Rabbit and Rose

beaded rabbit

Visitation

or: The Ancestors Finally Reject Our Childish Pleas for Clemency

In the end, our failure to raise a visitation
became intolerable. With every grotto sealed-

long abandoned in the milky tracks
of goat-herding children and their minion
trudging the bleached yellow hillside-

we rummaged the blurred, indolent shallows
at the furthest lip of the land. Face down in the muddle,
fingers snaking through the confused bottom weeds,
we twisted a root and delivered it from the chill, defiant muck. Then raised our head to the cracking blow of a daylight
that refused to diminish its sum for our sake.

Fever-blind, we sped headlong to periphery,
haphazard shards of hope
whirling through our dazed, mute esophagus,
summoning the waters of earth
to the stinging white brine of our misbegotten thirst,
surging tiny pathetic waves abreast Gibraltar' atoms
as if that stony ecstasy of silent rock might erode
and bare its fugitive fossil,
which might dare speak
given that words might have bones,
sovereign locomotion, power of direction-

headlong into blank astringent fact,
the tincture we tasted by night-

where last we went together
mining ice for fossil memory,
and watched its rime burn away
beneath dawn-rise,
in whose heat we hid the weeping sun
revolving in our belly,
awaiting birth into a sky,
any sky-
any sky at all.

Stephanie JT Russell


contents of issue 1

A Post-Colonial Irony
Tiffany Midge

The Diversity of Birds at Fort Gibson Lake, Oklahoma
Toni McNeilly

Mañanita
Nicole Henares

Visitation
Stephanie JT Russell

Jump
Trace A. DeMeyer

Legend of the ancient song bird
devorah major

The Sap is Rising
Abena Songbird

Letting Down the Stories
Kimbeerly L. Becker


Stephanie JT Russell Biography

Stephanie JT Russell is a poet, photographer, and author. Her most recent books, The Zen of Small Things, and One Flash of Lightning: A Samurai Path for Living the Moment , can be found at a favorite bookstore or ordreed through Andrews McMeel Publishing and any local bookstore.


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