This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from There are Still Woods by Hila Ratzabi (June Road Press 2022).
Nocturne
The mountains hold their purple
tightly to themselves.
The sky is smudged by a finger
dipped in pink.
Under herons’ wings
a shifting blue swoops in.
The artists can’t keep up with its names:
cobalt, cerulean, turquoise, cyan.
While they talk, the bay keeps bluing
and re-bluing, the moon widening
into its whiteness
like a growling mouth.
A million-year-old croak
lines the sky of the heron’s flight.
We watch the blues blacken
and the pinks dissipate
like gowns dragged across the sky.
We flick on our flashlights,
step onto the path,
poised for black bears and snakes,
too late to settle on the color’s proper name,
folded as it is into the forest’s throat.
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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