by Laura Ross

As kids, we built shelters from blankets
and lit the soft alcoves with a nightlight—
the kind you buy at a Caribbean market,
made of clamshells and plastic coral.
Even on rainy days, in our new house
the carpet was spring green. The seasons
swapped out in a vase on our father’s grave—
lilies, sunflowers, chrysanthemums.
Then it snowed, and we could see everything
was a landform—foreground, background,
a panorama, voluminous and disorienting.
White shards pieced between matte trunks
of trees whose empty branches filled with stars.
The new landscape—slippery, bitter, curious.
It mounded to the tops of our boots and numbed
our fingers. Wrapped in a thin sweater
and leaning out of the door, our mother worried
while we, in stoic awe, surveyed the transformation—
the heaped backyard, the white draped woodpile,
snowflakes that blew in like a clinging moss.
Bundled up for the reckoning, nothing came back
to us in echoes. Even the shadows had changed.
No longer earthbound, they had risen
in translucent blue to the surface of the snow.
We saw them everywhere—a sharp delineation
between what had fallen and what had not.

by Laura Ross

Yellow, a brittle current,
bluster-bound and having had enough,
like you and me—
midair, but wingless,
skittering into crevices, patterns
of wind, gullies pooled and fermenting.
Between us,
the dust up,
the blow back,
the raking ache
of clearing out & settling into smoke.
Did you breathe it in? What was gold

already sifted from our histories,
shaken out in flakes that disguised
the road home.
Knee deep in drifts of it,

I wasn’t anticipating the onslaught.
Where were the satellites, barometers,
forecasters of surge and intensity?

The fall of falling,
one of us might have
penciled in the name for this season
on a weather graph or timeline
where even the light left early
and shared the color of letting go.

by Alison Luterman

My cousin asks if I can describe this moment,
the heaviness of it, like sitting outside
the operating room while someone you love
is in surgery and you’re on those awful plastic chairs
eating flaming Doritos from the vending machine
which is the only thing that seems appealing to you, dinner-wise,
waiting for the moment when the doctor will come out
in her scrubs and face-mask, which she’ll pull down
to tell you whether your beloved will live or not. That’s how it feels
as the hours tick by, and everyone I care about
is texting me with the same cold lump of dread in their throat
asking if I’m okay, telling me how scared they are.
I suppose in that way this is a moment of unity,
the fact that we are all waiting in the same
hospital corridor, for the same patient, who is on life support,
and we’re asking each other, Will he wake up?
Will she be herself? And we’re taking turns holding vigil,
as families do, and bringing each other coffee
from the cafeteria, and some of us think she’s gonna make it
while others are already planning what they’ll wear to the funeral,
which is also what happens at times like these,
and I tell my cousin I don’t think I can describe this moment,
heavier than plutonium, but on the other hand,
in the grand scheme of things, I mean the whole sweep
of human history, a soap bubble, because empires
are always rising and falling, and whole civilizations
die, they do, they get wiped out, this happens
all the time, it’s just a shock when it happens to your civilization,
your country, when it’s someone from your family on the respirator,
and I don’t ask her how she’s sleeping, or what she thinks about
when she wakes at three in the morning,
cause she’s got two daughters, and that’s the thing,
it’s not just us older people, forget about us, we had our day
and we burned right through it, gasoline, fast food,
cheap clothing, but right now I’m talking about the babies,
and not just the human ones, but also the turtles and owls
and white tigers, the Redwoods, the ozone layer,
the icebergs for the love of God—every single
blessed being on the face of this earth
is holding its breath in this moment,
and if you’re asking, can I describe that, Cousin,
then I’ve gotta say no, no one could describe it
we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.

by Kaylee Lowe

I swing my leg over the bunk bed I share with my brother Jamie.
I sleep on the top- my nose touches the popcorn ceiling.

I’m eight years old, and our house burnt down last month.
Now we live in a trailer that mom hates. But I like the neighbor boys.

I shove Jamie, “Danny and Chris are probably already at the creek!
I’m leaving without you!” I call over my back as the screen door slams.

I stumble through the tree line, mud flaked across my
sun-tanned face. I see Danny, blonde hair streaked with soil.

Chris is knee-deep in creek water smacking frogs with stones.
He once caught a Copperhead with his bare hands and killed it.

Weeds cling to our skinny frames as we catch tadpoles,
and fireflies go down in the polluted grey and purple sky

I trudge home with the stars, empty my pockets of worms and rocks. When I climb the metal steps of
the camper, the door swings open.

“Where the living hell have you been?” my mother screeches,
“And why are you covered in shit?” I shrink in her shadow.

I only get two slaps with the spoon. Our Rottweiler tries
to nudge his head between us and gets a slap of his own.

“Go hose yourself off and take the damn dog with you.” As I scrub
my leg, a pill bug escapes my shorts. I follow him into the darkness.