Cover image: "Orange Bursts" by Lior Locher
Gallery 2
Cracking the shell
Ali Gipson
Harbinger
Scientific name: Turdus migratorius.
Common name: American Robin.
Description:
Charcoal wings, a reddish-orange breast,
a black head, and a sunflower beak.
Juveniles are a smaller version of the adults but
with white paint splattered on their chests
and a sense of wonder,
as if it is always the first time
they feel grass beneath their feet.
Their songs welcome warmth, light,
ending winter’s inexorable
nightfalls.
Encounter(s): Countless — They are everywhere.
Notable Encounter(s): One.
If you find a wounded bird in your backyard
I beg you to not pick it up,
cradle the glossy feathers
in your palms, carry the animal
to your mother. A bird will likely go into
shock when it becomes injured,
and this shock can kill it, and
I do not want you to get death on your hands.
Ali Gipson writes to magnify the beauty in ordinary moments, reflect on her relationship with the natural world, and explore her mental health, identity, and sexuality. A native Pittsburgher with a BA from Seton Hill University, she has more than a dozen publications in Parhelion Literary Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Sampsonia Way, among others. You can read more of her work at www.agipsonwrites.com.
Kika Dorsey
Origami Cranes
We can find the origami cranes everywhere in the papers of our youth,
the way we folded and loved, the way now in the spring
we drive through mountain passes to valleys—the Arkansas to San Luis
to find the cranes returning to the north. They descend on fields
of sage, their legs sunk in snowmelt mud, their wings long and thin
like willow leaves. But it’s February now, the month of hearts
and chocolate, of flight postponed until spring, buried beneath blankets,
and migration a hope, a fleeting thought, a leaning of flower
against bud, breast against pillow, while children cut hearts from
the very paper cranes used to arrive from. They give them freely
to their friends at school. They walk on buckled sidewalks
with a bag full of valentines, and on the horizon socked-in smog
reddens the sinking sun. It spreads our fire toward the low ground
while we listen for the clattering sound of the cranes in our minds
and our hearts fold and fold, the wind winnows its way
through snowmelt, the chaff our threshed love,
the children perching hopeful on our breasts.
I have chosen spring more times than I can remember.
I’ve unfolded my pelvis to birth what the seed of love planted.
I’ve spent February feeding cranes in my dreams
the wheat that was supposed to grow in a country riddled by war.
I have told you this: cranes look fragile with their long legs,
their beaks like knives separating grain from chaff,
but they know, like my love, to always return.
As I do. Even when there is too much between us.
Even when it snows in spring and all that melts is the shape of clouds.
Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature and her books include the chapbook Beside Herself and three full-length collections: Rust, Coming Up for Air, and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger, which won the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. Currently, she is a lecturer at the University of Colorado in literature and creative writing. Her novel As Joan Approaches Infinity was published by Gesture Press in May 2023. In addition, she works as a writing coach and ghostwriter. In her free time, she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.
Lisa Allen
Things I Text (or Don’t Text) My Stepmom While Visiting Portland
Please tell Dad I’m at a diner in the Pearl now,
eating breakfast served his way.
They call it a hot cake sandwich: three pancakes
and two eggs, stacked like a layer cake. Don’t tell him
I ate it all. Actually, never mind. He knows. Here’s
a picture. Actually, never mind. Here’s a better one.
Have you two ever been here? Dad would hate it—
homeless folks talking to themselves, some shooting up
on the sidewalk. Don’t tell him I watched a man
take off his jeans & boxers & run down the street
on my way to breakfast. Or that I spent too much money
on books at Powell’s. Tell him the bellhop was chatty
and said those damn kids just like he does. And that
two guys in ball caps next to me are talking about fishing.
Don’t tell him I’ve had Thai food three times in two days.
Tell him there’s a gorgeous rose garden. It’s too early
for blooms, but there are three gorgeous evergreens
that look like The Wise Men in their golden years,
on the move, backs brooked & heads not quite weeping,
but cernuous. It’s how I know these trees are men.
Don’t tell him about the vomit on the sidewalk, or
that when the girl in the disco ball boots smiled at me
in the elevator, it was his voice I heard, saying,
If she just had someone who gave a damn, maybe
she wouldn’t be twitching like that. Don’t tell him
I hate that I thought that. Tell him the urge to hug her,
to tell her to wait—just wait—and hang with the quiet
guy she calls a friend instead of the one she wishes
was more than because the quiet one
would be the one who cares if she’s safe.
Please tell Dad the only thing I forgot to pack
was toothpaste but it’s ok, I’m ok, because
the clerk named Cora handed me a tiny tube
and she smiled, her glued-on lashes heavy
with glitter, and I fell asleep to her honey voice,
deep and sure as his, the hotel blanket fluffy &
warm, like the home we had
when I dream.
Lisa Allen’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Bacopa Literary Review, Lily Poetry Review, December Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bear Review, and MER, among others. Lisa holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the Solstice Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lasell University. She is co-founder & co-director, with poet Rebecca Connors, of the online creative space The Notebooks Collective and is a founding editor of the anthology series Maximum Tilt. Lisa calls Kansas home, but has a wild case of wanderlust and a newly empty nest—which leaves her more time to figure out who she’s always been. She wishes she had the nerve to pack it all up and live in an RV, so she could wake up somewhere new (almost) every day.
Amy Marques
Nobody Uses Umbrellas in Eugene, Oregon
You’d think that in a place where rain is more norm than exception, everyone would choose to be prepared, but nobody carries an umbrella in Eugene, and nobody keeps pace with time as it rushes by and stands still at every instant. How could we as it is we who change pace, not time. Yet we regret how youth is wasted on the young as it was wasted in our youth when we allowed our grains of sand to spiral down the hourglass, shifting and morphing and swirling memories, dragging our childhoods away. But then we hardly noticed, because time is an owl, a silent hunter who, when satiated, perches deceptively wide-eyed and fluffy cheeked, calling the who who that echoes in our thoughts as they float as half-formed clouds, suggesting shapes that are easily blown away. But that is not a bad thing because we are houses shaped by the time that inhabits us, not constrained to what we might have once been designed to be, but expanding beyond our original facade, adding rooms, breaking walls, deepening foundations, reaching towards the heavens and, tentatively, opening our doors in welcome, hoping time won’t run out.
Amy Marques has been known to call books friends and is on a first-name basis with many fictional characters. She has visual art, poetry, and prose published in journals such as Streetcake Magazine, MoonPark Review, Bending Genres, Wild Roof Journal, Ghost Parachute, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Gone Lawn. More at amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.
Adam M. Sowards
War and Geese
I.
PLEASE PARDON OUR NOISE. IT IS A SOUND OF FREEDOM. The billboard, standing just outside Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, implored locals and visitors to tolerate the nuisance. A free society must pay certain costs, it told us.
In high school, I traveled with my basketball team to that community, connected by two high bridges, over a narrow gap, beneath which water furiously whirlpooled. The gym’s domed roof capped the space claustrophobically, just like the military presence and secrets. A trip there always felt a little different: on an island, under a dome, near instruments of war.
I recall nothing of the game my senior year except overhearing my mom, emotional, talking about it the week after. “The national anthem seemed different. All those military kids….”
The Gulf War, what we now must call the First Gulf War, had just begun and brought with it unbidden lessons in the geography of conflict and the geopolitics of oil. But some links were more personal. My brother in the Air Force was stationed in Texas, but for how long? Good-byes were said.
Much later, I married someone from that island. Several weeks ago, after decades away from western Washington, we moved to a home that looks out at it, and sometimes the sound of freedom scorches over our roof.
II.
When I gaze west toward the island, my eyes first glance across acres of flat farmland, a foreground I’m already accustomed to, a place I’m beginning to love, a scene that feels familiar.
Out among the fields, behind dikes meant to improve drainage and contain flooding, pockets of land are dedicated to wildlife. In some, that means, paradoxically, a place for public hunting; in others, keep your dogs and rifles at home. I prefer the latter. My favorite is less than ten minutes from our new home, and it tempts me often.
Birds call. My first week living here I experienced a murmuration of dunlins that opened up senses beyond the five I knew. Sight, sound, and my belly all fluttered, keeping time with a flock’s synchronized dancing in the wind, skimming overhead with a noise you could feel. My daughter, visiting from college, joined me too, and we shared this mesmerizing experience beyond ourselves and family and history in a way that seemed to bond us to the birds and this new place.
III.
I keep going back, not so much seeking to capture that coordinated movement of dunlins as though hundreds of birds shared one mind, but to find out what other mundane miracles might extend my perceptions of nature and the familial.
After an unusual Christmas snow in this moderate climate, the temperatures rose, but the wind at my favored place slammed open my car door when I took a respite from work one Monday, seeking distance from thoughts. It wasn’t frigid, but coastal winds blowing hard at even 50 degrees will make your nose run.
One part of the estuary, a former field that had been reclaimed by water after breaching a dike, usually is full of floating ducks but now stretched out mud beyond birds. Looking above, I saw a sky of clouds, gray but not foreboding. I heard some ducks behind me, saw a few ahead, and noticed maybe some eagles rustling at the shoreline.
I trudged on, hoping to lose myself in more of something. Not seeing much, I turned around as though beckoned. To the northwest, a half-mile away, a flock of snow geese at play. There’s no other way to describe it.
IV.
I’ve read that a flock of geese in flight is called a wedge or a skein or a team. These geese aren’t flying south in that telltale chevron known even to children. So not a wedge. And skein conjures coils of yarn, wound around predictably and self-contained. But with these geese, pandemonium. And if they are a team, playing a game, I cannot discern the rules.
They swirl and undulate, almost cyclonic at times. Up and down, right and left. They respect a perimeter, flying only so far that way and only so high, before turning back or diving down, circling, nearing invisible walls before sharply redirecting. They break up and combine in the hundreds, no thousands, expanding and contracting the size of our universe. Yet this isn’t chaos. This is resplendence painted in feathers.
Despite their name, snow geese are not all white. Their wingtips are black, as if dipped in inkpots.
So, when they fly,
a distance from you,
in the dim light,
of a late winter afternoon,
at just the right angle,
they can appear almost gray,
like the sky domed above.
Until.
Until they turn, slant, shift…then flash. Incandescent.
It’s not just the brightness of feathers that alters the scene. The air moves as a solid. It shimmers, vibrates, shakes, as if the wings of the geese produce shock waves you can see. You can look through the team, the flock, because beating wings need space. And that? That is like looking through solid air.
I am queasy with this, my stomach unsettled by the blurring and blending of what is solid and what is not, what is real and what is illusion. And I am queasy with joy. For not the first time in this place, birds have shown me a beauty that quickens my heart, steals my breath, and brings tears to my eyes. This magical world I did not know existed.
I say magical because I’m ignorant. I’m new to watching birds generally and snow geese specifically. An ornithologist, no doubt, would find this flight behavior explicable, not miraculous. (Although the best ones would still recognize the magic.)
A yellow school bus bringing children home drives on, a bright distraction oblivious, or merely accustomed, to the miraculous flight and the cacophony that reminds me of a million frogs with megaphones.
Then the snow geese seem to disappear, for now.
V.
When I walk at the reserve, five miles from home, I’m also walking on Wrangel Island. Nature connects us across almost 2,500 miles. The geese teach us this, if we hear them. Despite their noise, though, they have been easy to ignore.
The decade before my grandparents were born, two to three thousand snow geese survived on Wrangel Island north of Siberia. When I was born, 50,000 bred there, and a little more than 10,000 snows wintered in river valleys here, near where the international border sutures British Columbia and Washington. Today, more than 100,000 stay, eating in the estuaries and fields, while 300,000 geese join a hundred other migratory species to summer on the Russian nature reserve in the Arctic Ocean.
The population rebound that produced the spectacle I experienced is because of humans. Wildlife refuges created here and there helped. Programs with farmers to leave crops and restrictions on hunters made a difference. Climate change helped, too, because the snow-free season on Wrangel Island lengthens the breeding season.
The snows used to just pause here before continuing south to California’s Central Valley. Now, the majority stay, a boon for my birdwatching; a more complicated calculation for the gaggles, I reason. Flight is shorter. Food may be better. But the southern grounds may simply be too warm in the Anthropocene.
VI.
The show over, I turn my attention back to the ducks and eagles, the noise of the wind and its biting at my fingers.
Honk.
Honk, honk.
Just a few snows scrape over my head. No longer in their big team, they fly as a wedge. A dozen.
A dozen dozen, which sounds like a lot, but after the display a few moments before, it seems to be nearly nothing. Only now do I begin to comprehend how many snow geese I saw at play over the fields.
Long necks stretch south like a malfunctioning compass. Their fat bodies, somehow graceful, are held aloft with wings that flap effortlessly. I don’t mean that it looks easy, although it does. I mean that their wings hardly seem to move compared with ducks who always seem frantic. The snows’ wings roll up and down in what seems like barely expending energy. I hunch trying to keep the wind from piercing my coat and sweater and pants, unable to hear clearly with the wind shouting in my ears. Meanwhile, the snows roll on.
Scanning the sky and horizon brings the landscape into focus. I’m standing in a river delta, and the hills and mountains that define the watershed enclose me at a great distance. In the gray day, the snow-capped mountains remain clouded and obscured, but the forested (and deforested) foothills paint a dark background. The sky, a lighter hue, feels cold. Against this, the geese stand out. To the east, I see the remnants of the large flock rolling like a white wave against the dark green hills.
But the smaller groups close above me keep my attention. Like giant identical snowflakes, their white bodies, improbably aerodynamic at five plump pounds, are shaped like a bottom-heavy triangle. Wherever more than three geese fly, they shift into formation. “V” formations heading to the open bay and island beyond.
In World War II, “V” stood for “victory.” I’m marveling at them, swiveling my head to follow their mission-flight south, when I realize they resemble planes in formation heading off to war. Pulling back my focus to blur and allow my surroundings to fade, I’m in a war movie or in one of those books I read in childhood glimpsing squadrons moving to battle Nazi Germany. The Good War, always imagined in black and white and grays like today.
Shhhhhooooooop!
A noise too loud for even the wind to block out. My head turns in time to see a small but mighty jet streaking across the northern sky, finding the only opening among the clouds, on its way back to the naval air station.
A few days later, one of these jets, an EA-18G Growler, flew over as I walked through the woods, its sound intermittently piercing the branches of cedars and alders. Its long nose pointed the way, its wings heavy with fuel tanks and missiles making it bottom-heavy.
How do these imbalanced things fly?
VII.
From my house, I look west-southwest. In that direction, when the sunlight is right, I see far-off mountains and the bay close up. My wife’s home island crests in view just across the shallow water. But gazes seldom hold still, and when I look west-northwest, I see steam, always rising. At night it billows out, bright artificial light illuminating the plumes from below; during the day, even in rain, columns curl upward.
These two refineries help make our carbon economy function. Together, they process roughly 11 million gallons of crude oil daily, oil that comes via a pipeline from Canada or a tanker from Alaska after its own pipeline trip from the North Slope. The United States never went to war for Alaska, and it’s unlikely to invade Canada, although past the stacks I can see what had been disputed territory in the nineteenth century. But the fossil fuel economy sinks US interests around the world, making us vulnerable to regional instabilities and geopolitical entanglements. Such commitments and addictions and greed took us into the Second Gulf War. And took my brother to Afghanistan.
So many kinds of returns make our worlds.
Returns on investments drive corporate decisions.
Returns to D.C. where the powerful depend on attention and contributions that forestall action in a cycle of cynicism.
Returns of carbon to earth unable to escape a greenhoused atmosphere, sinking instead into oceans and changing life and water’s biochemistry.
And returns home.
My brother did, only to migrate south later to join Arizona snowbirds, earning his keep within the technological-defense complex comfortable in the air-conditioned desert.
And so did my wife and I. We’ve homed back close to the farms where we grew up, where our parents still live—me, not quite 25 miles away; she, 20 by air, 50 by ferry, 75 by road.
The snow geese, too, return to these fields, arcing over the Arctic Circle, within view, perhaps, of the North Slope drilling and pipeline that brings crude to awaiting tankers. Boat and bird navigate the route in tandem. One docks at refineries; the other settles in estuaries, in refuge.
That afternoon, when I stepped out of the car, I intended to escape my mind, to follow my senses until self-consciousness dissipated when I would be left only with the immediacy of the present moment’s saltwater smell, bird calls, and stretching horizon. But there is no escape in a world such as ours. The health of Russian islands affects the birds I see. The state of pipelines fuels the local tax base. The political economy of oil, of terror, rends lives in nature and families, close and far. My new home reminds me that in the Anthropocene, I am linked within the globe. And though there may be times when I may wish to fly alone, the snow geese show me that we are connected and magical and on the same team.
Adam M. Sowards is an award-winning environmental writer and historian. His most recent book is Making America’s Public Lands. His work typically explores democracy and nature across time and can be found in the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, High Country News, and elsewhere. You can find more at adamsowards.net or follow him most places @AdamMSowards.
William Welch
Contrary. Confirmed
“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast…”
—Friar Laurence
To want an intense life—an intensity like that
of a bird’s flight after mid-air shutting its wings…
Didn’t the quiet friars warn us about that?
Didn’t they admonish us to keep in mind the man
who carried a stone in his mouth every day
for three years until he learned how to be
silent? Otherwise, the frustration always is the same…
You work all day preparing
one meal, but not an hour after setting warm plates on the table,
it is finished… All of your skill and knowledge
of metallurgy you expend building a single vessel,
then it sinks during the maiden voyage… Yes,
we answer, we know this is true:
the ends contradict the means. So?
Even these fossils teach us. This one in the shape
of Narmer’s Palette, recording the kingship
of an oyster—a document inscribed with the text
of clams and small corals—pleads
along with us. Was everything
we lived through of no more consequence than this?
To want a life—contrary. Confirmed
by something more durable than stone…
William Welch lives in Utica, NY where he works as a registered nurse. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including Little Patuxent Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, and Cider Press Review. He edits Doubly Mad. You can find more about him at williamfwelch.com.
Leni Paquet-Morante
Leni Paquet-Morante (BFA Mason Gross School of Art) is a New Jersey-based multi-media artist whose work centers on shallow water systems as muse for a contemporary interpretation of landscape. Born in Canada and raised in Maryland, she came to New Jersey in 1984 to learn bronze casting methods at the Johnson Atelier; she has been an active member of the NJ community through exhibitions, volunteerism, and professional employment, including occasional teaching. An award-winning painter, her recent sculpture and drawing work has gained attention through inclusion in NJ Arts Annuals 2022 and 2023. She is listed in the Women Artists of America Registry and is a member of the National Association of Women Artists. Her work is in private, corporate, and institutional collections internationally. Website: www.lenimorante.com / Instagram: @lenimakespaintings
Sally McClellan
Love at Six
That was when you were outside in the mornings
and the cold you didn’t care about
you didn’t think about the sun or the trees
they were just all around
the trees you climbed
the sun that made you sweat
usually other kids were strange or made you feel
lonely or suddenly took you by the hand and ran
with you so you felt you were running into a good
place surrounded and safe but they might not take
your hand the next day you were too shy to take theirs
you knew things they didn’t know
you didn’t even know what it was you knew
except you lived in a hollow place
and school was so much better
with grown-ups who acted right who didn’t drink
didn’t cry didn’t sleep all day
There was the classroom with rules that were easy
prizes to win a library full of books to sneak home
a music teacher nice teachers chalkboards recess
where there were no rules except what to play
and how to play and that kept changing
lines on the blacktop in squares and circles
nets and rings heavy brown smelly balls
or spongy red balls poles and a tetherball
squishy puzzle pieces of black speckled stuff
under the jungle gym to catch you if you fell
but you could still skin your knees
mostly everyone ignored you or stared at you
so I didn’t know why Pierre followed me around
why he talked to me teased me smiled at me
I think he liked me he wore a beret and I knew
that’s what it was called he looked different he
was French I knew this he talked differently and
looked at me differently than other kids
like an adult a nice one
I didn’t know why he kept finding me
that’s all I thought about him—you’re here again—
he made me laugh or tried to make me laugh
every day Pierre at recess with his funny words and eyes
and the beret over his dark hair he was different
he liked me I don’t know why
I was up next at kickball waiting my turn to kick the
heavy brown ball I stood with the other kids in a line
along the chain link I liked this game
liked kicking and running
the sun was out it was warming up it was morning recess
our sweaters were all over the ground
Pierre was there again behind the chain link
he leaned over it to talk to me he told me smiling that
he was going he wouldn’t be coming back he wanted
me to know he looked right at me the way kids usually
don’t I knew what he was telling me was important and
I was sad I never saw him again
I looked for him all the time
Sally McClellan is a community and regional theatre actor and a retired special education teacher. Since her husband died in 2018, she has written Dear Sven (memoir); Ruth and Yori in the Afterlife, a comedy on grief; Grace’s Instinct (poems); and The Waitress’s Dream & other tales of unlikely healing. She finds her inspiration in nature and small moments and often writes character-driven narrative. She graduated from U.C. Irvine with a degree in drama. She lives in the Central California foothills, on the edge of a pond, where she walks her dog, Belle, every day.
Tresha Faye Haefner
Portrait of My Father as a Species of Butterfly
A Father’s lifecycle is made up of four parts; hunger, mouth, sorrow, wings.
Fathers attach to their children dreams with a special glue.
Fathers can live in the dream-state between a lifetime and a setback.
Father’s spend their days chewing violets, digesting opera, and sleeping in empty.
Most Fathers hide under a fondness for daffodils.
A Father will hang upside down, abandoning their memories of parent and garden.
A Father must be allowed to melt in complete color.
Fathers are so bright you see their patterns before they see themselves.
If you open a father’s ideas while melting, water lilies will ooze out and be destroyed.
Inside its sorrow, a Father’s stomach shrinks. It prepares to live off floating ideas, and the yellow sweetness inside the rose.
Any unused language will escape through the mouth of a Father’s first words.
Once a Father has abandoned its cocoon the emptiness hangs in the memory for all of its children to inhabit.
Fathers develop a long craving that can taste the undigested theories of Atlantis and promises made by the moon.
Birdwing Fathers have angular wings and chart the flight pattern of falling stars.
Place decaying bodies of fruit, and the religion of flowers on your porch and watch the Fathers settle in.
Scientists have seen rows of abandoned Father cocoons in the windowsill of a park lavatory. Their dull husks a kind of silent music. The wind blowing each one like a silent wind-chime.
Some Fathers develop early. Even before they enter the chrysalis they carry their wings under their skin.
Mine was such a Father. Even before he sprouted wings, he carried the end of the horizon under his eyes.
Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, Tinderbox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize as well as 2012, 2020, and 2021 nominations for Pushcart. Her first manuscript, Pleasures of the Bear, was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It was published by Pine Row Press under the title When the Moon Had Antlers in 2023. Find her at www.thepoetrysalon.com.
Kasey Butcher Santana
The Homestead After Dark
Evening chores have created an end-of-day ritual in our home so regular that cloistered nuns would approve. Like Mother Superior preparing for vespers, my husband tracks the setting sun, calling the alpacas to the barn as darkness falls. Our old little dog takes a final scamper around the yard because she is not allowed outside at night. She resembles a rabbit too closely. Dog and man come inside as I finish making large mugs of herbal tea, signaling that it is time to rest.
At the end of the year, darkness creeps in earlier each day until it arrives before my husband’s last meeting ends. I take over the evening routine, giving the alpacas their treat, closing the barn, and saying goodnight to the chickens, who put themselves to bed. Watching the dog run up the porch steps under a patch of moonlight, I question if our ritual is more monastic or monster movie. If the alpacas and the dog had their way, they would get perpetual access to the outdoors. We close them in at night because it is the only way to keep them safe from the mountain lions who live nearby. In bed, as I listen to the phantom thud of footsteps—trying to hear if my little girl is up, or if something is actually on the roof above my head—I consider the primal fear that comes with sharing the darkness with apex predators. No fictional threat, but a real, terrifying creature, just trying to eat.
Conservation groups such as the International Dark Sky Association remind us that darkness is also a habitat. The assertion surprises me, a creature made to live in the daylight. Quickly, however, my mind’s eye focuses on the mountain lions, coyotes, the bats who live in the eaves of our porch, the moths who sometimes wander inside the house, and the owl whose whos remind us why the dog is not allowed outside at night. After dark, while the dayshift sleeps, our homestead is still busy with activities we only find trace evidence of in the morning.
One summer, each evening brought a vividly orange sunset and the unmistakable stench of a skunk. I prayed that he would not find the beehive. As tired bees rest, the skunk could come along and scratch the underside of the hive. The sound might lure bees outside so the skunk can grab them, suck out the juicy parts, and leave the little insect carcasses behind. Darkness seems to pose such monstrous threats to the creatures we take care of.
Routinely, we find tracks of a small predator prowling around the chicken coop or deep gashes where it tried to dig under the wire. Perhaps the fox who runs through the pasture from time to time attempts these nighttime raids. Neighbors post doorbell camera footage of bobcats, coyotes, and the occasional mountain lion. The skunk eventually choked to death on an apple stolen from the trees behind the beehives, but not long after, a raccoon started walking along our balcony’s railing each night. As the security light startled us both, he and I looked at each other curiously through the window before the light switched itself back off, leaving me with my soft lamplight and the raccoon with the comfort of shadows.
Out here on the edge between the city and the foothills, nighttime offers deep darkness despite all the lights around houses. In the United States, however, nearly half of the land is lit by artificial light from sundown to sunup, posing problems for nocturnal species.[1] Global light pollution has increased by at least 49% in the last 25 years. Decorative lights, street lights, and security lights work together to brighten the night for humans and wreak havoc on the nocturnal lives of plants, insects, and animals. For example, Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) disrupts the flight patterns of moths, keeping them from pollinating as efficiently as they might otherwise.[2] A study compared a lit meadow to a dark meadow and found that in the presence of ALAN, the flowers were visited 62% fewer times by nocturnal insects and, as a result, produced 13% less fruit.[3]
Plants also have a circadian rhythm and need the dark period of night to grow, reproduce, and in some cases receive visits from beneficial insects. Botanists have found that ALAN, along with warming temperatures, has led some trees to develop buds up to a week earlier, marking a seasonal change that could put blooming trees out of sync with the pollinators they depend on, and who depend on them.[4]
In the animal kingdom, ALAN poses a major threat to biodiversity as it causes habitat fragmentation.[5] Animals such as mountain lions have learned that lights mean people, and therefore trouble, and will go to great lengths to avoid passing through a lighted area. Lights also impact the travel of flying nocturnal species, such as bats. As artificial light draws moths, bats have also adapted to catch the moths under street lamps, even as artificial light disrupts bats’ usual flight and sleep patterns.[6] Meanwhile, up to 80% of migratory bird species travel at night and ALAN threatens to draw them toward fatal collisions with buildings.[7]
In response to light pollution, conservationists suggest people practice “ecological solidarity,”[8] considering the use of nocturnal spaces by humans and non-humans, and finding ways to reduce light pollution for nocturnal species. Strategies for reducing ALAN are often simple. For example, outdoor lights can be installed to direct the light downward and use warm-toned bulbs, lessening the impact on flying animals and insects. Lights can also be set to lower intensities and paired with motion sensors that keep security lights active for less than five minutes. Finally, lights can be removed where they are not really needed.[9]
On a summer evening, we sat under porch lights struggling to finish plucking hay out of our alpacas’ fleece before our deadline to drop it off at the fiber mill. Every time we thought we finished, we found another patch of matted dirt or seed pods caught in fuzzy alpaca curls. As the night dragged on, my husband noticed me repeatedly glancing at the gap where the patio’s roof does not fully meet the brick exterior of the house. “The bat’s fine,” Julio told me. He knew without asking that I feared our presence and the lights above our heads would keep the bat who hangs in that crevice from leaving, maybe going hungry.
We rarely sit outside so late, but soon after that night, I took inventory of the outdoor lights on our backyard homestead, wondering how much we disturbed the darkness. Most of our lights have motion sensors. The glowing exception was the fairy lights I attached to an old metal door in an attempt to turn the junk left by the previous occupants—too heavy to haul away—into something approximating art. I doubted that the low-intensity wired lights would have much impact on bats, but just to be safe, I unwound them from the old door and reinstalled them under an awning, so we could see them out our window, but the light would be obscured from the sky.
I never considered before that the darkness was someplace to protect, rather than an abyss from which I needed protection. My fear of the dark ran far past childhood, fueled by horror movies and years living alone, one ear open for a prowler in the night. I dart to the bed from the bathroom, picturing a hand reaching out to grab my ankles. I try not to think about ghosts or someone standing at the foot of the bed when I wake in the middle of the night. When the security light outside our door went off at 12:30 a.m., adrenaline flashed a series of options through my imagination. Was it the enormous raccoon or someone sinister, looking for an unlocked window?
Thinking about the animals who need the darkness, I also want to know if our farm animals experience fear of the dark, too. When a fox tries to dig under the chicken wire at night, do the hens experience a different intensity of fear than they would in the light? Aware that they are prey, alpacas practice an on-call rotation with a different individual watching over the herd each night, allowing the others to rest. After seeing a motion alert from the security camera, I have watched the on-call alpaca stand alert at the crack in the barn door, ears perked up. Is she afraid of whatever ran by, or simply as curious as the herd was when a newspaper blew across the pasture like a tumbleweed? Perhaps that primal fear of what might lurk in the dark is the most intense connection between our animals and me, all of us vulnerable to predators—real or otherwise—as we sleep, hoping that our homes, herds, locks, and flocks are enough to keep us safe.
We barn the alpacas at sunset, and the chickens roost to stay safe from whatever killed that rabbit in the yard, but, as my eyes strain to scan the darkness, the guard dog snores at my feet, all twelve pounds of her feeling cozy and safe. I do not feel at home in the dark, but I take comfort knowing that along with the mountain lion—and the raccoon who I am now sure is on the roof—harmless bats and moths fly in the garden, doing their work to tend to the ecosystem, dancing in the dark.
[1] Robbins, Becki. “For Creatures of the Night, a Growing Threat in Artificial Light.” Undark Magazine, 14 July 2022, undark.org/2022/07/18/for-creatures-of-the-night-a-growing-threat-in-artificial-light.
[2] Hirschlag, Ally. “How Light Pollution Disrupts Plants’ Senses.” BBC Future, BBC, 9 Mar. 2023, www.bbc.com/future/article/20230308-how-light-pollution-disrupts-plants-senses.
[3] Slade, Jane. “Starving for Darkness.” LD+A, September 2018.
[4] Hirschlag, Ally.
[5] Challéat, Samuel, et al. “Grasping darkness: The Dark Ecological Network as a social-ecological framework to limit the impacts of light pollution on biodiversity.” Ecology and Society, vol. 26, no. 1, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5751/es-12156-260115.
[6] Slade, Jane.
[7] “Light Pollution Poses Threat to Migrating Birds.” International Dark-Sky Association, 6 May 2019, www.darksky.org/light-pollution-poses-threat-to-migrating-birds.
[8] Challéat, Samuel, et al.
[9] Robbins, Becki.
Kasey Butcher Santana is co-owner/operator of Sol Homestead, a backyard alpaca farm where she and her husband also raise chickens, bees, pumpkins, and their daughter. Kasey earned a Ph.D. in American Literature from Miami University and has worked as an English teacher and a jail librarian. Recently, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fieldstone Review, The Ocotillo Review, Star 82 Review, Geez Magazine, The Hopper, Canary, Heimat Review, and Farmer-ish. Instagram: @solhomestead
Maggie Parks
Maggie Parks is an artist and educator. She has taught at many of the cultural programs in the Western New York area. She is currently a Teaching Artist at Starlight Studio and Art Gallery. Maggie works as an instructor, mentor, and advocate for artists with disabilities.
Molly Smith
Acorn
The sun
drips
between
the clouds
and
parts
the dirt
that
chokes
my
dry throat.
I am
a seed.
I cannot
reach
towards
the sun
without
cracking
this
shell.
Molly Smith is currently a student at Cumberland University, working towards her BA in English and Creative and Imaginative Writing. Born in Northern Illinois, she moved to middle Tennessee in high school and has previous publications in Radix Magazine and Novus Literary Arts Journal. Her poetry centers on themes of growing up and of loss.
Samantha Imperi
Recipe for Rabbit Stew
Mama breaks a neck and it snaps with the crack of dry kindling,
the soft body hangs like a cape over the curve of her arm.
I watch its foot kick hard once against the open air
as its brittle bones break and Mama takes a deep breath
through pursed lips like she’s sucking that rabbit’s soul
right out of its living body and that foot didn’t twitch
no more. No more, I beg Mama as she puts her big hands
into the hatch and catches another squirming mass
by the scruff of the neck, its twitching body like liquid
rippling, Mama got her good hand gripping
the head and the body in her other, she makes me watch
again, the breaking and the breathing. Mama says
everybody gotta eat somehow and she holds another
live body in her claw grip fingers while it kicks
and Mama don’t smile none, but I see satisfaction
in her stare while she snaps it dead and lays it aside
to be cut and cleaned. And I don’t want to
but Mama takes my hand and in it places
a still-beating heart in an unbroken body and suggests
I do it quickly, with what strength of self I have
and I put my hands where mama shows me
where I watched mama put her hands all those years
where I know is tender and breakable
and tears in my eyes, on my apple-red cheeks,
I do as mama says, quickly, snatch the breath
right out of that small, fragile chest and suck
the air through my teeth, taking in the life I stole
and mama says, dinner will be ready soon.
Samantha Imperi is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at Ohio University. She has an MFA from the University of Akron in poetry and her work can be found in such journals as Beyond Words, The Blood Pudding, The Lighthouse Weekly, and the Great Lakes Review.
Inna Krasnoper
Inna Krasnoper is a poet, literary translator, and dance artist living in Berlin. In 2014 she received a BA in Dance, Context, Choreography from UdK Berlin. Inna locates her practice in the interstices of movement & writing, developing the visual and verbal aspects of poetry, and working with performance and installation. Her first book of Russophone poetry (Нитки торчат, Loose Threads) was published in 2021 by Voznesensky Center. Her work in English (and multilingually) has been published in SAND, Ghost Proposal (also featured on Poetry Daily), Pocket Samovar, Oversound, Alchemy, 128 LIT, Slanted House Zine, Dvoetochie, and stadtsprachen magazin. Her first chapbook of multilingual poetry is forthcoming with Eulalia Books.
Lior Locher
Lior Locher is a nonbinary mixed-media artist, mainly working in acrylic and collage and printmaking. After having lived in 6 countries on 4 continents and being homeless at some point, they are now based at the English seaside. Their training is in personal development, coaching and therapy; they are fascinated by people’s inner lives and how we make sense of our own inner journeys as humans, and the inner dynamics and stories we tell ourselves. Art is one way to make that visible. Website: liordotart.wordpress.com / Instagram: @liorlocher
