This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from There are Still Woods by Hila Ratzabi (June Road Press 2022).
Letter from the North
Is it spring in Philadelphia yet?
I’m still waiting for the river to unfreeze.
The buds must be poking up in the garden now.
I put so many seeds in the soil, I have no idea
what to expect.
Were you in the lab all day?
Do the cats have enough water?
It seems like every day the snow melts,
then freezes, then melts,
then it snows all over again.
You’re getting spring first.
I’ve never been this far north this time of year.
I came here to see what would happen.
I buried myself in the snow,
listening for something.
It’s breathing quietly.
I miss you. Don’t forget to take out the compost
on Thursday. What are you making for dinner?
I thought I would discover something here.
The earth is so still.
Someone said they saw an otter
scuttling across the frozen river
but I missed it. I think I figured
out one thing: that quivering
feeling in my heart comes straight
from the earth’s mantle.
And there are no metaphors.
I’m sitting here waiting in the plain snow.
Hila Ratzabi is the author of There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), winner of a gold Nautilus Book Award and finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published in Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and others, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside Chicago.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
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