Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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May/June 2017 • Vol. XXXIX No. 3 • Nature's Nature |

Augury

    Hear the starlings, reader in your dark-red car. The
starlings hear the dwindle. They hear the service station’s blue
pumps rasp,

    the grease trucks filling up behind a neighboring diner,
see every sign raised high on its pole. Read them this way.

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Ryan Patrick Smith
Ryan Patrick Smith holds a BA in English from Transylvania University and MFA in poetry from the University of Missouri–St. Louis. His poetry, runner-up in the 2015 Boston Review Poetry Contest and semifinalist in the 2015 Discovery Poetry Contest, appears or is forthcoming in the Boston Review, Salt Hill, Architrave Press, and elsewhere.

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Escape from Milam Landfill

By Ryan Patrick Smith

    What’s manna, what’s milk. What’s demonic to a mountain, the Illinois trash-mound chronic    with sourness & leak. Nothing fell on you like preservingsnow. Nothing petrified your leftovers. No container evaded breaking.In […]

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