literary journal, The Blue Nib. Her first collection, The Gypsy Shaman’s Daughter, is forthcoming from Salmon Publishing in March 2021.
Jack Slocomb
Comfort
Must be that turn of year,
days more dimly drawn,
nib of freeze in the tighter
twines of air,
for those fat black polished
crickets to be in high gear
in their frenzied
lofty springing in and out
of the weave of
drooping grasses
along the loose gravel lane
when I scuff too near
Must be the last burst
of the fiery spirits of summer
before the
…dropping
…….dropping
…………dropping
…………….dropping
…………………of leaves
My leaning is to
find the revelation
in such recurring liturgies as these,
of the way they aver
one another,
the way they
befall in the same embrace of time,
yet I can only ask and ask,
all the while tasting
in the breezes that such fathoming
cannot ever be mine
And that is the abiding
comfort
.
Jack Slocomb is a nature poet and essayist of the Allegheny Mountains of Western Maryland and West Virginia. He has been widely published and recently released his first full-length collection of poetry, Native Tongue. His inclination in writing poetry is to convey the drift of the numinous wind that he feels suffuses the sensate reality of the natural world.