May 1, 2016
The Mind Is Its Own Place
Mated and unmated, starlings swarm the willow with their devotions until the tree roils and sways, wing-beats sounding the torrent through which they swim. Dopamine, paroxetine, an injection of adrenaline […]
May 1, 2016
VII
I never sat around my backyard the night before heading off to Belize to study coral reefs unlike Professor Sara Lewis and I would not have compared firefly sexual […]
May 1, 2016
IV
What can I say? The cannibal Photuris firefly that pounces bites then sucks the blood of the speciel other for ill-tasting chemicals which it uses to protect itself […]
May 1, 2016
Return to Sender
To the topsoil and subsoil: returned. To humus and blistered rock: returned. To the kingdom of the masked chafer beetle, the nematode and the root maggot: returned. To the darkness […]
May 1, 2016
Letter to a Cockroach, Now Dead and Mixed into a Bar of Chocolate
Regulations allow for, on average, sixty insect fragments per hundred grams of chocolate in America. You are pulverized. The thorax, the head, the legs that no longer twitch. Invisible and […]
May 1, 2016
Introduction: Nature’s Nature
We are pleased to offer this second annual installment of “Nature’s Nature,” a suite of poems and one lyric essay gathered around the subject or location of the “natural.” I […]
May 1, 2016
Plasticity
It’s easier, now, for a man stranded on an island to place a message in a bottle and have it carried away on the backs of the waves. Before, it […]
May 1, 2016
Séance
The buzzard’s broad investigation ripples shadow across scrub, sketching the roots of a thermal. The usual séance. Hawks on the ground. Sphagnum and peat under a bent branch. Icicles fall […]
May 1, 2016
V
The predator Photuris firefly sometimes stages aerial assaults, picking out other species by their flashes and swooping down to attack and other times sits on a blade of grass, responding […]
May 1, 2016
VI
Like Professor Sara Lewis I view the meadow as a stage for passion and yearning courtship duets and competitions for affection cruel deception and gruesome death Like the Professor fluent […]
May 1, 2016
Prehistoric
Of the time before I could speak, I cannot speak. I was prehistoric, doing the dinosaur lurch Across my crib. The world was there, worlding away, and I was in […]
May 1, 2016
On the Nature of Things
Created, all of it, from the tiniest of particles—all of it from all, for nothing can come from nothing at all, and therefore cannot be removed from all— not fins […]