Say ‘Wow’
By: Chelan Harkins
Each day before our surroundings
become flat with familiarity
and the shapes of our lives click into place,
dimensionless and average as Tetris cubes,
before hunger knocks from our bellies
like a cantankerous old man
and the duties of the day stack up like dishes
and the architecture of our basic needs
commissions all thought
to construct the four-door sedan of safety,
before gravity clings to our skin
like a cumbersome parasite
and the colored dust of dreams
sweeps itself obscure in the vacuum of reason,
each morning before we wrestle the world
and our hearts into the shapes of our brains,
look around and say, “Wow!”
Feed yourself fire.
Scoop up the day entire
like a planet-sized bouquet of marvel
sent by the universe directly into your arms
and say “Wow!”
Break yourself down
into the basic components of primitive awe
and let the crescendo of each moment
carbonate every capillary
and say, “Wow!”
The Coppiced Heart
By Sophie Strand
Moist-polished oak stumps, wet yellow, freshly
beheaded, inspires me to press my own chest:
The place in me that has also been cut down
to its pelvic resin.
But give it a year. 2 years. Three or four.
And the resurrection will not be a shifted stone
or empty tomb, no. Look for a forest
of tuning forks. Vs of trees risen in the joined
music of strained wind.
All erupted from one trunk. Polyphonies
of leaf and bark and branch. Each
contrapuntal thread sprouted from the sore
spot I thought was surely dead.
Ah! Cut me down to double this desire.
Call forth from my bare trunk, the triplicity
of all I can be. I see it now. With the oak’s
exploded self. There are many of me
growing towards many of you.