“All summer, crowds have come to the canyon in steady currents, yet I’ve only felt small and solitary; deeply rooted is that particular form of loneliness that blooms in company. I kneel with the memory of your warm hand on my skin and unsown lands spread in my imagination. Every day I water and weed and watch the light change across striated stone blotted with juniper and cliff rose; formations I can put names to.”
“Making a narrative out of a life requires a lot of distilling. You gather as much flotsam from the past as you can and try to piece it all together just the way you remember it, only now, all your memories are liquid and volatile and won’t form a complete picture anymore. Eventually, you leave out the parts that you can’t make fit or the ones you don’t like thinking about. With time, these pieces fade until you can’t even remember what you left out anymore and the narrative becomes the memory.”
Read in full at Electric Literature
Excerpt from my prose poem in Flyway‘s Winter 22-23 Outside Issue:
It’s easy now to forget about summer bearing down, the stories about fried eggs on the sidewalk. These are days I can believe each grey branch of the mesquite tree might be resurrected with spring leaves. And sometimes I think I don’t ask for so much—a lover who makes me feel wanted, creatures going about their own business, the potential for regeneration—and sometimes I think this is so much to ask for.
Read the full poem and check out the entire issue by clicking here.
A short excerpt from my essay “Convergence” from the Summer 2022 issue of EcoTheo Review:
“The Gila River—opaque as butterscotch and laced with agricultural runoff—is ornamented with styrofoam cups, discarded truck tires and diapers engorged with river water. The vegetation is thick so it’s easiest to move in the river. I slide down the slick bank past the prints of a black bear whose movements I echo.
The calf-deep water is cool and ripples shimmy away from my footsteps like the fish that curl into eddies as I walk downstream. The Gila is one of the longest western rivers. Not so long ago, I could have floated from the headwaters in New Mexico through to the Gulf of California in a kayak or raft. Now, water is siphoned off into agriculture fields, reservoirs and canals that turn the Gila into a trickle halfway through its 500-mile journey towards the Colorado River. By the time it reaches this valley southeast of Phoenix, the Gila, whose headwaters are often called the birthplace of wilderness, is no more than an intermittent stream. My hiking boots saturate and sand fills their mesh as I wade, listening to the slur of my steps mix with the ensemble of birds calling along the river’s corridor. Under the shaded arbor of tamarisk, I pause. I am quiet. Sometimes you can only find a thing by being still.”
To read the full essay, purchase the issue (or subscribe!) by clicking here.
“Can we celebrate the wild just beyond the doorstep without conflating it with the wildness of places far from any doors? If we expect the wild to adapt to our cities and our lifestyles, where do we adapt to theirs. We must leave space and silence and open places for them to build their own nests, make their own paths through the desert, and communicate with each other in whisper songs.“
Purchase the issue to read in full
“He sounds like one of the mice that live in the house I will move to the first time I try to leave him, the ones I will set hard metal traps for in the kitchen. I will hear the bitter snap and squeak of them at night when I try to fall asleep but instead replay a recent conversation in which he tells me I am easy to love.”
I have a short triptych out today in Hobart.
I’m a little late in getting this up, but one of my poems was published this fall in the Autumn 2021 issue of monologging.
Ipomoea arborescens
Beyond the highway,
the desert is abloom
with white paper lanterns
or are they apertures
the arid land giving way at last… continue reading
I had a great time talking with Ashley Piccone from Wyoming Public Radio about the importance of word choice in science communication. Meaning is shaped at multiple levels within the communication process, even in the definitions of single commonly-used words. Being more attentive to word choice helps us think more deeply about how we can prevent misunderstandings, build trust, and meaningfully connect with people.
Listen to the WPR story here and then check out the original article that I co-authored with Bethann Merkle in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America.
“To be effective communicators we must have a deeper appreciation for how language and ideas are reshaped in context”
Read the full article on the importance of word choice in science communication in Issue 102 of Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America.
New words up today on Essay Daily!
…I had been working on an essay about fragments: fragments of bone, fragments of light, and what the space between these fragments can embody. I’m learning to pay attention to these spaces. A lot can happen in the subtext, in the distance between things, in the space of what is left out, in the time between December 21st and March 16th…
Two poems up now in the latest issue of Minding Nature, a publication from the Center for Humans & Nature.
LUNAR ECLIPSE OFF EXIT 88
Somewhere in Oklahoma,
speeding through scrubby darkness,
we pulled off the highway on Exit 88…
WHAT GOULD’S MAGPIE HAS STOLEN
For its feathers, the prism of light
that broke its blacks into iridescence…
Up now in the newest issue of Vagabond City:
THIS GROUND
…From the ground
of this Arizonan desert
branches rise as the roots of the sky,
and I wonder now, what is the difference
between a hundred places and no place?…
Published this week in the lovely Winter issue of Hawk & Whippoorwill
TIDAL DESERT
…Because I could descend
in the chasm of dissolution
between the layers of sandstone
to where life is pressed like petals,
I began to sense the land’ s lungs
beneath the soil, see the hardness of the desert
and understand that here,
life is not to be presumed…
Published today in Issue 6 of Sky Island Journal
MUDSOFT, HARDTACK
My first gasp was over the wide Sheepscot River,
mama panting in the speeding car,
holding me in…
Published this month in Entropy‘s “The Birds” series
ODE TO A ROCK DOVE
—For JPD
You’re right.
A blackbird taken apart
by a raptor is not the same
as the nestling pigeon,
wet from rain,
run into the
clogged freeway
by slavish,
hulking cars.
And of course it was a pigeon—
rat-of-the-sky,
pest,
dirty dirty bird—
call it
what they will,
you wish the authorities
would restore its name to dove,
dove, with all the potential
of cliches.
For isn’t that part of it?
We are a nation
in love with the idea
of pulling oneself up
by the bootstraps,
even as we call them pigeons,
even as we crush their bodies
as we inch forward dumbly
in our commute of tedium.
This ode is to the bird
that hadn’t yet grown feathers
with which to rescue itself
(and was given
no second chances)
so join me, reader,
with the same empathy
extended to the underdog,
and imagine its life if lived:
Imagine the search
for cold fries under a table
in pursuit of sustenance and survival
Imagine the spin and flash
of emerald and royal purple
in the drive to mate and remake
Imagine the power
of full-fledged wings
in the rush of rising up
up above traffic
up above streets
up above city
to look down on all of us.
Published in the Spring/Summer issue of the Aurorean
GRAFTING
Among high ponderosas in Arizona,
I remember Maine’s white pines—
how after climbing them,
their clear sap drew pieces of that homeland
straight into my hands….
Download the full poem here
Nell Smith 