Call for submissions: WIZ’s 2015 LONNOL Celebration

Love of Nature Nature of Love Month–it’s on!

Valentine’s Day is over, but the good ship LONNOL is still available for booking. Perhaps you yet have tokens of affection you would like to ship out. If they have even the slightest touch of nature about them, we’re longing to publish them. Please search your files for poems, short fiction, short essays, mp3s of readings of your work or of other work that’s in public domain, your original artwork, etc. and share them with us and our readership. Less than two weeks remains in February, but if need requires, we will keep things afloat through March.

Along with submissions from our readers, we’ll have a fond feelings haiku chain, to be initiated soon.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday. We’ll be five years old. To celebrate, we’ll be offering one or more of WIZ’s old movie giveaways. Giving our readers presents on our birthday is something we really enjoy doing. To “win” an old movie, all you’ll have to do is read each movie’s review and comment in the comment section. WIZ will contact you with further instructions about how to receive your free DVD.

In the Northeast, winter has been ridiculous harsh and relentless. Here in the Four Corners region, we seem to be trembling on the brink of an early spring. What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Full steam ahead.

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Memories of a Fallen Branch by Chris Peck

Innocence splintered when I watched the tree branch fall.
Sleeping in tight corners,
the wind, the rain, the mourning trees
all spoke my name as they cried out.

But in those sounds €”the creaking, the whining and pounding,
the whistling of the wind between leaves and branches €”

There was clarity, the possibility of death
so that we may all sing laments neither for us, nor for our souls,
but for the nature which, through language, we have left.

And I left it, staying within safety, if there was any to be had,
understanding the difference I, a product of selection, shared.

But in passing, in seeing the destruction and its forms,
I returned to the woods, to the breath of what we know and saw
fear in my own eyes,
in the frailty of nature, and of myself, to a birth of civility.

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Chris A. Peck, currently resides in Provo, Utah with his wife and two boys. He is attending Utah Valley University working towards a degree in English education and philosophy after a long failed stint in the sciences. He is an avid cyclist and loves the outdoors. He has recently published in Warp and Weave as well as with the Utah Valley University Philosophy Conference.

Photo is in the public domain.

My Latest Trip to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens by Theric Jepson

My Latest Trip to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens

was accomplished with more than the usual number of boys in tow.
Four in fact. Three mine  
and a friend.

To see the metasequoia and false rocks €”and mating newts
(it’s that time of year)
spotted first and immediately by my three-year-old
who can’t see a dirty sock on the floor no matter how I point
but a perfectly still newt under a foot of pond water
is unmistakable to his bright eyes.

He’s wearing a Cars cap over his long blond hair and his
favorite part of this trip seems to be the railroad-tie stairs.

The roses in their garden are dormant in February
But somewhere in the Gardens is my love
(with three other boys)
And I am hers.

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Now that his wife has bought a membership to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, Theric Jepson should be able to visit them more often. He is the author of the novel Byuck.

Photo “Sequoia géant” courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Sky’s an Ocean, As All Eagles Know by Mark Penny

The sky’s an ocean, as all eagles know
Who plumb the splendour nest to keel,
A craze of very ships in fleets that flow
On voyages forbidden whale and seal.
Its currents race, chained to the planet’s turn,
Churned by the jilted passion of the sun,
Exacting fervor from the veil-eyed fern
Mured in a pillared abbey like a nun.
Fleet immigrants, protesting falling leaves
And roofless perches, clog the trackless ways,
Pursuing passion while the bosom heaves
Of all creation in its fit of days.
The sky’s an ocean, leaping shore to shore.
So says the urchin on the ocean floor.

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For recent work by Mark and additional links, go here.

Photo “Birds in Flight” via Wikimedia Commons.