Table of Contents
American Fable: A Truth as Told by American Beaver, by Katie Daley
Even though we circle the days
slick & nocturnal
and survey the underworld
with eyes closed
we inhabit ponderable Earth
alongside you
It’s true, we’ve been endowed with
paddle-shaped tails
to slap like gunshots on river skin
webbed hind feet for superb swimming
& endlessly growing incisors
to fell Earth’s trees & devise our shelters
But because our excellent pelts
keep their shapes & colors in the rain
we once appeared to colonists
as excellent hats
Our deaths became
for a time
all the rage
Despite our clever underwater entrances
& keen teeth
we brinked extinction
as did, in our wake, our neighbors:
trout, Ottawa, wetlands
the whole before
unperturbed
swath of Turtle Island
But like clouds, fashion doesn’t tarry
only shapeshifts onward:
beaver to worm, pelt to silk
So listen
Now, beneath the scud
this swirl on river skin may speak
to you, may suggest
we burrow further than ever
into the deep, may warn
we still chew, slap, swill
& dream away our predators:
otter, cougar, mad hatters, humans
this story most of all
Winter Walk, by Laura Grace Weldon
Pavement icebound, I walk instead
around the pond, notice my steps attend
to a circle’s beginning and end while
animals, free of fence or cage, attend differently.
Their tracks follow hollows and ridges,
scents and sounds, a hundred variables beyond
my wavelength, all stories I will never know.
Water wrestled into ice heaves at the bank
grasps winter-softened leaves, reeds gone brittle.
The willow’s knuckled roots clutch at the edge,
branches leafed with tiny birds fluttering into flight.
Secrets, unseen, surround me. Blanding’s turtles,
bluegill, American bullfrogs sleep deep in the pond’s lungs
as I pass. Snakes, salamanders, dragonfly nymphs
wait nearby for spring. They know this icy landscape’s
promise. I haven’t yet mastered such faith.
Blight of the American Chestnut, by Carrie George
with observations from the naturalist Donald Culross Peattie
The chestnut grows blighted and destined to die
on the bodies of giants that once feathered and bloomed
like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface.
Illness inhabits a legacy, inhabits a system
of root, trunk, and vein swirling black thunder through
the chestnut, grown blighted and destined to die.
Muted browns resurrect in lovely women’s locks,
in fine silk cuts pleated into dresses, curtains, tablecloths
made like seas with white combers plowing across the surface.
Resurrected in memory and laboratories where needles
shock cankers into surviving samples. We play god
on the chestnuts, growing blighted and destined to die,
or to try, at least, as generational loops curse roots back
into fatal sprouts with only distant dreams of parents flourished
like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface.
We treasured their wood in pianos, barn timbers, fences,
smoothed their tall torsos into human shapes and desires.
The blighted chestnut we sentenced to drown
its white combers still bobbing on the surface.
American Giant Millipede, by Mary Quade
Iron-red tube,
thick as a pinky
and often longer,
it undulates along the
forest floor in darkness,
cleaning up the dead.
Besides the legs, there’s
nothing much to see, its
armor plain and shiny—
no wings, no spots, no
fleshy abdomen exposed,
no fateful stinger.
Only a snub head, short
antennae, waving, dull eyes
not seeming to see.
Not venomous,
unlike the centipede—
that flat biter hunting
in the basement.
But poisonous; when
unsettled, it curls up—
hard exoskeleton, a shield;
legs spooning legs—
and oozes yellow toxins,
untasty to a creature
seeking out a fat bug.
I’ll admit, they unsettle
me a little, their constant
crawling, an iron train of
segments—on each: two pairs
of legs moving in waves
along the ground, grasping
at decay. I can barely
keep track of my own
two feet beneath me; every
stick, every rock, every mud
puddle—a potential stumbling.
Or worse, a fall. But a
millipede can’t fall, except
further into earth, where
it builds a burrow to molt
into a new self, soft,
at first, then once again solid,
a larger thing which will
consume at least some of its
exuvia, its former skin.
Here is something, though:
when a female lays her eggs,
for each she creates a pellet of
chewed plants and her feces,
where she entombs the egg,
then passes that pellet along
her legs into her anal valve,
which closes on the tiny
wet nest, drying it in the kiln
of her body, until it emerges
a hard ball, both a shell
and a hatchling’s meal.
What measures we all
will take to make
a future.
American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis), by Marybeth Cieplinski
Above open fields they dip and swoop
on a sweltering summer day with sun-blistered pavement
or a crisp fall afternoon with leaves drifting down.
Whee-hee! Whee-hee!
Yellow and black streaks of color
as fast as June bugs,
as bright as the sunflower seeds they love,
singing out their roller-coaster joy,
searching for whatever food they can find.
Canada Thistle
Tickseed
Echinacea
Wild asters
Two, maybe three, times per summer the flailing young appear,
yellow gape wide, screaming
feedmefeedmefeedme
while harried parents rush to crack open seeds,
stuff the nutty kernels into ravenous maws.
Each season provides sustenance to the growing family.
In the Cuyahoga Valley, they flit year-round
in fields and forest edges,
alongside the river and marshes,
bright male plumage faded to mustard and gray in winter,
hardly distinguishable from their female mates until spring.
"Wild canaries" we called them as children.
"Yellow bird"
"Thistle bird"
The first sighting of sunflower yellow on wing tips
shows that spring is approaching.
The fields warm, sprout, expand, bloom,
and the song of the goldfinch
Whee-hee! Whee-hee!
gladdens the ear again.
Musclewood, by Jeff Gundy
for Nelson Strong
Blue Hen to Buttermilk Falls is an easy 20 minutes, even with the roots
and creek to slow you down. But it always took an hour with Nelson
who never saw a tree he couldn’t explain, a patch of woods that didn’t signify.
The Horne-bound tree is a tough kind of Wood, that requires so much paines in riving as is almost incredible, being the best to make bolles and dishes, not subject to cracke or leake.
-William Wood, New England’s Prospect, 1634
My farm boy half, always bent on arriving, sighed when Nelson stopped
at a gnarly little tree, its trunk no bigger than my calf, and said, Oh,
this is musclewood. The settlers tried to use it, he said, but found the wood
so tough they mostly gave up, learned to just let it be.
American Hornbeam. Leaves emerge reddish-purple, change to dark green, go yellow to orange-red in fall. Blue-gray bar, fluted with long, sinewy ridges. Difficult to transplant due to deep spreading lateral roots. Slow growing. The hard wood is used to make golf clubs, tool handles, and mallets.
-The Morton Arboretum
Touch it, he said, and I wrapped a hand around the trunk,
a comfortable fit. My flesh still remembers the grooved bark,
how it spiraled upward like a long loose-threaded screw.
My hand told me the wood I clutched was dense, pale, stiff
beyond even the oaks and maples, ready to last a long time
between the trail and the creek, easy with a flood now and then.
The Ojibwe people used musclewood as ridgepoles in wigwams. Decoctions of its bark were used in Cherokee, Iroquois, and Delaware medicine to treat painful urination, “diseases peculiar to women,” and diarrhea, respectively.
-The Heartwood Tree Company
Nelson moved west. I’m stuck at home. This absurd,
apocalyptic year creeps slowly toward God knows what.
But the little musclewood is still there, leaning into darkness
and day between the creek and trail, whirling and steady,
pressing out and shedding its new leaves and seeds and flowers,
tough as any tree or trail or creek, any walker stopped
by a curious friend and asked to look, to touch something
native but not common, unassuming, discreet,
of slight human use but entirely at home in its place.
American Waterlily, by Geoffrey Polk
(Nymphaea odorata)
Out of the muck of Northeast Ohio
out of the Cuyahoga valley
out of this mud-clotted shallow pond
bordered by towpath and scenic railroad
jogged past by runners, bicycle sprinters,
strollers and Sunday photographers,
interrupted periodically by sound blasts
to scare crows from corn fields,
they appeared one day on the pond’s surface,
launched from pie-sliced pads of green,
apparitions out of the mist, creamy yellow and white,
floating aliens whose startling glow,
mesmerizing and canyon-deep,
stops the meadow traffic in its tracks,
binoculars fluttering, camera lenses shattered,
walkers fainting, bikes piled together,
dogs slumped to the ground, birds cloister-silent.
The flowers opening, spreading,
dimpling the still pond, fragrant petals,
desired by muskrats, radially symmetric,
they emerge from module Earth like space walkers
tethered to pond bottom
by branched root rhizomes, rising along long petioles,
umbilicals holding these comets of wonder
for us to see, mirrors of our soul—
we, aloft, adrift, waiting for the message
to call us home.
An Artist's Bracket, by Susann Moeller
I wish I had your
cosmopolitan distribution, dear.
While no one has you for lunch,
some will have you for tea.
And so, this poet raises
her Scarlet Cup to
the pungent inspiration
in these odorous woods.
I waltz through mycology,
where Turkey Tails and
Hens in the Woods
flock without feathers;
where moss and lichen
cover and layer the playground
for Hänsel & Gretel and Snow White
with rotting bones, leaves, and scat.
Beneath my feet
spreads a carpet of hosts
to Saprophytes,
Biophytes and Necrophytes.
Beer and cheese need them
as much as I crave you.
You, neither plant nor animal
but part of Thoreau’s lore!
As I walk on Silky Parchment,
stroking in passing a Lion’s Mane,
Funeral Bells chime from afar
and in the Dryad’s Saddle
that hung from an oak nearby,
or was it a maple—I ride
through the Grimm brothers’ tales
and dash away from parasites
on logs and stumps and pale gleams
that hide amatoxin under
their white satin skirts
and promise the Death Angel’s Kiss.
You meet her, among the cracks
and right angles of Deep Lock Quarry.
She crabs back to cover her clutch of eggs.
Your muscles go taut In the same way
wild, and unconsidered — heart quick
without enough breath to compare
your relative mass, you back away.
I tell you she can prey on fish five times her body size
just to turn your blood on. Pumping too loud in your ears
to consider her family: the nursery web spiders
— a different way to name her.
I wonder what is/isn’t automatic or natural?
We ought to be careful, looking over the menu at Fisher’s Cafe,
that no one decides to name us by what we consume:
Bread people, beef people, egg crushers & cheese melters, oil
folks & forest eaters, mountain top destroyers, those who confuse
shame for power — then swallow it all, drainers of rivers, desert
makers, 73 hot dogs in 10 minutes, entire neighborhoods of old
homes, feeding on memory, feeding on self-improvement,
clutching our eggs & our pets close to the tangle of veins &
arteries & nerves in our core, web of ribs, sternum & carapace.
Bluegill, by Olivia Farina
I do not know how to swim but
that comes so naturally to you.
You move in ways I can only dream about
because you were built to dance in the water.
Even when you are frightened,
far away from your hidden water fortress,
you flit away from whoever seeks to harm you,
curved into a C,
dancing away.
I caught you once and
threw you back and
that is when I learned of your dance.
I couldn’t stand to see myself hold
something so cosmically full of life.
You run like a machine:
Every muscle underneath scales and gills
is a work of art that keeps you alive.
Though your body is structured for movement and navigation,
you are still stuck.
When I see you in my dreams you are free and wild,
but in an instant you are taking oil into your terminal mouth,
drowning on sewage,
held trapped in plastic.
I try to remember you dancing
and not hooked at the end of a line.
Common Star-of-Bethlehem, by Brita Alaburda
Your infant breath still fresh
from nourish
seen
in your milky sheen
you of Bethlehem
descended in seed,
sequestered
humbled
in the crumble
of mother earth
was some of your destiny,
but here, yet, another part –
your bloom!
You come above
black earthen bed,
point to sheer living by sincere
starrish-spread,
spout in tender arches of white
you, tiny bright,
are anything but common
our eye
accepts
not a sprinkle
of color vivid
but an immersion
of hue mild,
to saturate the black drought
of the center palette,
cleanse the pupil
to glean stark vibrance,
for our visual taste wants
for something unblemished
worthy to savor,
to see – a wonderment
of one of the constellate,
find purity in your plasma
petals,
kneel low
we reach for you
Ode to the Plecoptera, by Karen Schubert
I sing you, common stonefly, and your 3500
families living everywhere except Antarctica,
coming to us straight from the Carboniferous
358.9 million years ago when atmospheric oxygen
reached its pinnacle and your ancestors
were big as flying cars. Now ribbons of oil.
You’re the canaries in our clean streams, intolerant
of pollution where until recently, water
was pristine. I sing you, drab brown Plecoptera,
your Greek name meaning braided wings,
even if you prefer water over air, mandibles
feeding on sunken leaves and algae or
large compound eyes hunting arthropods.
After swimming as gilled nymph for years,
leap to land for one last molt, listen for a mate
drumming his belly for you. Then fly low over
the water to drop your thousand sticky eggs.
Search Point, by Nathan Kemp
“That softness around your eyes, a softness in your face. Almost the way you feel when you’re about to start crying. That, to me, is love. It can be romantic love, it can be friendship love, it can be family love, it can be love for a chipmunk. It can be love for anything.” —Moby
a race from one post
to another it can go unnoticed
I am not looking for
pests
during the mating season
one can harvest
165 pine nuts a day
seasonal stocks of
forest seeds fruit
mushrooms & stems sometimes
my diet is striped red
sugar maple sardines cherry
skins underground
a bunker of lean grains
I hibernate but do not
store fat during
I put extra food in the sheets
a hiding place for energy while you sleep
if it is perishable or
if it is stolen or destroyed
grocery stores offer
important groceries in winter
high summer sometimes
all year round
I get lost & gather
or rather I store food as a hobby
in tunnels meters long
rooms connected to the surface
the entrance is invisible there
are no traces of excavated soil
The Eastern Red-backed Salamander, by Tovli Simiryan
Another note, you hiking alone,
in/out of cyber-space near some campsite in West Virginia,
moving slowly along a nameless creek, eventually closing in on Ohio.
So I print…so I have paper thoughts now,
folded for weeks inside my LL Bean kangaroo pocket,
a soft hunk of fluff; not the brittle leaves you crush as
fall arrives beneath your boots, dust filling cavities—
something to guess at…or, better still, declare humbling.
Just send me a picture—the Red-backed Salamander, for example,
before it forms a crust against leaves and gravel.
I hear its red striped skin is forever—a tattoo of belonging,
social monogamy and defended homelands.
Sounds like something you’re looking for, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I’ve stopped guessing, or better still everything I own
is an envelope licked, sealed shut and tasted—the hollow places filled
with living beings, or some plastic bottle tossed aside, now part of
a tattooed reptile’s habitat. Everything has its little place whether discarded,
remembered or born…
that’s it, birth; I am born deeper and deeper
and looking up, there are so many eyes, so many suns—
every piece the darkened forest transcending an upheaval of principle,
the little creek with no name and, then your footprints floating against the water;
spinning in the air. There you are—drowning in the earth;
hanging on precariously of course—see how much we’ve loved you?
Homeownership, by Zachary Thomas
The third coat of Eastern Tent Moth Wing dried
as sundown beamed bright bronze boxes
onto the far living room wall
where wooden framed photographs of family, friends,
and purchased proof of this married project, this fixer upper, this welcome home
in need of TLC will rest above the hearth’s flickered free flames forever warmed
by a single union, 1 life in Christ’s name, we pray
for cracked cocoons and velvet flight paths to abandoned forests of
good health, loud laughs, and fancy fulfilling feasts right and just
for my floral crowned queen, beckoning me to join her
for our first supper together under this roof.
Little Lanterns of the Night, by Jacquie Dukes
Beautiful insects that are natural lanterns of the night.
They are always the life of the party for all their short-lived life.
Their tiny orange or yellow head with split black wings hide a hidden treasure.
That thrills, excites, and delights with astounding mystical pleasure.
It prowls the habitat for a twilight date.
It employs bioluminescence to attract a mate.
Trying to avoid the looming, nocturnal,
Mason jar zoo.
They bob and weave and loop de loop.
Lampyridae is hard to say, but scientifically their name.
They love to play “Hide and Seek”
and are experts at the game.
“Lighting Bug” or Firefly”
folks from the North or South both needle.
Ironically, they’re not a bug or a fly,
but classified a beetle.
Quietly upon a Summer’s eve,
on a stealthy mission
they embark.
They shine some light on a dimming world,
by piercing through
the dark.
Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus), by Laurie Kincer
One summer’s humble rosette of large,
velvety leaves promises a towering stalk
the next summer, petal to eye with a hiker.
It compels attention and invites touch,
leaves furred in woolly white, mullein from
mollis, Latin for soft. At top, columned buds
open a few at a time into yellow petals
circling orange stamens. Later, thousands
of seed-specks scatter to create a majesty
of mulleins in stony fields, roadsides,
fecund in ignored dirt. A traveler from
Asia and Europe to America, each name
a story—beggar’s flannel, miner’s candle
Aaron’s rod, cuddy’s lungs, Quaker rouge,
witch’s taper. Books call them weeds
but we still turn to them for wounds,
coughs, earache, as rag or torch, and
when our worn boots need soft lining.
Green Heron, by Paula J. Lambert
It’s been hard for me to love Green Heron.
Homely, hidden, hardly moving at all, staring
into the depths, eyes made for that staring,
pointed permanently down, as if Sky never
mattered at all. How often we lift our eyes
to see her sisters soar: Great Blue, Egret,
those of the graceful glide, the long necks,
long legs, all while Green Heron hunches,
staring ever down, easy to overlook, so easy
not to see at all until she springs to action—
even then, we question what we’ve seen.
Praise the eater and the eaten, Joy Harjo says.
Praise beginnings; praise the end. Praise
our eyes now opened, praise understanding.
Praise the serpentine neck, suddenly retracted
and hidden again. Praise the fish swallowed.
I am the fish, writes Mary Oliver, the fish
glitters in me; we are risen, tangled together,
certain to fall back to the sea. Bless Green Heron
and her quietude. Bless beak become spear,
the javelin thrust. Bless homeliness, and bless
what it hides—bless all that it provides. Bless
the depths reflected, mirrored sky, the bird who
watches and who sees, bless the un-beautiful
creatures so quick to judge. Bless ignorance,
and patience, and forgiveness, and love. Bless
every new beginning. Bless everything that ends.
Grey Catbird on the Nest, by Theresa Göttl Brightman
If you hear a mewling cry, between a
human child and a disappointed cat,
in the dense shrubs of your yard,
and see a flash of rust
under a handful-cloud of slate grey,
leave her be.
She is friendly but shy, transitory,
fierce in defense.
If you could ask her,
she would tell you
she does nothing heroic.
It is what her people do.
One thousand miles,
from south to north then south again,
following budding trees in the spring
to a fresh hold of twigs in the undergrowth
where she raises her babies
and fights off blue jays and grackles.
And when the brown-headed cowbird
gets up to the old cuckoo tricks,
her sharp, dark eye watches.
She jabs the intruder’s eggs
and rolls them from the nest.
She knows invasion.
She does not proceed with irrational fury.
Nor does she ignore the threat,
waiting until danger blossoms and fruits.
She acts, protecting
the innocents in her care, and ends
the parasite incursion before it begins.
She would tell you
she does nothing heroic.
It is what her people do.
Field Guide to Fleeting Moments, by Amanda Schuster
Dusted in pollen
a clumsy bumblebee lands
atop her petals:
Hepatica Nobilis,
ephemeral queen,
angel of fleeting moments:
The smell after rain
The spinal stretch of a cat
The sharp breath running uphill.
In the forest-floor opera,
everything singing,
Hepatica,
a whispered aria:
Let us return to the earth that made us.
Let us surrender to the sun again.
Let us feel the pulse in our knuckles
holding hands.
The Interrupted Fern, by Kathleen Cerveny
takes a moment for itself,
stopping briefly in its slow
unfolding from the forest floor
to seed itself for the future.
Within its tall and barren
vase of feathers the fertile
central fronds will pause
in the rote release of pinnae.
They take a breath—make space
along their spines to bloom
a nursery before resuming
the unfurling of their lissome blades.
With millennia of practice—
as far back as the Triassic—
these osmundae have prevailed,
independent of an ‘other’ for fulfillment.
Through eons of their seasonal decay,
these fragile ferns—which once sustained
Jurassic herbivores—are layered, deep;
compressed into the midnight seams
now plundered by a fevered world.
Jack-in-the-Pulpit, by Michael Buebe
present
for your presentation
your wrapping
green cloth of any
simple fabric
peaking for congress
for the first
calming breath
(vulnerable / in breathing / in filling your lungs)
before the sermon
& then
(!)
the word of silence
is passed
in turn
plant to plant
&
gnat to gnat
(so serene the lesson
the sun & silence)
Meadow Vole, by Anonymous
they call me a meadow vole
I have bright eyes as dark as coal
to the family of rodents I belong
but my scaly tail is not too long
my fur is thick and shiny
my nose and ears are tiny
I eat a lot to keep my plumps
I’m sleek and smooth and have no lumps
I munch on stalks of grass and weeds
I crunch sedges, roots, and many seeds
in summer I scurry about at night
in winter I prefer the bright daylight
I chatter my teeth and growl and squeak
when an owl or hawk causes me to freak
I can be a pest, I won’t dispute
but you have to admit I’m pretty darn cute
Monarch, by Deborah Fleming
Transparent light of afternoon,
late summer chirr of cicadas
and the green frog’s G-string note.
Ironweed blooms royal purple
like a glass of wine held up in air.
A monarch plucks sweetness
from the petals, carefully opening and closing
the stained glass of its translucent wings.
The Muskrat Makes His Bed, by Catherine Wing
O. Zibethicus!
To the man who asked what I am good for,
a few words. It’s true my ancestral name
is unfortunate—two rough things unkindly
brought together—but while you can’t speak it,
musk is my language and rat’s the size of my tongue.
Also, my ambition. What you don’t know
would fill my burrow and its underwater entrance
twice over. With my extraordinary lung capacity
and my glossy underparts I made Hinterlands Who’s Who.
In 2012, it was my famous lodge, den, and bed,
that earned me Wetland Designer of the Year.
It’s true I eat sedge and cattail.
It’s true I lap up pondweed and duck potato,
bulb and tuber, and if forced
I will stoop to snail and salamander.
It’s true I am swamp and bog inclined.
I’m not picky.
My family’s ancient and well-represented
in the fossil record. I am rumored to be descended
from the Balkan Snow Vole with whom I share a molar.
I can swim backwards and I can hold my breath
for a full 17 minutes. Are you good for that?
I am not a beaver and I am not a rat.
Call me what you will but I am native.
How rich for you, destroyer of habitats,
to accuse me of destructiveness, to blame me
for your leaking pond. I understand
that you think yours is the only story to tell
and that your way is the only way to tell it
but I have news for you.
Musk is how I sing, talk, love, woo, and warn.
It is my sign of bigger things yet to come.
You can’t ice me over or push me out.
I will defend my bed, my burrow, and my craft.
Afterall who among us in this world
is not born blind and furless, given a name
by others and called to account?
Cuyahoga Valley's Collar of Dissent 2020, by Monica Kaiser
in memoriam of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
I am cocooning,
& visualizing butterflies
to escape the dying,
the images
of people with tubes
down their throats.
A global diseasing.
Mother keeps warning.
Mother keeps warming.
I am guilty of climate genocide,
even as I fell in love
with you, pearl crescent.
Even as I watched
natural laws govern you,
summer after summer,
the continual reinvention
of yourself—
a finale of flames
puddled on wet ground,
an otherworldly orange.
Language-like,
your pigments & patterns
are fluid, vary state to state,
region to region. Your pearls
are persistent, rebellious by nature.
One by one,
you flitter, disperse.
Heavenwards,
out of sight. Down to open meadows,
to the throats & tubes
of flowers. Petal posers.
Wings open. Wings close.
Your proboscis sips the nectar’s
sweetness, as tiny spiracles allow air
into your tracheal tubes.
Systems are necessary for survival—
as is your courtship chase,
a possible fluttering, a coupling,
a joining of abdomens: copulation.
I, too, am a reinvention—
a dynamic energy
sheltering inside a bulldozed tree
as it snows,
as our gas furnace heats,
as our curtains shiver in its air,
as I visualize butterflies
& reimagine you & your
hindwing’s crescent pearls
quivering at the collar
of every
star.
Poison Hemlock, by Jon Conley
w—
hat
can poise
on a poison
he—
mlock
hard
hard hair
or
the attn: I
deserve to b—
e poised
poisoned
upon
an eye
& eye well
D. Carota, by Jessica Jones
Queen Anne's Lace— how many
at five in the evening
in August?
Can't count those in arms reach
— white, cream, green, gold,
mauve, white again;
snowflakes beaming face up,
some curled,
tentative
like girls at Quinceañera.
Others spread like matrons’ aprons
wise in the truth of their short hour,
dispensing perfect acceptance
of time.
Instructing me
against bitter patience,
to embrace
their widening view—
tactful, elegant—
amid sifting light.
Upon Seeing a Red-Headed Ground Beetle I’ve Decided: I’m More About Protection of the Weak Than I Am Survival of the Fittest, by Bob King
Most of what we do, directly or indirectly,
is about distracting us from the fact that
we’ll all be dead soon. We’re all just renters.
But maybe it’s also about being remembered
after we’re kaput. Squished. Entombed. See also:
headstones and mausoleums, which really
are just fancy Post-it Notes for the future
generations for when they walk through
the field-cemetery-kitchen of our past lives:
we hope they see the hasty scribble and forgive
us for eating all the plums in the icebox which
they were probably saving but were so delicious
and sweet and we simply couldn’t help
ourselves. Don’t be a plum eater. Think of
others. Conserve. Learn trivia along the trail:
Did you know Darwin’s Galopagoan boat
was called the Beetle? Wait. That’s not true.
It was the Beagle. But I misheard the podcast
or the lyrics and thought John, Paul, and George
might’ve been trying to make some kind of evolved
statement after the hard days and nights in Hamburg,
where their 10,000 hours of play transformed them
from amateurs into experts. But no. They weren’t
naturalists or activists. Yet. Did you know that
Neanderthals were most likely gingers—red tufted
and freckled and soulless and Germanic with limited
language but urgent with their hubba hubba eyebrow
arches in their pastoral pickup joints because
procreation. Because without procreation they
knew that the Homo sapiens on their way from
Africa would try to exterminate or assimilate or both.
Most of us still have at least 2% Neanderthal DNA.
That’s a fact, you post-extinction caveman. Red yarn
red yarn red yarn—butterfly effect—and like an amateur
detective I can red yarn from Ethiopia to Hamburg
to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and red yarn
from my footfalls on the crushed limestone towpath
to a quick scamper off-route and after taking a leak
beside a walnut tree like my epically aged ancestors,
like an expert I bend to check out the Red-Headed
Ground Beetle feasting on aphids just outside
Szalay’s sweet corn field. Yes, it’s true that this
ginger beetle is capable of mixing chemicals
in her dual pygidial glands—her butt—yes, in
her marvelous ass she can blend fluid and create
a combustion engine and POP! hot acrid gas
ejects and is capable of paralyzing even a small
mammal, like a shrew, which is why some beetles
are called bombardier beetles and even Darwin
got bombed by one, but that’s not what took him
out. No. He was run over by a Volkswagen Bug
in the ironies to end ironies because like Alanis
Morissette, it’s not ironic. And it’s not true.
The Bug wasn’t invented until about 50 years
after Darwin’s ticker stopped, and even
the combined idea and design of Ferdinand
Porsche and Adolph Hitler couldn’t have
resurrected a father of evolution, which—
red yarn—can be easily corrupted,
like anything, because as good as we are
at discovery and invention, our penchant
for perversion and exploitation of a good idea
is just as strong. See evolution. See eugenics.
See entomology. See deforestation. See politics.
See coup d’état. But the truth also is that Red-
Headed Beetles are beneficial creatures, despite
their incredible capacity for cruelty. Cruelty
isn’t the point. For them. For us. Even the smallest
creatures make the globe spin like good vinyl.
And when all the broken-hearted people—broken
by the bullies and belligerent coaches and teachers
and family members and cliquey kids in a field
with a weaponized magnifying glass—yes,
when all the broken-hearted people living in
the world agree—agree that there’s more power
in being a cheerleader than there is being a critic—
there will be an answer. Yes, there will be an answer.
Star Jelly, by Cameron Gorman
then the meteors came, and they left us.
we fell down from some bright place, blanketed
the grass, the branches, the thing we called sleep.
nobody knows how we eat sunbeams,
where we go when the rain stops.
they call us remains. they call us earth-star.
they have tried to name us. we were uligo,
which meant fat from the earth,
a star which has fallen.
we remember the atmosphere, its dizzy wash
of blue-beams. the streaming before we were
star-slubber, star-slough, caca de luna.
we remember fire, the heat close to heaven.
the coldness that could not touch us.
the showers came, and they carried us down,
and we became your star-shot, and we became
translucent, which means allowing some light
to pass through.
Upon Learning That Double Samaras Also Litter The Heavens, by Steve Brightman
And it’s not enough
to know sugar maples
have lined the banks
of Lake Erie since
before Christ literally
or figuratively
walked the earth.
And it’s not enough
to feel the sweetened
cool of their canopy
as they blacken the sun
above the luscious
gurgle of the Cuyahoga.
And it’s barely enough
—just barely—
to heap young belief
upon young belief that
they are angel wings
helicoptering from the
Ohio sky just for you.
The Turkey Vulture, by Andrew Gilkey
Wings coast to coast,
a black scar on
the belly of the sky.
A red ruddy head scanning
roadside carrion.
I, an ecological equalizer.
An envoy of all forgotten gods of death.
The bluebird’s foil.
A feather for every gust guiding
thermal air that pushes me upwards, pushes
the smell of rot into my septimeless nose.
My baldness isn’t pattern,
It’s by design,
It’s a clean glove gripping a scalpel’s handle
picking meat from vacated
vessels to plunge bacteria bound flesh
into corrosive guts.
The sound of bone-scraping
is the lounge jazz of our night-time committees.
intermingling with our prehistoric chatter
as we look up to morning stars,
dreaming of the next day’s reaping.
White-footed Mice in Winter, Cleveland, 2020, by Michelle Skupski
I want to like these mice,
I do. For my 8-year-old son
and his mess of predator/
prey lines in science class.
I feel safe
in that web. The mice
are always at the bottom
like in 7th grade
when I reached into the dark
shelf of my locker
and fingered the cold
squish of the dead
mouse. I didn’t want to
toss it in the trash
for the smell so I slid it
on my teacher’s desk and
left. I wanted to leave
my unease there too,
the memory of a lost
mouse stumbling through
our kitchen when I was 12,
my little brother climbing
the kitchen table, screeching
because a mouse does not belong
here. I am not a natural predator.
I don’t need
this mouse for anything and yet
here I am nearing my 38th year
still holding all these mice
close, squeezing. They scramble
around in my mind like
the many that foraged our attic
floorboards as I tried to sleep.
They won’t let me
rest. And I wonder now
who or what is safe
and when. I have a house
and a door and a lock and
still I find another mouse
making a home
in my other son’s rollerblade,
soft padding for safety
of another kind. Mouse,
will you ever leave me
alone? Dearest Self,
you are safe in your mask
in your bubble with a broken
garage door and not enough
money for repair. Today
you will feed the birds.
White-tailed Deer, by Benjamin Rhodes
I'm sorry to say
the way I know you
best is strung-up
by your hind legs,
the cavity of your body
on display, headless,
skin flayed and peeled
to be cured and stretched
over a wooden stool later.
I'm sorry, your meat
was delicious as a pot
roast, your youth and lack
of fear at death made
the gravy, the potatoes
tender. If you didn't know
better, you might not tell
the flesh in your teeth
was once wild.
And no, I was never the one
with the bow, with the camouflaged
rifle and orange vest. I only ever
perched in boxes nailed to trees
as adventure in imagination, as
play at being higher than my
surroundings. I only ever saw
the way men in my family
treated you through pictures,
only ever pet your neck
as it hung on the wall.