Out of the Woods

KVgrafik

STEPHANIE V. SEARS

The tree line slow-motions green same as those boreal eyes that oversee the turpentine forest lined afar with fur and howls sweeping north to the pole.

A long swelling aria across my wood front I heard it….. how he is far. A rending of nature’s endless gesture. A strategic muteness of fallen trunks in crosses….in rafts of safeguard. My caterpillar zeal towards some type of faith between moon, moss, a rampage of awe.

The slow, rocky, R’d syllables from his toffee voice of artic cold a fluxing mutter between silences unfolds his love like a napkin.

Now fire ignites among my brooding trees. Their council radars between us. Outreaching. Subterranean ligaments search up and down the edge of the field for a passage.

I must try to get back to him…

as if in nature’s school, only pines apart, in the smell of plumbago point pencils and book pages glazed with bear fat.

The burn of a sudden alliance at the fir line…. Our belief, steadfast.

Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist (Doctorate EHESS, Paris 1993), free-lance journalist, essayist, and poet whose poetry recently appeared in The Deronda Review, The Comstock Review, The Mystic Blue Review, The Big Windows Review, Indefinite Space, The Plum Tree Tavern, Literary Yard, Clementine Unbound, Anti Heroine Chic, DASH, The Dawn Treader, Dodging the Rain, Amethyst Review, The Non-Conformist Magazine, SORTES, Short-listed in 2009 for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book of poetry: ‘The Strange Travels of Svinhilde Wilson’ was published by Adelaide Book in 2020.

Dmitriev Mikhail

Cupola

STEPHANIE V. SEARS

Clouds strain outside like rowboats against a winter’s cobalt. Inside the church swells into a different outside just keeping beyond reach. Cupola, incubator of heavens, through arched windows up there, emphasizes sunlight. In the circle’s epicenter, a soft flutter of wings magnetized by the rays. An angelic uplifting of space snubs gravity. Unusual geometries cast off from some drawing board. Disembodied vision conjures flight, though the body hesitates below. when dusk’s bruise shows again, and the eyes strain again through the dark