As usual, Em Spider had skipped breakfast in favor of half a pot of coffee and five hours of remote work. “QA for a streaming media platform, blah blah, who cares,” Em would say if you asked, with a practiced laugh just uncomfortable enough to encourage a change of subject. Around 2 pm, abdomen rumbling, Em scurried down to the mini-mart located in the lobby of the adjacent apartment building and grabbed a couple of microwave flies — flavorless pill-shaped factory-farmed frozen bugs, filled with a vaguely cheese-like food product. After the hurried meal and a couple more hours of […]
Journal - Nature - Poetry
The mountain watched us
We returned to the thrice-burned wood, shoulder of Klickitat once dense green, now spiked with ghost trees. Close to downed trunks ash white and charred black we turned soil, pulled grass, and set in live starts of oceanspray / ironwood and wooly sunflower. Around the new plantings we built flimsy graze-guards of slender limbs, snapped from the desiccated bodies. The October sun was strong and gold. The earth in our fingers was soft and dark. A raven flew over and shared its deep, purred croak. Young firs waited, waist-high, green, patient in grassy fields pierced by their forebearers’ wooden bones. […]