At the end of 2024, I was on a surf trip in Costa Rica. Seeking peace and quiet from the hustle and bustle of the hectic surfing village, I took my camera into the dense rainforest on the slopes near the village. I was particularly fascinated by the shimmering vegetation in the eternal shade of the jungle.
Month: February 2025
The Reason the U.S. No Longer Exists
by T. G. Metcalf The teacher, a woman in her early forties, was seated at a table in her study. The students were scattered within a one-hundred-mile radius of where she sat. The year was 2137. The subject was United States History. “Looking back at it from our perspective now, one hundred years later,” she said, “the breaking apart of […]
A Suite of Sprawling Cattails Occupy a Suburban Woodland’s Edge
Spaces between the built and natural environment host transient goers. Herbaceous materials gently waver, offering fluffed seedy packets.Delicious debris diffuses along the paved-unpaved zone.Woodland soundscapes rapidly grow quiet. Suites of volant wildlife emerge.
Feeding Dynamics Across the Land-Sea Interface
by Josh Kesling Autumnal wrack lines linearly diffuse across beachscapes, demarcating the relationships between land and sea. Peppered with copper browns and aged maroons, not to forget the faded plums, these lines sprawl. They push through glassy pasts with unknown futures. Leaf litter has a defined fate, and it settles throughout brine-buttered interstices and micro valleys. Seaward deposits calculatedly arrive […]
Stratigraphy
This poem is formatted in a shape resembling a rock formation. It is intended to be read first as in standard English, left to right, top to bottom. Then read again bottom to top, and right to left, as a geologist would read strata. gods the of valley monumental a sustaining I.V. an from drips like justified center solo stacked […]
At the Window
I pray to the Invisible: Please protect usfrom blizzard and hail, from blaze and swelter,from flying insects that sting and swarm,from pestilence and sulfurous miasma,and from the crowded bluster and welter. But let us see the light,through your architectured frame,of sun, of stars, of moon, of clouds,of dappled leaves, of shimmering creek,and all your gentle creatures without names. And give […]
Any Time Spent
Any time spentNot making babies.Or not making money. Any time spentNot tilling the soil.Or not dancing the floor. Any time spentNot watching the sunset.Or watching the sunset. Any time spentNot being outraged.Or being outraged. Any time spentBeing forced to choose.Or regretting your choice. Any time spentHaving no choice.Or lamenting your fate. Any time spentGoing on living.Or giving up.
Carbon Footprints of Unwanted Children
I can’t put my finger on it, when did itchange? I would ride my bike miles fromhome, even at night and in rain. No oneworried, I would just roam. It ended, maybe,with a spoonful of cereal and a half gallon offear, the milk carton asking, feral and wild:“Have you, have you, seen this child?” When did having children become animposition? […]
Tunneling
by Steven Ring I’ve been living with the ants for six weeks. Shrinking was awful, but I’m starting to feel better. Now, every day is the same. We wake together in an almond-shaped cavern and sing the Queen’s song of beginnings – a thrumming tune that sounds like building rain. The melody stretches through the stale air. It’s dark. I […]