ALOCASIA

Wine in Europe was never the same after the explosion,
can be dated by its radioactivity, levels of caesium-137.

The northern radiation plume swept up into Scandinavia,
the southern dusted the berry-fields of France.

It’s said that you can taste the difference, can feel
the ever-nearing fallout of your own body with each sip.

American wine was sold in Sweden for the first time in 1987.
Economics is the science of unintended consequences.

The city of Pripyat is now a restored Eden,
without any god to watch over it.

The confinement zone turned refuge has saved species
from extinction, all of their skins pulsing beneath the surface.

Somewhere in Norway, someone is watching
the Northern Lights, a glass of Yakima Valley Merlot in hand.

Somewhere in Pripyat, a spider is weaving an irregular web,
a tree is growing its 38th ring,
an enormous wolf is howling its reservoir song.

 

Mandy Seiner (she/they) is a writer, educator, and dill pickle connoisseur living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in underblong, perhappened mag, Stone of Madness Press, and elsewhere, and she is co-editor-in-chief of DEAR Poetry Journal. Talk to her about condiments, your favorite documentaries, and the use of pink peppercorn in unisex fragrances.

don’t forget to put the teakettle on, listen to the hum, the hiss, 
the scream, add to the water one length of rope, one candle 
wick, one pinkie mouse will escape the snake, so sprinkle 
granulated sugar on every counter, to wipe up later, to crush 
under sandalled feet, to thumb through old film, remembering 
the sight of one lone cockerel, alive to fight another day, then 
bring each one of seven to the yard for sunbathing, while one lazy 
black cat noses your legs, teach them to listen, to the trucks hitting 
potholes on the old river road, to the river beyond, 
chewing at her banks.

 

Hana Damon-Tollenaere is a biology student and occasional writer. She lives in California with her girlfriend and a variety of reptiles and amphibians. Her published work can be found at hanadamontollenaere.carrd.co.

In the corn museum the docent shrugs 
when I praise the strange blue cobs. 

They weren’t good producers.
They were content to remain plants.  

What did we give up when we abandoned 
variants that were happy this way? 

When the cactus evolved thorns, 
retracting its leaves into daggers,

where did the sound of the wind go? 
Does the cactus remember that flutter? 

An artist and a scientist worked together 
to record the cellular sound of the cactus, 

its song in seed, genetics, body. 
The sound is like poetry scraped over desert rocks.

When making a difficult decision, 
imagine one part of yourself continuing 

down the path you did not choose, 
living her own life of hardship and joy. 

Knowing she’s there may make your decision easier. 
Go ahead, imagine another life of blue corn & cactus leaf.

 

Sara Eddy’s full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Fissures, was released by Kelsay Books in May 2024.  She is also the author of two chapbooks (Tell the Bees, A3 Press, 2019, and Full Mouth, Finishing Line Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.

I am haunted by sylvan ghosts. I grew up in forests, and every one of them is being systematically destroyed. Huge swaths of habitat are removed from the earth every day, and every day ecological disasters increase. I remember trees which no longer exist. The towering white pines at my grandparents’ old home were cut down and replaced by a subdivision. The sugar maples of my father’s tap line were removed and replaced by a Christmas tree farm. These Christmas trees are cut down, sold wholesale, and discarded like trash when the holidays are over. The cedars, spruces, and balsam firs of my childhood home were bulldozed. They’re long gone, but I can still feel their bark, still smell their sap, still taste their tacky gum. I still remember my Dad boiling maple sap in the basement, distilling the trees’ gifts into rich, amber syrup. My tongue aches to taste it again, but Dad hasn’t worked the sugar bush since the 1970s. No maples grow where he lives now. He’ll never make maple syrup again.

All my life I heard about the tragedy of the vanishing Amazon jungle–how the lungs of the world are being destroyed. In 2016, I went to the Ecuadorian Amazon and a tour guide warned me to steel myself against the devastation I would see. But when I saw the areas being cleared, the stumps being burned, I thought, that’s not so bad. No worse than I see back home. And then the enormity of the situation hit me. The Amazon isn’t the earth’s lungs. All forests are, whether they’re boreal forests, jungles, cloud forests, mangroves, or underwater kelp forests. And the reason the Ecuadorian destruction didn’t faze me is because I have become acclimated to large-scale ecocide. My dad worked in the forestry industry, and I lived in remote and rural areas all over Canada. I’m used to making way for logging trucks, to walking through clearcuts, scalped mountainsides, and barren hills, and to seeing and smelling countless animals dead on the roads which stab through their homes like burning daggers. I’ve grown accustomed to extinction events. I’ve become desensitised. I’m working to overcome this.

I study trees wherever I go. In 2017 I went to southern Africa, and I saw tawny landscapes dotted with brush and punctuated by majestic baobab trees. I sat down in the savannah to draw them. These massive trees are festooned with vulture nests, and pockmarked with climbing holes carved hundreds of years ago. People scaled and still scale these trees to collect the fruit. Elephants strip the bark and devour it, and the baobabs persevere. They are thousands of years old. I asked my South African guide why they stood all by themselves and learned that once this area had been forested, but all the trees were cut down except the baobabs. Baobab wood is fibrous and spongy–worthless to the lumber industry. So now these ancient trees stand alone, survivors of a sylvan genocide. I wonder if they remember the trees which once surrounded them.

When I walk amongst trees, I sometimes collect their fruit and nuts, their leaves, their thorns, or pieces of their bark. I will gladly admit to being a treehugger. Sometimes I even lick trees. I press my tongue to the fuzzy berries of staghorn sumac to check to see if they’re ripe. 

Winters grow milder and milder, and a lot of folks have been enjoying the unseasonable weather. I’m in Canada, known to the world for its snowy winters, and in January of 2023, my neighbours’ lawns were green. The ground should have been frozen and blanketed in white, but plants rose like green zombies. Trees began to bud. People asked me how I enjoy the fine weather, and I told them that I hope it ends soon. I wanted it to drop well below zero. We need the cold here. Then they asked me why, all while looking at me like I’d gone mad.

Here’s why: I’ve been watching how trees handle the changing climate. When these false springs keep hitting, confused fruit trees flower out of season, and then crops fail. People and animals go hungry. With too many mild winters, trees are afflicted by invasive insects, pathogens, and fungal infections. Dutch elm disease, spongy moths, ash borers, and more combine with rampant deforestation, and we lose even more trees. Conifers fruit heavily after too-mild winters, sending out new children in what could be death throes. They ask us to tend to these children just as they have always attended to us.

When the Europeans first came to what is now called North America, many were dying of scurvy. When you have scurvy, all of your old scars unknit themselves and open up. It’s a terrible disease. Indigenous Peoples showed these suffering people how to harvest life-saving medicines from the generous trees. Even in the coldest of winters, the evergreens share their vitamin C with us. 

The Royal Navy considered the trees more valuable dead than alive, and forests worldwide were cut down to feed the demand for timber. Even though the navy doesn’t make ships from wood anymore, forests are still considered more valuable dead than alive by industrialists. These green macroorganisms aren’t viewed as sentient beings but as natural resources to be plundered for monetary gain. The oldest trees in the world are still being cut down, but instead of being turned into ships, they’re converted into fuel pellets and toilet paper. With every destroyed forest, the world gets hotter. Storms worsen. Glaciers melt. Oceans rise. Our ecology is in a tailspin, and industry is making a killing. Profits are as high as the temperature.

But roots are rioting, microfilaments spreading like a mob, joining with mycorrhizal fungi to seize the means of production. They summon reinforcements, and the invertebrates creep closer, reinvesting the dead into the stuff of life. And from these teeming micromasses the tree grows, her tap root reaching down, down, down into the depths. A living anchor, a life line, an umbilical cord connecting her to the earth and to us. So long as she is tended she will thrive, distributing her gifts of fruit and oxygen. And the bees will find pleasure in her blossoms, the birds will find sanctuary in her branches, and those who are weak from heat will find coolness in her shade.

The riotous roots of the trees knit together the soil so that when the rains come, the earth remains intact. And when the trees cluster together on the mountainsides, they hold hands and slow avalanches. And the mangroves weave together wetlands so that when coastal storms hit like a hammer, the land is not washed into the depths of the sea.

We can learn much from the trees. All trees are trees of life. All trees are trees of knowledge. We must reciprocate their generosity. We must tend and nurture them. We must bolster forests. All the earth can be a paradise if the lives of trees and all who care for them are prized as the treasures they are.

 

Shantell Powell is a two-spirit swamp hag raised on the land and off the grid all over Canada. She’s a graduate of the Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University and her writing is in Augur Magazine, The Deadlands, SolarPunk, and more. When she’s not writing, she wrangles chinchillas and gets filthy in the woods. You can find her online at shanmonster.dreamwidth.org.

Me & my girl are leaning on the guardrail
eating pineapple with chopsticks.
They are bright yellow – so vivid
that you cannot believe there isn’t 
artificial colouring in their veins. 
Shaped like carefully carved statuettes,
strange tropical flowers with obese petals
that sting my chapped lips with juice 
sour like venom. Minutes ago the pineapple was sitting,
enthroned upon the high stack of textbooks
on your desk. Staunch as an owl, its brown and yellow
pelt rough against my fingertips; its crown of
dark green sword-like leaves stood proudly
facing my inspecting eyes. I walked pass 
your desk and patted it as if it is your pet
and you caught my hands within yours, with
palms soft and wet like the pineapple’s hometown
A raining orchard. Thanks to the knife you’d always kept
under your desk and (I never know whether you are serious
or not) beneath your pillow. The blade you’d much rather press against 
the overgrown bushes on the corridor; your forearm
(we stared at each other through the mirror in the girl’s bathroom
as the running tap water diffused the last trace of pink);
the boys who jeers and the woman who stares. Now
the pineapple wraps around it like a sheath.
A body brightly yellow, throbbing
with the possibility to multiply and grow new lives
upon its flesh; but such promises always die immature.
We pierce the pieces with bamboo chopsticks
taken from a fast food restaurant and watch the rain outside.
The campus is melting & flowing; we feel like two
on an island, surviving on mystical fruits plucked from
unknown trees.

 

Peihe Feng is a student writer from Guangzhou, China. She has published a prose collection in Chinese while her English poems are featured or forthcoming in Thimble, Roanoke Review, manywor(l)ds, and elsewhere. She enjoys gardening on the balcony with her cat.

Caddo Creek

We’ve come past the creek, two boys and
            the indifferent lonely-
                  ness of beasts. 

You move to incept the hunt, redhead
            centipede scuttling 
                  over stones,

ready to chew me unfamiliar.
            We setae soften &
                  morph, eyes locked.

Dusts us pollinate, we primrose moths 
            topping wild onion blooms
                  in the clear,

flecked till flesh was flower, unflowered,
            air wilted to dark crisp
                  softly sewn.

We suck the cups, the bulbs, our sepals
            into windy glistens
                  sweeping at,

whipping into each other’s bodies,
            into a new body,
                  one fleabane

fasciation freaking in dust gust,
            warping together in a 
                  cristate stretch.

 

Fasciation

goldenrod in riverside park flanking the silver maples
crested by mutation by miracle chance

sunglow fluff like cordyceps fungus frosting a wren
you carry with your splayed back
pollen kiefed
& rippling

the body found queer
is the body queer

bloom like an early h. d. poem
distinct you in a crowdy walk
autumn death above you
looking on

 

Seth Copeland (he/him)’s work has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Shore, Yalobusha Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and South Dakota Review. He edits petrichor.

Oak leaves leave me: They fall and I do not see
them until my foot screams out that I have trampled
a beloved thing.

Maple seeds select me; and I feel grateful that one
lands on my tongue to melt. Reminds me of a time before I
knew that I
would be happier trading my eyes for branching roots.

Beeches beseech me to actually Google what they look
like: It would be a lie to say I got into
horticulture and plants to impress crushes, but
here I am—

Birch trunks transform me—Or my attitude: For I always associate them with Minecraft, and Minecraft with Kakashi: Likely one of the first examples of “gender envy” I
 have ever had. My sister and brother
still game, but we mostly do Mario Kart instead: I
hear my sister’s Platinum-ranked  in Valorant, though.

Pine needles needle me: And they shift and and undulate
under my eyelashes, my nails, my very shortened breath: I
look to the future, and pray to some mushroom-
covered thing to bring me the steel-covered ones:
The metal needles with vials of—

T

   rees always remind me of where
   I have to be, and
   please, I think:
   let me stay,
           I want to say
           I, my tongue:
          Look! It’s covered in
          leaves of oak
           leaves leaving—-

 

Ace Sang-Yong Ko is an author exploring trans futures (and may actually be a tomato plant). He writes about anything particularly interesting at the time. Their previous publications include the Quil and Keyboard. He may be found at sangyongko.carrd.co, but that is not entirely guaranteed.

A Letter Addressed Only To You

All these years, I’ve been meaning to buy you a new camera.
I dropped yours outside Apalachicola.
With sweaty palms, it slipped right through.
All these years, I’ve been meaning to box a new one up
with a letter addressed only to you
about how frightened I was hearing the metal
crack against parking lot asphalt
like my little body when you pushed me once
to be better at hitting a ball over a net.

Here’s what I know:
cameras capture what you can see in a moment.
There were beautiful flowers planted at the edge of that forest,
ground orchids and pitcher plants with mouths open for rain.
If this were a poem, I might say that,
because the camera broke,
instead of capturing images of our hike through the forest
I got planted there with the flowers.
I am still there to this very day.

But this is not a poem.
It is a letter addressed only to you.

 

Memorial Tree to My Patrilineal Line

in that Jacaranda lives
several thousand families
of ants and other beings
with their own concepts
of what makes a good day

in the Poinciana’s fruit
unimaginable potential
if only we learn from it
and when the flowers fall
know new ones are to come

at the bending of a palm
I come to you with hope
you won’t quite understand
but I’ll keep coming home
and trying, trying, trying

 

Marina Ramil is a writer and student from Miami, FL with the strangler figs and paper-flower bougainvilleas. They have had work published in Stoneboat, South Florida Poetry Journal, OxMag, Astrolabe, and elsewhere. They believe in liberation for Palestine, DRC, Sudan, and oppressed and occupied peoples everywhere. You can find more information, including their socials, at marinaramil.com.

The Rosa glacies, commonly known as the “ice rose,” can be a beautiful addition to your nocturnal garden. Some say the plant is too difficult for beginners, but we all have to start somewhere, don’t we? However, the propagation is not for the faint of heart, though not for the reasons you might suspect.

To successfully propagate the ice rose, think back to a time in your life when you felt the sting of betrayal. It’s there for all of us, some more than others. But a run-of-the-mill betrayal will not suffice. Nothing so simple as when your significant other dumped you for your best friend, or your rival received more grant funding than you. No, the betrayal must run deeper. It requires the sort of betrayal that turned your heart cold, never to trust again. Like when one of your colleagues in the lab stole your work, claimed it as their own, and used it to climb the academic ladder to become Dean of Biological Sciences … or something equally vile.

It must be the moment that turned your heart cold, because without such a moment, you cannot produce the necessary frozen sliver of your own heart that is the seed for the ice rose.

The fortitude to pull that shard forth is no small thing. Though it makes no biological sense, it can only be regurgitated. You will feel every moment of the sharp crystalline form traveling up your esophagus, rounding the pharynx, and depressing your tongue from the back. The pain will bring you to tears. (If you have the presence of mind, capture those tears in a vial. They contain nutrients vital to the growth of the ice rose. If you fail to preserve them, you can always generate more later.)

But assuming the regurgitation is successful, you will force a perfect shard of ice from your lips. Quickly transport it to the spot you’ve chosen in your garden for your ice rose, and plunge it into the ground, as though you were driving this icy shard of your own heart into that of the person who betrayed you.

If you have your reserved tears, sprinkle a few on the ground. Save the rest to water the plant as it emerges, but only use those tears on the nights of the new moon for the first three months after planting.

If you failed to collect your tears earlier, or if you saved insufficient tears, use memories of other betrayals and disappointments to bring yourself to tears, and harvest those instead. By no means should you use another person’s tears, nor should you use tears shed for other reasons. Tears of betrayal and disappointment are the only things that nourish an ice rose, and the former are far superior to the latter.

And then, wait.

Below the surface, the ice rose will take root. You may be impatient to see the fruits of your pain and labor, but as with all growing things, it takes time. Some believe that the deeper your betrayal, the more quickly the plant will emerge, but the measurement of degrees of betrayal is an imprecise science, so do not be disheartened if you see no sign of your new plant for several months.

Note, too, that the ice rose will not sprout green, but rather as a sickly, twisted, and immensely thorny black bramble. Do not succumb to the urge to consider your propagation a failure when you see what it produces first. The splendor is yet to come.

Many have asked how they might encourage their ice rose to grow more quickly or bloom sooner. Again, patience. If you find yourself in search of something to do while you wait, perhaps plotting revenge against the one who wronged you would be a suitable use of your time. It may not make the plant grow any faster, but it does give you something else to which you might turn your attention.

And then, on a clear night when the moon is full, you may hear a faint tinkling sound emanating from your garden. And there, in all her glory, Rosa glacies, the beautiful frost-rimed petals nearly glowing.

Now, for what to do with the blossoms, you’ll have to come back for part two, “Using Rosa glacies.”

Until then, my budding alternative botanists!

 

Dawn Vogel has written for children, teens, and adults, spanning genres, places, and time periods. More than 100 of her stories and poems have been published by small and large presses. Her specialties include young protagonists, siblings who bicker but love each other in the end, and things in the water that want you dead. She is a member of SFWA and Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her awesome husband (and fellow author), Jeremy Zimmerman, and their cats. Visit her at historythatneverwas.com or on BlueSky @historyneverwas.

Over the barbed wire, under the sweet thorniness of it, around the rootbulb,  strangling the dog rose. Between clematis and snowberry. Twisted with fennel and tree of heaven. Blooming into  morning glory, into knotweed.  Weaving our fingers through our tangled hair. Pulling kinked strands for the nesting birds.

Blooming back into the summer spent hacking back blackberries.  As we grew into machete-swingers, sunkissed, strong. Twisted into vines tough as rope, grooved deep fiber             meshed in with thorns big as cat claws.

Under the best of intentions.  Growing into the  spiked alien-green head of the mock cucumber, blooming into a fuckage of snails. Blooming into the listening well. Blooming into the flank of the culvert. Blooming into luminous distraction. Inextricable from a boy who rappelled out of a locked quarantine third story balcony with a piece of hemp rope to come eat tangerines with you.

Held in a dying grapevine, bloomed with yeast.  Inextricable from a boy who said he could make water into wine give him grapes and six weeks. Who said he would weave a crown of thorns and wear it if you told him to. Our arms cross hatched with scratches for trying

Over hedgerows, under property lines, around distinction. Between profit margins.
Tightening in this unseasonable heat, choked by its own green hunger. Choked by the attempted depiction. Blooming into the purple thrum of nightshade, fruiting into the promise of trouble.          Twisted in the bottom of the milk jug.

Inextricable from the girl who stabbed me in the knee with a plastic fork after I shaved her head,
in the chaos of snow geese lifting off the field, meshed in our hands.  Held in everything I’ve bought and broken.  Sheltered by our own deadwood, sheltered by our own dry brush where rattlesnakes laze.

Under the foundation, around the median, where a feral cat hides her kittens in the oleander. Weaved back to bloom into every kitchen slow dance.  Meshed in fishing wire and horsehair,              dental floss and string. Place held in the chaos of memory, sheltered by obscurity. The rabbit tunneling through the brush.  Someday I will wrestle this into song

 

Elizabeth Wing is a writer and trailworker based in Portland, Oregon. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, The West Marin Review, 7×7, Up North Lit, and numerous other venues. Wing wrote Entanglement under the mentorship of Joan Naviyuk Kane as part of her thesis work, I WOULD NEVER THROW A FIRECRACKER INTO DRY GRASS, BUT – at Reed College.