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 [...]
While we’re teetering on the very edges of our seats gripping our arm rests watching the heated race for the Most Popular Poem Award, I have a few announcements I’d like to make.
House bashed in grays, homespun
surrounding yellows and pinks
on a Kansas prairie appears lonely tonight.
The theater, the lives once lived alive
inside are gone now,
buried in the back dark trail
behind the old outhouse.
Old wood chipper in the back, rustic, worn, no gas to thunder.
Old coal bin open to wind but no one to shovel the coal in.
Pumpkin [...]
Mark Twain on the tundra: At times, that’s how this 1963 classic played to my mind. Farley Mowat’s sense of humor—often self-directed—and the acuity of his social criticism reminded me so much of Twain’s acerbic wit that I found myself reading Mowat but seeing in the text Sam Clemens’ ghost—flowing white hair, white mustache, white [...]
On a warm Virginia day I walked to the Eastern Seaboard Coastline double tracks near our house and came to a small pond lying between the track grade and the woods. A stand of wild irises grew in the water, along with rushes, green bubble-beaded algae, and sedges. It was a small habitat not entirely [...]
Beside serving as the foundation of the world, Turtle surfaces in folk literature as the trickster’s trickster. It may surprise some to learn that Turtle has the smarts necessary to get the best of flimflammers like Jackal and even Anansi, the trickster spider, but then surprise is part of the strategy.
This is the first installment of a five-part post.
Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer. Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves. Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads. Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, [...]
I love stories like this.
The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.
Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could [...]
The sun’s ten fingers came unfurled.
He gathered struts and made a world.
With careful breath the sphere was blown:
a hollow ball of molten stone.
And with the glass-sharp stars in thrall,
he spun the geodesic ball.
The moon stretched out her oyster hand
and on the struts she lifted land.
In mercury streams the valleys bled:
the mountain shook its hoary head.
She [...]
Satan and the snake had watched each other for a long time before either spoke. It was mid-morning—it was always mid-morning—and the breeze was pleasant and warm in the thick tangles of shining dark leaves. The snake, a long purple shadow, was hanging in negligent coils from a branch of the tree hanging with blue-spotted [...]