Love Songs for End Times

By Zoë Fay-Stindt

 

I sing to
the green anole
in a made-up
lizard language—
fiddling tongue,
whirlwinds
and whistle-
clucks.
He curves his neck,
ear hole craned
to my porch perch.
He pinks
his bubble-throat.
For years, I saw
devil horns peeking
from each human
head. Yes,
the chemical,
the highway framed
with fields
and fields
of low metal
chicken farms,
bouncing off death
in the sun. Yes,
the river
nearly evaporated.
But on all those
superfund sites,
someone—
no, a people
—are planting
black ash trees.
Sweetgrass
grows thicker
from our harvesting
hands. Reader,
it’s not all gone up
in flames.
I say this
for you
and for me.
On a postcard
taped to my wall,
a globe as deep
pink as the lizard’s
puffed throat:
le soleil
ne se couche pas.
And it’s true:
the sun never sets.

 


Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American South. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, featured or forthcoming in places such as RHINO, Muzzle, and Ninth Letter, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University, award-winning teacher, and co-managing editor for the environmental writing journal, Flyway.

Photo credit: Green anole image by Matthew Paulson via a Creative Commons license.


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Ghosts in the Eucalyptus Grove

By Julie Martin

Ending with a line from Brooke Jarvis

 

Footsteps churn
sassafras, mud, and fern leaves
into confetti in a continual cycle–
germinate, thrive, die, decay, give way to new life.

The hollowed log of a King Billy pine
garlanded with moss and mist serves as a lair
for the transverse stripes that radiate
in shadows.

Eyes gleam in the dark
on the threshold between dead and undead,
present and absent,
remembered and forgotten.

Every crack of a twig
is ripe with potential
for a glimpse
of Thylacine–

Amalgamation of a creature:
head of a wolf, hindquarters striped like a tiger,
long thick tail of a kangaroo,
the size of a Labrador retriever.

More commonly known as the Tasmanian Tiger.
The last known specimen
died in a zoo in 1936.
And yet of all the world’s officially extinct species,

Thylacine has the highest number of supposed
post-extinction sightings.
“Is it more foolish to chase a figment
or assume that our planet has no secrets left?”

 


A poet and a public school teacher, Julie Martin lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband, sons and dogs. Her poetry has appeared in several online journals, most recently Thimble Literary Magazine, Gravitas, Pasque Petals, Dreamers Creative Writing, Tiny Seed Journal and Tiger Moth Review. She was the 2018 first place winner of South Dakota State Poetry Contest, in the landscape division.

Photo credit: Young, male thylacine at Beaumaris Zoo, about 1936, National Museum of Australia.