by Patricia Karamesines
Mountains and evening: aspen leaves,
Pale as moth wings,
Reclaiming the wood.
The car clove spring.
A flock of yellow petals, heads hung—
I wanted to stop,
But seeing you, said nothing.
You were not much in your face,
Your words, better remembering
Some breathtaken childhood
On this exalted road.
At the peaks, winds ground
Clouds to dust
In parching cold.
We rode through green flush below,
Windows pleasantly rolled down. Continue reading “Evening Drive”
First item of business: Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature-themed prose: creative nonfiction or environmental nonfiction, eco-criticism, interviews, hybrid literary forms, and short fiction, including novel excepts, that reflect on humankind’s relationship to the natural world, wherever writers engage it.
We’re especially interested in writing that demonstrates the need for and effects of what I call €œgreen language €–rhetorical prowess that taps into the fertile realm of language’s most vital energies. One of WIZ’s foremost goals is to advocate for better behavior in the teeming yet at-risk environment of human language.
So, got nature in your prose? Please consider sending it to Wilderness Interface Zone. Before you submit your writing, please read our About and Submissions pages.
Item two: Poets, please continue sending your poetry. WIZ loves poetry! Please send your nature-inspired poems to Jonathon at WIZpoetryeditor@motleyvision.org.
Item the third: For the past three years, starting on or around the spring equinox, WIZ has launched its Spring Poetry Runoff, an annual, themed poetry competition celebrating spring’s highly anticipated arrival. Each year, the influx of vernal verse has graced WIZ with a garden of poesy. It’s been one of my favorite times of the WIZ year.
This year, Jonathon and I have chosen not to run the Runoff. We’ll bring it back in 2014 in new and improved form. However, we will host an informal spring fling featuring poetry and prose that revels in the arrival of warmer and brighter days, the annual emergence of life, and the onset of spring migrations that change life’s scenery.
Spring rises before the sun on March 20. Feel free to add a ribbon to WIZ’s literary maypole. Even if your poem, essay, short story or novel excerpt merely mentions spring and nature, please consider submitting it to the festivities.
(Edited 3/12/2013 at 12:10 p.m.)
Last year, spring in the Four Corners region of the desert Southwest was comfortably cool; this year, mixed business temperature-wise, but brittle-boned, tinder dry. When the summer rainmakers come, they’ll find plenty of fodder to feed their range fires. So far, mosquitoes have been rare and the black gnats–“flying teeth,” as a friend once called them–pretty thinly spread, causing little trouble. The hummingbirds and orioles that frequent our feeders drain the cups twice a day, which is pretty serious sugar water quaffing for May–especially with those thread-like tongues that the hummingbirds have to work with. So far this spring, I’ve removed one hummingbird and one fence swift from the house. Because of dry weather, the globe mallow–O, ye of the lovely, sherbert-orange blossoms!–is blooming a bit closer to the ground than it has during previous springs. The invasive alfalfa that over the last five years had built quite a stronghold in our yard is struggling everywhere except in my garden area where I water the peach trees (which, by the way, surrendered all hope of fruit to a week’s worth of chill o’ the night frosts … except for one tree, which put out two flowers two or three weeks after the rest). The claret cup cacti is blooming out. Engleman’s hedgehogs are beginning to flash pink frills. Prickly pear buds have sprouted like toes on the wide green pads of those be-spined plants. The creek in Crossfire Canyon has gone thin and muddy, then, in places, flaky or sandy and dry-stoned. The snowmelt on the Abajos to the north seemed to have skipped its trip south to the San Juan River via Crossfire Canyon and cascaded straight up into the air. The beavers remain the water barons in the canyon, gathering together the springs at their canyon bottom outlets with mud and vegetable dams to hold constant the water levels of their modest ponds. The last time I entered the canyon, about 30 black Angus cows and calves were strung out along the beaverworks, which provides the only significant, native water for miles.
Unlike the melt-off from the Blues, WIZ’s Runoff has been pretty impressive. But like all runoffs, it has tapered off. The last poems have posted and deliberations to choose which of the 31 eligible entries might win the Spring Poetry Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award and the Admin Award are about to begin. Voting for the Most Popular Poem will be conducted by public poll beginning Monday, May 28 or Tuesday, May 29. Poets, please come back and vote, and invite your friends and family members to come vote, too. Winners of both awards will be announced on or around .
Thank you so much, writers, for participating so well. Poets, readers, and commenters who have already put so much time into the Runoff €”prepare yourselves to vote, starting next week. Each voter will be able to vote for his or her three favorite poems! Please, participants–enter three choices for your favorite poems. It’s more sporting than just voting for your single favorite poem, and it provides other poets feedback for their hard-wrought words.
Again, good work, participants, and thank you, readers, for sticking with us and reading all the entries. There were many delightful surprises in this year’s offerings–a lot of poetry I’ve been proud WIZ hosted. Remember: Choices for this year’s prizes are Fire in the Pasture, an anthology of contemporary Mormon poetry, edited by Peculiar Pages, and the novel The Scholar of Moab, by Steven L. Peck and published by Torrey House Press. Which, by the way, opened up to accept submissions on April 25.
It’s been a vibrant spring so far, thanks to all your flowers of speech. (Does anybody besides me remember that phrase, “flowers of speech”?)
Wire up my mind to
Spring
Breaks free
The seeds are roasting on my chest
I can only think
Of cliffs
To jump
That window
Sunny
Outside
I blame the birds for
My sympathy to god
God must be larks
Feeding swans
Maps taking shape
Lame boys
Like me
Still having hopes
When light gets
Dark and we get scared
Flee Flee Flee
Free
Words
Birds
Mean kids playing free
Out there
In the park
And me here wanting to grab what I can’t grab
Because I keep my hands on the keyboard
Instead of plugging them into the wet ground
And now
I’m quitting
Spring is bringing back the thrill
I mean
Jump off
Self-pity is leaning towards the edge
And embrace the risk
To be
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ãngel was born in Barakaldo, Basque Country, northeastern Spain around 1976. Currently, he is a professor of English at the University of the Basque Country where he has been teaching literature, poetry and history as well. Some of his short stories have been published in Deia newspaper and some other anthologies after being winners of contest such as Villa de Gordexola, Ciudad de Eibar or Ortzadar–all of them in the Basque Country. In the last few years all his creative efforts have been focused on his dissertation on Phyllis Barber’s work and some other scholarly stuff but he still got some time to publish a short story in a Chilean literary magazine and poetry in WIZ. All his poems in Spanish remain unpublished, waiting for the day Ãngel feels confident enough to find an outlet for them.
*Competition entry*
Wilderness Interface Zone 