POETRY and PLACES

February Snow by Francisco Aragón

spain antonio duque licensed

February Snow
by Francisco Aragón

The tint of the sky between sunset and night.

And wandering with you and your nephew
in that maze, half-lost—Madrid
of the Austrias—looking for Plaza of the Green

Cross where, days before you arrived,
an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels
straddling the curb, and so the van

heading for the barracks that morning
had to slow to squeeze
past . . . Back at the hotel your mom

is holding up her gift—Amethyst, she says
admiring how light
when passing through a prism

bends. At his window that morning before we began
my student said, ¡Qué bonito!, watching it drift
and descend, settling on roofs and cars.

And I think of you and your wife
and daughter: getting to see Madrid
in white, your visit winding down, and how

I had wanted that lesson to end
to get to the park—Retiro, they say, is the city’s
one lung, and the way the feel and sound of steps

cease
when grass is completely covered
as if walking on a cloud. The year before

on a visit from the coast, a friend
sitting at a window
watched the flakes flutter

and fall, dissolving before reaching
the ground—aguanieve, he said
while from a town near Seville

B-52s were lifting off . . .
I was in a trance that week
though like most things the war

in the Gulf was soon another
backdrop, like the string of car bombs
the following year. And yet that morning

as soon as I heard, something led me
not to the park but down
to City Hall, workers in the street

evacuated, sipping coffee, though I never reached
the site—of course it was cordoned
off, the spray of glass, the heap

of twisted metal, and so later learned their names
their lives. Of the five
there was one: a postal clerk who

as a boy, would plunge his hands
into the white, the cold
a sweet jolt

whenever he got to touch
the stuff, scooping
it tightly into a ball

like the ones he would dodge and throw
years later
at his wife-to-be: those weekends,

those places—away from city air—
a release . . . Miraflores, Siete
Picos, Rascafría . . . It’s in

his blood, she would come to say
chatting with a neighbor
about his thing for snow—the way it falls

softly, blanketing roofs
and groves, villages
nestled in the Sierra’s

hills: it is February
and she is picturing him
and the boy, up there now

playing, horsing around

PHOTO: Palace of Communications, with statue of Cybele, Madrid, Spain, after Storm Filomena, January 2021. The snowfall was the heaviest in 50 years, leaving 20 inches in the capital and nearby provinces.

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spain, madrid

NOTE: Madrid is the capital and most-populous city of Spain, with approximately 6.5 million in the metropolitan area. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), after Berlin. While Madrid possesses modern infrastructure, it has preserved the look and feel of many of its historic neighborhoods and streets. Its landmarks include the Plaza Mayor, the Royal Palace of Madrid; the Royal Theatre with its restored 1850 Opera House; the Buen Retiro Park, founded in 1631; the 19th-century National Library building (founded in 1712) containing some of Spain’s historical archives; many national museums, and the Golden Triangle of Art, located along the Paseo del Prado and comprising three art museums: Prado Museum, the Reina Sofía Museum, a museum of modern art, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which complements the holdings of the other two museums. Cybele Palace and Fountain (pictured above) has become one of the monument symbols of the city.

PHOTO: Madrid, Spain, cityscape. Photo by Rudi1976, used by permission.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. A native of San Francisco, California, he holds degrees in Spanish from UC Berkeley and NYU. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1998 after a decade in Spain, Aragón completed graduate degrees in creative writing from UC Davis and the University of Notre Dame. In 2003 he joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies where he established Letras Latinas. A CantoMundo fellow and a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Aragón is the author of two books, Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat as well as editor of the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His third book, After Rubén, was published in 2020. His Tongue a Swath of Sky, his fourth chapbook, was released in 2019. Previous chapbooks include Tertulia, In Praise of Cities, and Light, Yogurt, Strawberry Milk. His poems and translations have appeared in various print and online journals, as well as numerous anthologies. His work as a translator includes four books by Francisco X. Alarcón, as well as work by Spanish poets Federico García Lorca and Gerardo Diego. More recently, he’s been rendering versions of the Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío. He has read from his work widely, including at universities, galleries, and bookstores. He’s been a featured poet at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival as well as the Dodge Poetry Festival. Aragón spends the fall semester on the Notre Dame campus, where he teaches a literature course on Latinx poetry, and spring in Washington, DC, where he teaches a poetry workshop featuring the work of local and visiting Latinx poets. Read more of his work at franciscoaragon.net.

Author photo by Craig Mailloux

Threshing by Ed Ruzicka

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Threshing
by Ed Ruzicka

Leoncio wakes me before six
so we can march down to the next town.
I am to drive the Datsun that is kept there in a cousin’s garage.
I have been trying to teach Leoncio
how to drive but it is terrifying.

So many pile onto, lean off, the pickup’s bed
that I can hardly see out the rearview.
On a great knoll overlooking the Jauja Valley
everyone whips out machetes, sets to hacking wheat.
They gather cut stalks, bundle them,
spread them out across hand-woven blankets.

With gestures, they tell me to drive back and forth
over the blankets. That is how they plan to strip
chaff from grain. I tell them it is not clean.
They laugh with the sun in their mouths.

They raise grain, let chaff and seed sift down
in a golden rain, “Limpio, muy limpio.”
To keep the herd at bay, women and children
pluck up dried dung, zing it at cows.
I try to explain microbiology in a language
I can barely use to order lunch. “Limpio,” they sing.

The Datsun jolts back and forth.
At noon we drink cool maté from clay jars.
By sundown we have a harvest spread in bronze pyramids.
On the journey home slumping figures bounce over ruts.
I drop them off. Guided by nothing but starlight,
I manage to squeeze the Datsun back into the garage.

Silent, exhausted, Leoncio and I
trudge back up the side of the mountain
with legs as heavy as stone.

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NOTE: The Mantaro Valley, also known as Jauja Valley, is located in the Andes, 120 miles east of Lima, the capital of Peru. The north-south trending valley, which extends for about 37 miles, is situated between the cities of Jauja and Huancayo.The Mantaro River flows through the fertile valley, which produces potatoes, maize, and vegetables among other crops. From Pre-Columbian times, this site has been a breadbasket for the people of the Andes. The valley contains about 160,000 acres of arable land, ranging in elevation from 10,330 feet to 13,800 feet, the highest elevation at which cultivation is possible in the area. The Mantaro Valley also features many archaeological sites. At the northern end of the valley is the city of Jauja, an important pre-Columbian center and Peru’s provisional capital in 1534.

PHOTO: Tejados de Orcotuna (Rooftops of Orcotuna), a village in the Mantaro Valley (October 2009). Photo by Martin Garcia, used by permission.

leonci and family

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: In 1979, over a period of months, I bussed from Bogota, Columbia, to deep in the Peruvian Andes and back. What I did could not be done again. By the end of that trip, I was who I am now, not just some father’s son. I was lucky enough to stay a month in a small village in a room off the familial quarters of a master carver of gourds, Leoncio Veli. Leoncio and his family are pictured here. His wife is wearing the sort of broad brimmed bowler all women in this region wear. I went back last year. Leoncio is still carving. Leoncio’s wife wears the same hat. Most things change, some do not.

PHOTO: Leoncio Veli, his wife, and children in their Andean village, Peru (1979). Photo by the author.

the old gringo returns

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Raised beside creeks and cornfields near Chicago, Ed Ruzicka is an occupational therapist and lives with his wife, Renee, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Ed’s many takes on the rocky marriage between freedom and the American highway were just released in his second full-length book My Life in Cars. Ed’s poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Rattle, Canary, as well as myriad other literary journals and anthologies. To read more of his work, visit edpoet.com.

PHOTO: The author, Machu Picchu, Peru (2020).

Golden Eagles over Franklin Mountain by Robert Bensen

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Golden Eagles over Franklin Mountain
by Robert Bensen

On Oct. 25, 2018, we counted 128 Golden Eagles, a single-day record for eastern North America. The previous single-day high was 71 (Nov. 11, 2015) so the magnitude of this big day cannot be overstated. The reason for this Golden Eagle push two weeks before the traditional migration peak, is unknown.
—Andy Mason, Franklin Mountain Hawkwatch 2018 Report

The scaffold bristled with digital Yashicas clamped on scopes
and monopods strutting in khaki and camouflage, as a flock
of hawk-watchers scanned quadrants of sky from Otego
to the peaks where the Susquehanna swerves into the valley, and east.

I stood by, naked eye aswarm with floaters the one,
the other useless that magnifies and smears every human face.
Peter, half-felled by flu, and Becky tallied the count
and helped the dozen-some visitors identify specks

that could be buzzard, or goshawk, or harrier, or sharp-shinned
or rough-legged or Cooper’s or red-tailed hawks, or merlin, falcon,
kite or kestrel, among twenty-nine listed, including Unknown Raptors,
hoping for Goldens riding the polar stream from Canada, or, better, one

gliding low and hungry on a hunt. I couldn’t see diddle.
And it seemed weird to me to have the drum, but to my hand ungloved
the skin felt warm and taut. So I slipped away and up the path,
deer-silent for the spring of thatch underfoot.

I dug my heels in and labored up the grade, paused
to catch a breath at the hill’s brow, midway through the field
walled in by limb-laced fir and hardwood, when a shape or shadow rose—no,
an enormous bird rose above the brim and—Wait! I yelled and I swear

it gave pause mid-air while bone-chilled I fumbled the drum,
and out of a cloud of sage-smoke started a roll of thunder
that closed in, closed fast and passed, then the song brought
a line of thunders helping the verse find drafts and currents

to ride and sign God-knows-what to the bird, white flame-tongued
wings that skimmed the tree-rim, gliding so slowly with the song
that so tethered the two of us it seemed the wall of trees revolved
the way between the potter’s thumb and fingers the new bowl turns.

We shared the easy slip of air around the bowl of circled trees.
Once around, his flight feathers splayed, trimmed then splayed,
eyes holding steady gaze, with each lift of song a fresh wind. A quick
turn of his head and he vanished. Who’d not be at first forlorn?

But filled with that glory who’d mourn or sorrow for long
or deny he’d gone to let the others of his kind know,
ready for passage through this valley to the Catskills, that here,
here someone had kept the song the eagles gave so long ago:

Wanbli gleska, naha anunca, heya a uh chun kay.
Mea trocha heya anpetu wawakeay:
“Golden eagles, Spotted eagles, the first to fly with the dawn,
come see the people trying to become human beings! Come!”

So they did and were counted: one-hundred twenty-eight strong.

Previously published in Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society Newsletter, January 2020. Find the poem at this link.

Also previously published in Blood, River, and Corn: A Community of Voices, ed. Terra Trevor, March 2020. Find the poem at this link.

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NOTE: The Franklin Mountain Hawkwatch, located on the Delaware-Otsego Audubon Society Sanctuary overlooking Oneonta, New York, is noted for late-fall-season flights of Red-tailed Hawks and Golden Eagles. Franklin Mountain provides a panoramic view of the Susquehanna River Valley and surrounding hills of New York State’s Otsego and Delaware Counties. Read more about the area’s annual Golden Eagle migration at nyupstate.com.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Bensen is a poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and publisher in Upstate New York. Most recent among six collections of poetry are Before and Orenoque, Wetumka & Other Poems (Bright Hill Press). Poetry and literary essays have appeared in AGNI, Akwe:kon, Antioch Review, Berfrois, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, Jamaica Journal, La presa, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. He has edited anthologies of Native American and Caribbean literature, and authored a bibliographic study, American Indian and Aboriginal Canadian Childhood Studies, at Oxford University Press online. His writing has won fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, the State of New York, Illinois Arts Council, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and others. From 1978 to 2017, he was Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (Oneonta, New York). He conducts the community-based poetry workshop Seeing Things at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center (Treadwell, New York). He is the founding editor of two literary presses, the Red Herring Press and Woodland Arts Editions. Find more of his work at robertbenson.com.

Going Home: New Orleans by Sheryl St. Germain

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Going Home: New Orleans
by Sheryl St. Germain
for my grandmother, Theresa Frank

Some slow evenings when the light hangs late and stubborn in the sky,
gives itself up to darkness slowly and deliberately, slow cloud after slow cloud,
slowness enters me like something familiar,
and it feels like going home.

It’s all there in the disappearing light:
all the evenings of slow sky and slow loving, slow boats on sluggish bayous;
the thick-middled trees with the slow-sounding names—oak, mimosa, pecan, magnolia;
the slow tree sap that sticks in your hair when you lie with the trees;
and the maple syrup and pancakes and grits, the butter melting
slowly into and down the sides like sweat between breasts of sloe-eyed strippers;
and the slow-throated blues that floats over the city like fog;
and the weeping, the willows, the cut onions, the cayenne, the slow-cooking beans with marrow-thick gravy;
and all the mint juleps drunk so slowly on all the slow southern porches,
the bourbon and sugar and mint going down warm and brown, syrup and slow;
and all the ice cubes melting in all the iced teas,
all the slow-faced people sitting in all the slowly rocking rockers;
and the crabs and the shrimp and crawfish, the hard shells
slowly and deliberately and lovingly removed, the delicate flesh
slowly sucked out of heads and legs and tails;
and the slow lips that eat and drink and love and speak
that slow luxurious language, savoring each word like a long-missed lover;
and the slow-moving nuns, the black habits dragging the swollen ground;
and the slow river that cradles it all, and the chicory coffee
that cuts through it all, slow-boiled and black as dirt;
and the slow dreams and the slow-healing wounds and the slow smoke of it all
slipping out, ballooning into the sky—slow, deliberate, and magnificent.

PHOTO: New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo by F11, used by permission.

mardi gras 2021

NOTE: In 2021, Mardi Gras falls on Tuesday, February 16—and, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, is closed to its usual revelry of parades and mass celebration in New Orleans, so residents are turning their homes into floats. Mardi Gras, also known as Shrove Tuesday, refers to events of the Carnival celebration, beginning in early January on or after Epiphany (Three Kings Day) and culminating on Mardi Gras—the day before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. “Mardi Gras” is French for “Fat Tuesday,” reflecting the last night of eating rich, fatty foods before the sacrifices and fasting of the Lenten season. A number of traditionally ethnic French U.S. cities, including New Orleans, have notable celebrations. Mardi Gras arrived in North America as a French Catholic tradition with the Le Moyne brothers, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, in the late 17th century, when King Louis XIV sent the pair to defend France’s claim on the territory of Louisiane, which included what are now the U.S. states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and part of eastern Texas. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A native of New Orleans, Louisiana, Sheryl St. Germain has taught creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College, and Iowa State University. Her work has received two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay. St. Germain’s books of poetry include Going Home (1989), The Mask of Medusa (1987), How Heavy the Breath of God (1994), Making Bread at Midnight (1995), The Journals of Scheherazade (1996), and Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems (2007). She has also published a chapbook of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien (1994). She is also the author of a memoir about growing up in Louisiana, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman (2003), and she co-edited, with Margaret Whitford, Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century (2011), and with Sarah Shotland Words Without Walls: Writers on Violence, Addiction and Incarceration. St. Germain’s book also include Navigating Disaster: Sixteen Essays of Love and a Poem of Despair (2012), The Small Door of Your Death (2018), and Fifty Miles: Essays (2020). She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University and is co-founder of the Words Without Walls program. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Visit her at sheryl-stgermain.com.

Author photo ©Teake Zuidema, 2017.

It’s Only Make Believe? by Lynn White

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It’s Only Make Believe?
by Lynn White

The little cinema was packed,
even if fictional, films about the locality were rare.
And later, in the bar there was much discussion.
The shots of the sheep blocking the road were appreciated.
Well, our sheep were famous for their techniques of blockade.
This was no fiction.
There was insider knowledge here!
It was the mass action that was shown.
It brought the occupants out of their cars
to wave their arms and shout in angry frustration.
But the individual acts of defiance by escapees
were not shown.
This was considered regrettable.
It was felt the film should have acknowledged the action
of a single ewe lying nonchalantly chewing
on the tarmac while the cars stopped
and drivers moved rapidly from
“awww cute sheep” to louder and more frantic hooting
and then to arm waving and shouting outside,
There was no discrimination, after all.
Old cars, new cars, large cars, small,
the ewe would eyeball them all impassively.
Locals just drove round her.

But the main discussion centred on the two elderly sisters
who lived up the mountain.
They drove a very old car.
One of them had learned to drive in the War
and no one had thought to check if she still held a licence.
But, no matter,
she could still drive well enough
even though blind.
Her sister could see fine.
And even though she could not drive
she was adept at giving instructions.
Well, it was only fiction!
Or was it?
The audience doubted it.
All could almost remember these women,
or similar ones.
More insider knowledge was suspected
as they argued happily
about the identities of the eccentric drivers.

First published in Politics/Letters Live, Car Poems: A Collective Vehicle, Oct 2018.

PHOTO: A sheep in front of slate mine, Gwynedd, Wales. Photo by Bernard Brueggermann, used by permission.

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NOTE: Blaenau Ffestiniog is a town in Gwynedd, Wales, created to support workers in the local slate mines. The workforce for these quarries came from nearby towns and villages such as Ffestiniog and Maentwrog, and workers’ houses were built near the quarries. After reaching a population of 12,000 at the peak of the slate industry, the figure fell with the decreased demand for the area’s slate. Today, the population stands at around 5,000. Tourism has become the town’s largest employer. The Ffestiniog Railway and the Llechwedd Slate Caverns are popular tourist attractions, as is the Antur Stiniog downhill mountain biking centre. Recent attractions include the Zip World Titan zip-line site, which also now features the Bounce Below slate mine activity centre.

PHOTO: Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd, North Wales, showing waste heaps from mining. Photo by Stemonitis, used by permission.

artworks quarry

NOTE FROM THE NATIONAL GALLERY: After the invasion of Poland on September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. In the summer of 1940, the outlook seemed bleak for the Allies in mainland Europe. The British army had been forced into retreat at Dunkirk, while France and the Low Countries fell to Germany. The invasion of Britain looked imminent, so a plan was needed to protect the national art collection. The Manod mine in North Wales was a perfect hiding place. Explosives were used to enlarge the entrance to accommodate the largest paintings and several small brick bungalows were built within the caverns to protect the paintings from variations in humidity and temperature. Special “elephant cases” were constructed to safely transport the paintings on trucks to Wales. By the summer of 1941, the National Gallery’s entire collection was in its new subterranean home, where it remained for four years. The collection was returned to The National Gallery, London during 1945.

PHOTO: Paintings from The National Gallery, London were stored in the Manod mine in North Wales from 1941-1945 to protect them from Nazi bombing raids during WWII.

It's Only Make Believe

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The poem was inspired by local reaction to the film Framed (2009), which was set in Blaenau Ffestiniog. The film was based on the 2006 children’s book Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce. The book and film were inspired the true story of the removal of paintings from the National Gallery, London for safe storage in one of the chambers of the old Bwlch slate mine during the bombings of World War II.

PHOTO: The author in 1983 outside the entrance to the slate mine with one of the wagons used to transport the paintings in and out of the mines.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lynn White lives in North Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy, and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud “War Poetry for Today” competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including Apogee, Firewords, Capsule Stories, Light Journal, and So It Goes. Find Lynn at lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and on Facebook.

Giardini di Villa Melzi by David Del Bourgo

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Giardini di Villa Melzi
by David Del Bourgo
Bellagio, Italy

His white marble eyes
seem more curious than ours,
overlooking the intrusion
of two hundred years.
A fantastic arrogance
survives casual indignities:
rain-cragged shoulders,
a mustache chipped
by a childish hand.

His wife sits opposite
in the gazebo, admired
by everyday men like myself
brushing fingers across her smooth
chest, testing the finely
carved pearls that appear
so real. I can imagine
him stepping off to the side
to kiss her small mouth,
when he, she and the sculptor
walked along the newly planted
paths, discussing plans
for importing trees from the Orient.

As if he lived his life
in the time it takes
to wander across the main
walkway on these slate slabs
which were probably laid
on a day just like this
with the sun
sparkling off Lake Como.

PHOTO: Busts in the Moorish Pavilion at Villa Melzi with view of Lake Como, Lombardy Region, Italy. Photo by Saint Antonio, used by permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “Giardini di Villa Melzi” was written during a trip to Northern Italy’s lake district. I visited a large house with lovely gardens that had become a tourist destination. Out front were stone busts of Mr. and Mrs. Melzi, who had owned the house in the early nineteenth century. About a hundred yards away, inside a small chapel, were stone carvings of the couple laid out in their coffins. I was stunned by that quick passage of time from them being young and beautiful to becoming old and dead. This was a difficult poem because I wanted to tell the whole story about the young couple’s busts compared to statues of them after they had died. Yet I found that I could not capture the passage of time writing about both places. I remembered Aristotle’s continuities, and how one was about remaining in one place. In the end, I whittled the poem down to the one scene of the couple’s young busts, and attempted to capture the passage of time in that one place.

PHOTO: The author on the grounds of the Giardini di Villa Melzi, although not in front of the statues he writes about.

IMAGE: Map of Italy showing the location of Bellagio near the border of Switzerland.

NOTE: Villa Melzi d’Eril was built in Bellagio, Italy, by Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Duke of Lodi, vice president of the First Italian Republic and personal friend of Napoleon, who wanted a summer residence as elegant as the Villa Reale in Monza and other villas on Lake Como. The project was entrusted to architect Giocondo Albertolli, with construction from 1808 to 1810, while the park was the work of Luigi Canonica and agronomist Luigi Villoresi, creators of the Park of Monza.

PHOTO: Villa Melzi, Bellagio, Italy, Lombardy Region, Italy, with Lake Como and the Alps in the background. Photo by Janos Gaspar, used by permission.

NOTE: Bellagio is a municipality situated on the land mass that divides Lake Como. The city center occupies the tip of the promontory, while other districts are scattered along the lake shores and up the slopes of the hills. Along the banks are many old patrician houses, each surrounded by parks and gardens. Some, like Villa Serbelloni and Villa Melzi d’Esti, are open to the public.

PHOTO: Bellagio, Italy., on Lake Como with the Alps in the background. Photo by Tomas Novatny, used by permission.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Del Bourgo has published over a hundred poems in literary journals such as Epos, California Quarterly, and The Tiferet Journal. His work has also been featured in anthologies, including Sephardic Voices, The Literature of Work, and Three Los Angeles Poets, a Spanish translation of American poetry. Two books of his poetry have been published through small presses. Elie Weisel wrote the cover note for one of those books. He is also a member of Squaw Writers. He lives with his wife in Los Angeles, where he is presently working on a novel about the feminine divine.

The Ghost of Mazama by Marianne Brems

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The Ghost of Mazama
xxxxxxxxxxxCrater Lake, Crater Lake, Oregon
by Marianne Brems

The Rim Road around Crater Lake
with a dusting of snow beside it
is nearly all mine.
In temporal sunlight
I ride on two slim tires
around a lake without tributaries,
deeper than a skyscraper.

My core swells in warmth
pushing heat out my arms
as I ascend,
receding again during descent
when fierce wind imposes.
The swing from one to the other
like a trapeze as Watchman Outlook
nods in acknowledgment.

Where glacial blue and shale gray meet
below a thin white blanket,
I am a tiny traveler
following a concrete cut
in the pine dotted flank
of once molten Mount Mazama.

As the autumn sun passes midday,
a forest ready to host hibernation,
lures me on
around this ancient caldera,
the ghost of Mazama
hovering near my sternum.

First published by Willows Wept (June 20, 2020).

PHOTO: Crater Lake, Crater Lake, Oregon. Photo by Caryle Barton on Unsplash

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NOTE: Mount Mazama is a complex volcano in Oregon, in a segment of the Cascade Volcanic Arc and Cascade Range. Most of the mountain collapsed following a major eruption approximately 7,700 years ago. The volcano is in Klamath County, in the southern Cascades, 60 miles north of the Oregon-California border. Its collapse formed a caldera that holds Crater Lake. The mountain is in Crater Lake National Park. Mount Mazama originally had an elevation of 12,000 feet, but following its eruption was reduced to 8,157 feet. Crater Lake is 1,943 feet deep, the deepest freshwater body in the United States. Post-caldera activity has included the production of the Wizard Island cinder cone volcano in Crater Lake.

PHOTO: Crater Lake, Oregon, showing the Wizard Island cinder cone volcano. Photo by Sébastien Goldberg on Unsplash

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I cycled around Crater Lake in early October 2019.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Marianne Brems’ first poetry chapbook is Sliver of Change (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her second chapbook Unsung Offerings is forthcoming in 2021. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, including The Pangolin Review, Nightingale & Sparrow, The Sunlight Press, and The Tiny Seed Literary Journal. She lives in Northern California. Visit her at mariannebrems.com.

Meditation: Galápagos Seas by Lorraine Caputo

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Meditation: Galápagos Seas
by Lorraine Caputo

Surrounded by
xxxxxxxshattered coral
xxxxxxx& sea-burnished lava
I sit in the warm
xxxxxxxlate-afternoon sun
xxxxxxxlistening
to the tide rising, waves
xxxxxxxleaping over fractured
xxxxxxxboulders, waves rising
translucent green-blue
xxxxxxxto break, frothing, arriving
xxxxxxxto shore, before
relaxing

Red crabs cling
xxxxxxxto those black crags,
xxxxxxxthe surge breaking &
xxxxxxxfoaming over them
& out yonder
xxxxxxxtwo boobies skim
xxxxxxxthe waters, back & forth
xxxxxxxalong this ragged coast
one flies near, its
xxxxxxxturquoise feet tucked
xxxxxxxagainst its white belly

Previously published in On Galápagos Shores (Chicago: dancing girl press, 2019).

PHOTO: Blue-footed booby on rocks with Sandy Lightfoot crabs in the Galápagos Islands. Photo by Mcwilli1, used by permission.

NOTE: The Galápagos Islands, part of the Republic of Ecuador, are an archipelago of volcanic islands distributed on either side of the equator in the Pacific Ocean surrounding the centre of the Western Hemisphere. Located 563 miles west of continental Ecuador, the islands are known for their large number of endemic species that were studied by Charles Darwin during the second voyage of HMS Beagle. His observations and collections contributed to the inception of Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: In my stays in the Galápagos Islands, I would often go to the beach after a day’s labor to do tai chi and to meditate. There I could escape from the human population and immerse myself in the native and endemic species.

PHOTO: Galápagos Islands. Photo by by Pen Ash, used by permission.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator, and travel writer. Her work appears in over 180 journals in Canada, the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, as well as in 12 chapbooks of poetry – including Caribbean Nights (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Notes from the Patagonia (dancing girl press, 2017), and On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019). She also pens travel pieces, with stories appearing in the anthologies Drive: Women’s True Stories from the Open Road (Seal Press, 2002) and Far-Flung and Foreign (Lowestoft Chronicle Press, 2012), and travel articles and guidebooks. In March 2011, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada honored her verse. She has done over 200 literary readings, from Alaska to the Patagonia, and journeys through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. You may follow her Latin America Wander travels on Facebook and at latinamericawander.wordpresscom.

Slieve League by Christine Gelineau

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Slieve League
County Donegal, Ireland
by Christine Gelineau

Cliffs draw us, as margins must: that limitless curiosity limits excite.
It’s exactly the 600 meters of granite verticality that insinuates

closer, let me show you. Our thirst for clarity runs that deep.
The glittering little lake at Bunglass Point observes unblinking

as tourists and family groups head off along the ridge; there
at Amharc Mor, “the good view,” a sketchy fence suggests

but well beyond, the man and boy stroll, and a girl sits leaned
against a stone, turning the pages to her book, rehearsing nonchalance.

This high up, the breathing of the sea is barely audible.
Watchers cross and re-cross the glass distance to the waves,

imagining the release, almost welcome in the manageable
summer air. Daydreams. Less than vapor. Assume instead

the composure of the heather. After the cliff walkers
return to their domestic suppers; after the noisome

cars reload and wend back, sunset stains the stones
mortal red and shadowed ambergris. In the mobile dark

of borderland the sea repeats without complaint
the siren song of its remorseless loyalty.

PHOTO: The Slieve League cliffs, County Donegal, Ireland. Photo by Holzauge222.

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The Slieve League cliffs, located in County Donegal, Ireland, are nearly three times the height of the better-known Cliffs of Moher. On a trip to Ireland to see the birthplaces of my mother’s parents, we traveled up to Donegal to visit the poets Joan and Kate Newman, who live in sight of Slieve League and who took us to that unforgettable site. The poem is included in my collection Remorseless Loyalty, the book that won the Richard Snyder Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press and was published in 2006.

PHOTO: Sunset, Slieve League cliffs, County Donegal, Ireland. Photo by Johny Goerend on Unsplash

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Christine Gelineau is the author of three full-length books of poetry: Crave (NYQ Books); Appetite for the Divine and Remorseless Loyalty (both from Ashland Poetry Press). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau teaches in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University; after 26 years, she has just retired from Binghamton University. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely including in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The New York Times Opinionator, Green Mountains Review, and others. Gelineau lives with her husband on a Morgan horse farm in the Susquehanna River Valley of Upstate New York. Visit her at christinegelineau.com. Read an interview with the author at readwritepoetry.

The Cemetery at Tuscarora, Nevada by Robert N. Coats

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The Cemetery at Tuscarora, Nevada
by Robert N. Coats

A weathered plank with wooden cross affixed:
Sacred to the memory
of our daughter M.B. McNamara
Age 7 days
Died Dec. 27, 1893.

Outside the barbed wire, grazing Herefords
huff and munch, gazing
at tall brome growing between the graves.

Enclosed by an ornate iron fence,
a monument of white marble:
L.J., wife of P. Snyder
Died Nov. 23, 1875
Aged 17 years.

Thunderheads bloom and coalesce,
sparse raindrops moisten
the graves, the thirsty earth.

Headstone of gray granodiorite festooned
with sun-blanched plastic flowers
and a small faded flag:
Pfc. Andres Ynchausti
1949-1968.

Petrichor rises, and the scent of sagebrush.
A breeze rustles the grass.
Purple shadows creep across the valley floor.

A simple slab of pink granite:
Robert R. Coats, Geologist
Born Nov. 27, 1910
Died Jan. 23, 1995.

PHOTO: The cemetery at Tuscarora, Nevada, 1970. Photo by the author.

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Tuscarora began as a mining camp following the discovery of placer gold in 1867, and grew rapidly after a rich silver deposit was discovered nearby in 1871. At its peak, the town boasted of a polytechnic institute, two skating rinks, a ballet school, a theater and high school. The population of its Chinatown was second only to that of San Francisco. By 1886, the silver was mined out, the mines were flooded, and the most of the miners had fled. Since 1966, the ghost town has been home to the Tuscarora Summer Pottery School. Petrichor is a distinctive scent, usually described as earthy, pleasant, or sweet, produced by rainfall on dry soil.

PHOTO: View of Tuscarora, Nevada (2012). Photo by Famartin, used by permission.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert N. Coats has been writing poetry for more than 40 years. His poems have appeared on the Canary Website, in Orion, Zone 3, Windfall, Song of the San Joaquin, in two anthologies (Fresh Water: Poems from the Rivers, Lakes and Streams and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and in his book The Harsh Green World, published by Sugartown Publishing. He is a Research Associate with the University of California Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.