This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah. Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I [...]
How ugly you all are,
An all-over ugly!
Iris bulbs unearthed and scythed
Of top leaves,
I lay your twisted, tuberous
Bodies across a gutted paper sack
And take a moment to grimace
At your grotesquery.
Dirt clings to your stringy reaching roots.
Not even warm water and bleach
Can pretty the rough hide of your skin.
Poor horrid hags!
But wait—don’t droop,
Shrivel dry in shame.
For I [...]
Make
like a tree* and
grow, bloom and bear fruit,
give shade, give shelter, sow seed,
weather storms, dig deep,
breathe deeper.
Be useful
in your
death:
frame
well,
burn
bright,
enrich
the soil,
and,
mulch
made,
resurrect
a tree.
____________________________________________________________________________
*This is, of course, a variation on the common adage to “make like a tree and branch out,” and the less common adage, used primarily among canines (the dogs, not the teeth), “make like a [...]
While WIZ loves poetry and heartily encourages poets to continue sending their nature-romancing verse, it’s perhaps time to follow nature’s own example of protean morphologies and bring more rhetorical diversity to the site. Hence, WIZ is issuing a call for short, creative non-fiction and fiction pieces. If you have a nature-oriented essay or field notes [...]
Coming soon to a mailbox (or computer) near you: Dialogue’s environmental issue. Several Wilderness Interface Zone contributors are included therein–congratulations, friends! Frequent WIZ contributor Steven Peck guest edited this issue.
Table of contents:
Page Author Title
Mary Toscano Front Cover
Inside Cover, Title Page
v Edwin Firmage, Jr. Letters
1 Steven L. Peck Why [...]
Warming rays over frost kissed flowers
Bids cold love depart into a smiling sun,
Enticed thereby to air and cloudy bowers
Where icy winds and snow have lately run.
An earth in step with brimming clouds above
Renews a onetime halted suitor’s dance,
Accepting rain’s entreating poet’s love,
Penned once again in arcing rainbow’s glance.
Cold voices from this blanket world rise up
To [...]
Palm hands
applaud the wind
that brings
lost cloud ships
slowing
to toss extra weight overboard
Rocky hills
blush green from
unexpected rain
Shy poppies
bloom
in spite of themselves.
_________________________________________________________________
To read Judith’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here, here, and here.
*contest entry*
A robin arrived early spring with
snow on his breast and the
moon in his eyes heavier
than the moon in the sky.
He took his rest on my
gaunt apple tree and
the robin’s winter melody
began to haunt me, he
sang every day for twelve
days and on each day
an apple grew. I watched
him from the window.
The moon in my eyes
escaped with [...]
“I’ve always pictured Cedar Hills as a daffodil city. They’re beautiful and the deer won’t eat them.”
“He’s laughing.”
“Sorry. It’s just such a good quote.”
“I’ll look for it in the paper.”
An hour later the reporter stops short of his car.
Behold
Three night-lit deer on the lawn,
Across the street three more in the [...]
April is the lovers’ month. Though some
would say June, with cancer’s sun
on the full-blown lips of Tudor
and Lancaster—I never (after
all) could think love and war the same.
The swelling earth, the dusting rain
waking the buds of branches. Brave
Green—that bright, defiant color
of the lovers’ month.
And secrets in the woods; I come
here often, whispering the names
I know. I [...]