Category: woodland (Issue No. VIII)

A Mental Maze

Rahul Gaur

Through the shadow-less spiky trees,
I watch you walk, the
graveyard of loss weighing you down
Seagulls screech a mirage of
the end of this murky forest
that you managed to nd
the courage to walk through
The leaves sway in regretful melancholy
as the clouds patiently tease you
with the possibility of wreaking havoc in your world any minute
You find yourself ripping your head apart
in order to conjure up the graveyard in front of you,
as that seems like the only option to end this torture in your mind;
but the seagulls sing now and then to give you hope
that the thunderous clouds scream as false

You have to choose now
No longer can you pretend to hide in this forest
and call it taking on a challenge
because the puzzle is complicating itself,
and the sky is burning away
into darkness that will engulf the forest
And I will be lost trying to
separate you from the forest and the darkness in which you’ll be gone forever

Rahul Gaur

EACH TREE, WHERE IT STANDS

Paula Bonnell

Paula Bonnell

The Dappled Forest

In the old stories, one tree looks just like another
and soon, you are hopelessly lost.

You come to a clearing— a cottage— and your panic melts.
You just feel sheepish, relieved.

Smoke, the sweet smell of barbeque, pours from the roof—
maybe they’ll ask you to lunch. The knocker crumbles like sugar.

Naive to think that things are better, just because
we can see the sun. The old ones knew about shadows,

how night is the shadow of Earth, and the absence of light
is the least of what blooms at dusk.

The forest reveals itself in moist fragrance, quiet tones of rust
and green, in stillness the brilliance of daylight dissolves.

Turn and re-enter the uncertain light,
where your lost heart weeps and your spirit delights.

Chuck Madansky

Sun Stained

Kelli Lage

Sun stained moss,
grips the lumberjack’s splendor.
When sunrise stumbles forward
the honeyed earth looks so sweet.
I could bite into the golden ground.
Beneath my fingernails,
dew rests.
My youth mirrored
in the stomping of a school of ants.
Queen Anne’s lace
wraps around me like a nightgown.
A robin’s egg cracks open
and the woodlands rejoice.
Evening slithers in and
sets the horizon ablaze.
Guided home by the light
dancing on the tips of my boots.
I sing prayers
that the moon may melt and
drip into my dreams tonight.

Kelli Lage

Requiem

Clay F. Johnson

And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
— Rimbaud

Moon-eyed I sight-read the sky
Divining the stars like bones,
Tracing patterns of star-clouds
I prophesize tree-spirits rise,
Slow-burning, curling wisps of smoke
That float like faceless ghosts
Ascending into darkness
Toward undiscovered universes

Breathing death into Earth’s
Planetary lungs, the fire-clouds
Consume the owl-light & witch-stones,
Untuning the music of the stars
In fluctuating starlight,
Undoing nightingale night-craft
Whose melodies of silver lucidity
Occults the moonlight

Waking from a winter’s torpor
And dreams of magic-root raskovnik—
Called furzepig-grass, or moon-clover,
Unlocking buried secrets divine—
My garden hedgehog would rise
To hear her nightingale sight-read the sky,
Listening enraptured to the night-bird
Singing to the stars of another world

With blueberries & raspberry jam
I fattened my famished hedgie,
And her sleepy, gnomic life
No longer seemed a mystery,
Yet each night she awoke,
Crept out from the shadow
And with upward-gazing eyes
Counted stars & absorbed the night

Until like a rare night-ower
Picked beneath singing starlight,
I plucked my fattened hedgie
From a golem grasscutter’s blades—
Night’s birdsong became requiems,
My hedgehog garden a grave

When I held her mangled death
I lost touch with reality,
For the moon & stars were captured
In the black of her cold, dead eyes,
And when I placed her into the earth
I buried the starry night sky

Clay F. Johnson

autumnal swing

Melissa Frentsos

Melissa Frentsos