by Meggie Royer

In a past life my great-aunt
believed she was a monk,
resplendent in marigold robes,
offerings cloaking her doorstep like a shroud.
There was a heron against the water
in her dreams,
so pale it shone like hair.
In the life before that
she was a boy in a cave,
younger than I could ever picture her,
hiding coins in the dirt.
It was a privilege, to end one life
and wake in another,
to falter in the way love falters,
to see her likeness
moving around the corner like a cloud.
When I knew her, I knew myself.
I saw her; I saw what she buried,
I saw that some of us spend our whole lives
moving away from what moves toward us.

Meggie Royer (she/her) is a Midwestern writer and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persephone’s Daughters, a journal for abuse survivors. She has won numerous awards and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She thinks there is nothing better in this world than a finished poem. Her work can be found at https://meggieroyer.com.

by D.W. Baker
​pantoum collage after Martha Lundin

To be a witch is to love the natural world more than the things human hands have made.
We name women who spend too much time with nature Witch,
but the line between goddess and witch is thin--
I was always sure of my identity: I was part of her.
 
We name women who spend too much time with nature Witch.
(We name things we want to control after women.)
I was always sure of my identity: I was part of her--
In this one body, there is no need for names.
 
We name things we want to control after women,
but the line between goddess and witch is thin:
In this one body, there is no need for names--
To be a witch is to love the natural world more than the things human hands have made.

D.W. Baker is a submerging poet from St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, who writes about place, bodies, belonging, and the end of the world. His work appears in Green Ink Poetry, Snowflake Magazine, Feral Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a poetry reader for Hearth & Coffin. See more at linktr.ee/dwbaker​

by Patrick Wright 

you post pictures of funny-walking seagulls
and crumb-loving pigeons. from a distance
I imagine a mother and child, clambering 
over rocks, eating crêpes, paddling waist-high. 

as lifeguards supervise, your message arrives 
on ‘the uncanniness of arcade machines,
a run-down town, a rag-and-bone tumbleweed 
place, a bustle of back streets, antique shops …’

meanwhile, my device is streaming blue skies,
terns perched on promenade lights, a laughing 
sailor: come laugh with Jolly Jack. I reply: 
‘I hope to never meet him under moonlight.’

you heart this line. you’re far, while I’m at a 
loose end. you text as you trudge up the steps, 
put the fun in the funicular, sign-off with emojis 
and gifs, nothing but a screen of hieroglyphics.

Patrick Wright has a poetry collection, Full Sight of Her (Black Spring), which was nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Southword, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda, Wasafiri, and London Magazine.

by Alana Kelsall

we arrived as couples
at the rebirthing centre     mats lined up
like rafts     his arm around
my shoulder     I dropped
     to a crouch   
angled my huge belly into line
wondered who would succumb first
to the tug of sleep     draw up
     the flood of their birth?
our best friend trumpeted his snores
in no time     roped back sheepish
into the shadowy room
     whale music probing the walls
feeling like a cabbage adrift in a field  
I slipped towards a dark watery eye  
     was it a fish?  
 
how human is it to breathe?
the Denisovans once roamed across
vast mountain ranges     leaping
     from crag to outcrop
without losing their breath  
a gene they bequeathed to the Tibetans
where did they come from those climbers    
     how did they die out?
were they somewhere between a fish and a bird
able to lean into storms
     with breath and bone?
how did my body erase my
fearful mind during labour
with each surge
     to the end?
will our children’s children have to breathe
through water     learn how to float
     to higher ground?

Alana Kelsall is an award-winning writer of poetry and prose who lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. She recently won second prize in the June Shenfield Award, and was longlisted for the Liquid Amber Poetry Prize. Her poetry is forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Anthology.