Making Emancipation

write a poem paint a mountain and let it go to the garbage. can I? can you?

forget about creation let the moment go.

Let it go, my son sings. Let it go!

I sing too, the best refrain. we fling our arms in the air, release skyhigh. I don't care what they're going to say! the sparkly blue dress princess sings.

Let it go! to the garbage can! the recycling bin! a drawer! Let it go! no frame or matboard! not belonging somewhere to someone!

I wrote a poem about a gardener. Let it go! Is it finished? I ask.

If you think so, they say. Let it go! I do. not. a small poem, nice and that is all. Let it go!

do I get out more paper? Let it go! do I clean my brush and start again? this long walk, stepped on paper and canvas Let it go! fling them trail side, lighten the load, get to a going.

what will be left when we arrive?

Emily Kurn Tallman

Regeneration

I tip the plastic box into one of the hollowed-out trunks, the ash mixing with loam and lichen, bits of bone like teeth chattering into the wood.

I put her inside the tree as my father once put me inside of her, she divined and divided my cells, grew me a tongue, a skull, two hands with which I carry her now in weightless flecks of stone and cinder. After I came out of her, she held my naked body against hers, she watched my grey eyes open and close, she lifted me up into the air to feel what it was like to hold a new life in her own two hands.

Carey Taylor

Closing Time

I wipe the sticky table with a gray-white rag, hawk-eye the place for jacked-up voices, guy who never smiles, pistol on the hip, the not-marriedto-each-other couple in the dark corner. Are you feeling it? This edgy world. The fuck it let’s live for the moment world .

And who can blame us? The news above the shuffleboard is on a constant loop of disaster: hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, corruption, mass shootings, extinctions, war—and no one with the balls to power it off.

So I make a new drink to usher in summer. I want three months of effervescence—a sparkling cocktail that goes down easy.

I mix Prosecco, elderflower liqueur, splash of club soda, drop in three ice cubes, a twist of orange peel. I list it on the booze-board as the summer special: St. Germaine Spritz.

I want to tip my glass to France, or Florida and those sunlit days of tolerable heat.

I want to toast a cool breeze from some jade-green ocean, half-empty bottle of bourbon slow-loping in my mouth, flicker of fly in the fruit-filled trees, feather of the great blue heron.

Thomas A. Thomas