The shaft of sunlight through the far barn window spun the hay dust into a different kind of gold. The colour lent the old barn a sense of prestige and solemnity, like a king’s robe draped over a farmer—lifting his hollow cheeks, straightening the wrinkles on his brow.  

“The Wind has not changed its pattern since the tumble of the world. It tears across the surface, weaponizing the cold weather so no one can live in it, and then it vanishes for seven days. It brings down branches, yes. But it’s never left such marks before, like—like a beast! Why has it changed, now? What else could it do?”

“Where the Wind sleeps,” Teren said, “Is not a mystery, though.”

The house-thief strikes
When I lay the scissors down,
Vanishing them under whatever scarf
Is most forgettable.

The wolves waited with baited teeth, the leaves dripping onto the forest floor stopped mid-drop, and the little mushroom people called Caps scrunched close and still against the loam. Nothing could move under her shadow, for Bright equaled motion.

Four-year-old Selka tipped her chair back and fell for a half-second. Half of her soul poured out before she caught herself. 

You amble outside of your in-laws’ house, the one they’ve had for thirty-four years of married life, the one you’ve driven to approximately 784 times if you count all the late-night stops when you dated your now-husband in high school. The air wavers like a mirage in a desert, and this clues you in that a dream has begun.

The exterminators wove their bags from the vodka strength of the noonday sun, killing the shadows straight off when they stuffed them in the bags. But Culver wove his bags from the strands of dawn, from when the first few beams trailed across the fields, not too bright, but just bright enough that they couldn’t slip through the stitches.

Hailey, startled, fell backwards on her rear. She was ten, and mushrooms had never deigned to talk to her before.

She wondered if she could transform into a bear, or an ant underground, something that could burrow into the depths of the soil or rock and stay there for months in the winter, unconcerned with the cold or with cages.

Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon. The black lights.

Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we knew they were coming and are down by the river. Pisses the chickens off to no end, of course.

Aloe waited in the mailbox, shivering in the February freeze along with his three foster siblings, Cactus, Snake Plant, and Jade.

The door opens like tree boughs reaching for /
the sun, and you’re sure /
you didn’t move, but the floor moves you inside /
like wind buoying a bird through its branches /

When will they regard the autonomy of a woman’s hard /
decision with the same religion of just looking up /
with the same faith and leaping to conclusions /
That they do to us?

In the autumn, we trek /
Into the Red Grove /
Where the little fox-fires grow /

Dawn pressed his lips to the horizon and Sky blushed like a schoolgirl. All pink and pastel, she twirled her birds up into the winds.

Panic Attack: WAKE UP THERE’S A BEAR

Me: what no there’s not

Panic Attack: BEARS EVERYWHERE

Every day, Niska climbed the rope ladder into the harbor of the sky to watch the cloud boats sail.

The constellation wrapping her torso—Tapez, the Winged Warrioress—flared crisp and bright through her clothes in the darkness of the late evening.

In that time between interesting things /
We Rests flourish /
During the whirling wheel /