NEW PHOTOS by Kyla Witherspoon

New Writing

PROTECTED FROM SIN

At the San Gabriel your daughter
squats on dinosaur stone,
glacial skin seared by cobalt skies.
Alone along the banks of the Looking Glass,
a dying red maple leaf in your palm,
you wait for autumn’s door to slam.
The white snake of winter stalking
in dead bluestem along the road.

You slip into the arctic current,
hole up beneath the crystal beauty,
float under the radar again,
conspire with the water,
doze among the graveled beds,
submerged, protected from your sin.

In late May you will rise slowly,
a brookie to a Yellow Sally, flashing
your white belly fat to the sun.

New Writing

THE END OF DAYS

Much like the way she fought the slug of cancer
that rasped her pancreas to dust, the volunteer
Early Girls have kicked the ass of an ugly winter.
Casting to every rise, he artfully considers his turn,
a wind taper half-moon slicing the sky. Damselflies
usher light out the open window of a another day.
Does he understand the gift of fatherhood, she asks?
At the edge of the morass he hears the sweet chinook
song floating through the tops of white pines.
Just before the loop on Cameron Bridge Road,
mucked to his wader tops he stops to witness
the horizon struggling from delicate salmon to lusty red.

She watches him, wade his luminous river as it schleps
along like the translucent tail of Hale-Bopp. Trout
disappear like embers of orange ice and stone stars
into the black velvet hole of the milkyway canopy.
She once asked him why people kill deer. Radishes,
spinach & onions rise from the baby cottontail
she carefully buried in the garden last September.
The half eaten pear sits rusting soft on the cabin floor,
stem pointing southwest to Fife Lake, a compass home.
Across the river a green heron rises, angelic wings on fire.
The yearling buck drinks clear healing waters, head down,
his doe standing in jack-in-the-pulpits carefully waiting.