A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Re: Re: Winter

Russell Zintel, Columbia County, New York, USA

 

What is longed for when the hearth in your belly

Gets a kink in its blue line

The one, hotter than the hottest vein

Linking it to coals you know to be steady: 

My sight tunnels into writing over a field I cherish

One lined with barbed wire

Presuming nothing of other fields

This one, as it turns out, is a mirage

Poisonous, temperate, alighting a medicinal steed

The mirage reveals a nostrum

Image of a real place, poorly remembered

As not a nostrum, not leaving the steed

Chestnuts on an emptied island

There amid the horse’s circle of bent straw

Subdivisions, a field this longing forgot

Interrupted with canopies of 20,000 years of sleep

Yearned for & not infinite, not like the alfalfa of old grazers

Haunted in photographs

Collapsible farmhouses

Grounds scattered with proud fruits

Proven too burdensome for their prickly spines of summer

What loosens the kink

Besides twisting the vein

The one that trades good meals 

For clean chimney fumes in February

The season from bleachers, forest of innermost fires

& keeping up with basics, like cooking

Elderberries before eating

Remembering our hands before the walnuts are shelled

Eating summer’s sweet punctuation raw & in spirit

Choking in effigy on the resin of the rind

Which, once fallen & absorbed            

Kills most growth beneath the canopy

Here, I am only asking, what species

Of the mind, besides the satisfaction of everything 

Grips the color of what should flood the vein 

To keep one’s head from cracking

Against the ground 

Into uncountable seeds

 

Russell Zintel lives north along the Hudson River with his partner KT and their cat. His work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, decomP Magazine, Re-Side Zine and others. He is currently in progress with a full-length poetry collection.

Two poems by Christian Yeo

Moon as a Pinhole