WRITING ARCHIVE

Reminded | One by Jacar Press

Each time I ask the donkeys
to shift to the side, so I can move between their bodies,
between their breathing flanks and bony hocks,

they reach up urgent mouths and exhale
a warm equine language, a wiffle of breath in my ear,
eyes dark, resting a jaw on my shoulder.

I have no hold on spirit, or what feels like belonging
to something larger than ourselves—but believe it is here
in moments like this.

What are we after all, but breath?
I lean into their gray sides and ask the donkeys to lift their hooves,
and clean the packed soil from the soles of each, one by one.

Donkey Time | Earthshine Poetry Journal

It is true that long gray ears
and slow hitches of sound
are a donkey’s trademark.
Some say they are stubborn,
obstinate, stolid. If you ask me,
this is more of their singular grace.
Donkeys are everything lucid and liquid
in their own dark-eyed meter of time.

I can be churning with things to do,
worries for the day and my own regrets:
Then the donkeys look at me
as if to say slow down.
One look and they have me
wanting to buckle my knees
to spend the day in the loose hay chewing
something other than what needs to be done.

Some things are reliable in life.
Wind will change.
Fog scatters in the sun.
Stars are still there in the daytime.
In their own time, donkeys
will fold their knees
to lie down and rest.

Winter Storm | Issue #11 humanaobscura

When the cows lie down
birds go deep in the trees
silence settles around us

we turn to watch
clouds of our breath
below mackerel skies

ahead of bruised gray
boundaries at the horizon
nothing like a dove’s breast

geese flying low
watch the land
gather itself

Early Gathering of Water Emerge Literary Journal

If you were clay, you could sleep right here between the roots of the trees
at the top of the hill, where the turtles come to lay their eggs.
You could be vessels holding water. You could hold the banks of the streams.
 
If you were an apple tree, wild on the hill,
you could hang your last fermenting bodies
high in the cold air for anyone to dine on, to spread your seed.
 
If you were a stream, you could laugh over all the rocks
and bubble around the corners – create a home for salamander,
trout, and caddis fly. You could quench a multitude of thirsts.
 
If you were a coyote, you could crisscross the junctions
of trails and mark them with your pithy scat full of beetles, berry seed and apple skins.
You could yip in the night with your family and run across pine needled forests.
 
If you were a porcupine, you could crawl into a hollow tree
for the winter, with a bountiful cairn of dung at the door, unconcerned with the look. On warm
days, you could trough your belly out and back through the snow, with your waddling way and
tail swag. When needed, you could fan your quills with a rattle and show how strong you are.
 
If you were a hill, ah, if you were a hill, you could cup the blue-line stream in its early gathering
of water as it begins braiding its way to the bay and ocean. You could hold the chill morning
mist between your shoulders and call this home.

What Do Stones Remember? Emerge Literary Journal

It was here, beneath the rock pile
just below the barn, where the pasture
meets the red maple woods—

Coyotes pulled out the chicken carcass,
spreading the hen’s golden feathers
into a trembling fan across the last corner of green pasture,
like a gift on an altar no one was visiting.

It makes me wonder if coyotes
also found my children when I wasn’t watching—
below the lichen covered stones
and the roots of the oak tree.

Too early, their heart beats had stopped,
and my body did what women have always done,
blood to blood, a dissolving of life and self.

My husband and I buried them,
twice, under the old tree where the deer
path goes into the woods
and great horned owls call;
a temple where loss rattles itself
into the shape of wind over the fields.

The gray rocks have a thin coating of first snow.
I imagine the stones must remember the glacier
that left them here.

Letter to Autumn Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY

I am not ready
for the last bumble bees
to curl into silence
while the geese fly
the sky lonely of their wingbeats
I am not ready for you
to lean your hips into the last
length of sunshine as you leave
I am not ready
to have mist
turn to rime frost on the trees
as if you are saying
“Look, who is coming”
you keep telling
my bones the truth
colder by the day
the columns of needle ice
glass flowers bloom
through the dark soil
turn time forward each day
even when I tell myself
I will sometime recall
the bell-like call of winter solstice
how silence can feel
like a reprieve
how night tastes of moonlight
when it is cold
that I will remember
that we forget until we remember
the shortest day is
the beginning of longer days

With the Rain | humana obscura Issue #10

When the wet tongue of water unfurls,
dust rises peppery from the eager ground,
the musk of dirt and roses give themselves to our nostrils.
With the rain, we can smell the shape of what is here.

Old Friends Phoebe Literature* Old Friends was a finalist in Phoebe Literature’s 2024 nonfiction contest

He was there all night in his gray donkey self, standing beside the covered body of his friend while the snow fell. Coyotes yipped from the hills but stayed back. Deer came through, and shied away, leaving only their startle tracks in the snow. Each must have smelled the warmth of new death on the winter winds. 

In the morning, the still body of the horse was circled by snowflakes and small donkey hoofprints. With the earliest light, the donkey began to bray. He brayed throughout the morning—turning the morning inside out with his calls—and then he kept going as if he could never stop, building out the day with an aching sound. 

While the donkey and I wait for the old horse to be buried in a deep hole beside the apple tree, the donkey’s sound gives shape to what I am feeling; a long hollow shape that carries the resonance of loss on the wind. 

I cannot know what the donkey is truly feeling, but it would be my human failing to say that his braying has no emotion, no missing, no long friendship lost. I do not have a word for this—when an old donkey stands all night in the snow beside the dead body of his horse friend—except perhaps to look to the origin of the word bray from the Old French of braire: “to cry.” Silent now, we stand shoulder to shoulder as the earth fills in the hole.

Old Horse River Teeth’s Beautiful Things

His bones have a hold on the earth, with sinew and muscle built from the hills, corded and bunched over his shoulders and haunches. Along the edges of bramble rose and burdocks, he flushed wild turkeys into flight in front of him, like a ship scattering schools of fish before its bow. Gleams of deer, wide-eyed beneath the apple tree, would freeze in place—hocks cocked to run, green apples paused in their mouths—cupping our sound in their ears as we clattered by, all hooves and thunder over the ground.

Now, I look in his amber eye, I tell him it is ok, and say thank you, and say it is ok again. He looks back, steady in my eyes, without blinking, and then he falls as if gunshot, no buckling of legs, he just falls sideways, complete, to the snowy ground. The ground gives with a soft tremor. The veterinarian listens for breath and heart sounds. The thumping cadence is absent now, his old bones are finally resting. I kneel, forehead to forehead.

Letting the Garden Be | The Journal of Wild Culture

“Once there was a sagging shelf of books that told me the perfect way to make soil. They told me a scientific process so specific it gave me an ache and internal paralysis with the worry of doing it wrong. The books were so certain.

In the garden when I was working in the rain the books got wet and muddy and torn. To protect them I left them on the shelf. One might say I let go, and the garden and I were better for it. READ MORE

 Hair Thief: Kleptotrichy* Seneca Park Zoo* Hair Thief was a finalist in the 2023 Seneca Park Zoo Nature Poetry Contest for emerging poets.

The hillside cupped my back 
with warm grass and stillness, 
lulled me with rock dreams and rooted self
until the quiet took me gently in 
the palms of sleep.

A jab at my head startled me.
We are not used to birds standing on our faces, 
or having them pull out our mammal hair, roots and all. 
I tried to understand the narrow toes
standing on my forehead 
impossibly gripping my skin, 
the beak reaching brazenly for another hair.

As my breath burst loose 
the bird flew up with strands of hair 
floating between wing beats, 
ethereal in the backlit sun and my disbelief.
This hair theft, this kleptotrichy,
continued and my nap turned 
upside down 

to watch the bird’s breast 
rise on my forehead, on tip-toe with each tug, 
launching with feathered wing 
to line a nest and return, oh surprise—and return—
despite my laughter, my breaths.

I would share my gray hairs now
to have such a moment again, 
to have such good thievery, 
if only as a reminder of what courage
can embody. What valor is – 
to steal hair from a sleeping mammal.

*Kleptotrichy: a bird stealing mammal hair

Nature-Based Therapies | Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Rehabilitation
A comprehensive review of currently available scientific information relating to complementary and alternative therapies and rehabilitation. 1st Edition, Author: Eric Leskowitz

Refer to Chapter 21 for “Nature-Based Therapies” by Rebecca Reynolds Weil.