Before the Harvest

 By Lee Marcus

᠅

A tiny wasp finds a red peony

bursting open with sunshine, drinks

until slow and satisfied, moves voluptuously

to the tomato leaf waving nearby

whose yellow flowers have only just appeared.

Soon the fruit will come and more

hungering avians might visit

and you might even see them

if you look up from that glowing screen

and open those unseeing eyes, even

if you have to squint. You might

watch a backwards zipping hummingbird

dance from lavender to honeysuckle

and back again as the sky turns scarlet.

And when the moon widens then

wanes and daylight births again you’ll

remember how you are a part of

all of this, more than anything you

think you’re part of, because unlike

the glass and metal in the palm of your

hand, this is real, a pulsing web

that encompasses us all.

᠅

Lee Marcus is a High School English Teacher from Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in several online publications. When not encouraging young people to engage in academic discussions about poetry and prose or inspiring them to improve their writing skills, he enjoys yoga, running, walking his dog, Chef, and the joys of being a new parent.

Mycorrhiza

By Rebecca Clifford

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Through the crux of the rock,

a thin lace of water seeks the valley floor.

Full of memories and moments,

echoes of laughter—time-worn promises,

it calls to a kettle lake, dark and steeped

in history, geology, a lake a hundred miles

further on.

Rivulets long to kiss the new washed pebbles

of the shore, hungry for home.

Between granite, shale, and limestone,

the quaternary sediment that is the valley,

life whispers and sighs.

Tendrilled and strange, moving through air,

and earth, trees exchange nutrients and water,

from crown to trunk to clutching twaglet, through

soil, pines exchange carbon with the birch,

fungi interpret messages marking the season.

Sky, water, wind, flora, fauna – a pulsing web

encompasses them all. They talk about

the weather.

᠅

Rebecca Clifford's written works have been widely published at home and in international anthologies, blogs and e-zines. She lives rurally, near a watershed, gardens with a backhoe, and plants as many sunflowers as the ground will hold.

The Astronomy of Love

By Nirvana Samsara

᠅

Even between you and me,
this gap that you feel
is a million light years away,
where I can't see,
but I can feel your silence
rippling through the stars.

We drift away,
just like how the universe expands—
we drift apart,
like galaxies pulled by unseen threads,
like time stretching
between two fading Venuses.

Even between you and me,
this gap that you feel
is filled with memories and moments—
echoes of laughter,
time-worn promises,
where everything seemed to last forever,
but now are found nowhere.

We shall meet again
in a multiverse,
where the red string of fate
holds us closer,
and where we live a life
the universe once promised.

᠅

Nirvana Samsara is an emerging poet from India who writes poems for the soul. Her work lives in the spaces between love and longing, life and death, silence and memory. She often blends human emotion with nature, using symbolic imagery drawn from sky, water, light, and the body to speak about the tacenda — the things we left unsaid. @nirvana_samsara_

Egress

 By Alexandra Cipriani

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When we pluck

at piano keys,

linger in the doorway,

picture cobblestones weeping moss,

know that jollity is here

with all the old-time loveliness again.

Do not yield, but take splendor

in hitching breath;

how tears heed paths the same every time,

and when flesh meets ivory in chords of sugar.

The last drop slugs your gullet

as we sever from sticky, honeyed melodies

into air—

in bloom

in tune

with beads of sweat and lightning bugs.

Take no mind of the space.

There is no space.

Even between you and me,

this gap that you feel,

and hear,

and caress

is confetti betwixt those wrinkles.

Do not let sophism be all that you bear.

᠅

Alexandra Cipriani is a Filipina-Italian writer currently based in Colorado with plans to build a career in publishing now that she has graduated from New York University's Summer Publishing Institute. She recently completed her bachelor's degree where she studied English at the University of Colorado Denver, and she continues to work for her institution’s literary magazine, Copper Nickel, as well as the publication October Hill Magazine. She is an emerging writer with work forthcoming in KRNT. @

literarywithlexi

Præterita.

By Madison Julius Cawein

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Low belts of rushes ragged with the blast;
Lagoons of marish reddening with the west;
And o'er the marsh the water-fowl's unrest
While daylight dwindles and the dusk falls fast.
Set in sad walls, all mossy with the past,
An old stone gateway with a crumbling crest;
A garden where death drowses manifest;
And in gaunt yews the shadowy house at last.
Here, like some unseen spirit, silence talks
With echo and the wind in each gray room
Where melancholy slumbers with the rain:
Or, like some gentle ghost, the moonlight walks
In the dim garden, which her smile makes bloom
With all the old-time loveliness again.

᠅

"Præterita." was written by Madison Julius Cawein (1865-1914) and exists in the public domain.