This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from There are Still Woods by Hila Ratzabi (June Road Press 2022).
The Bright Side
Melting ice is turning the Arctic Sea into a giant buffet for
killer whales.
—Scientific American, February 20, 2012
Killer whales are making a killing:
fewer ice caps for prey to hide.
The trumpeter swan is expanding north:
more space and time to breed.
New winds in Antarctica
help the albatross find food.
Snakes and salamanders
live longer, get fatter.
Other winners include
ticks, fleas, beetles, mosquitoes.
I’ve been strolling around Philadelphia
all winter in a light jacket,
past flowers and chirping birds,
while other species float away.
Perhaps in fifty years I’ll retire up north
to Canada, the new Florida.
I’ll wait out hurricanes in the dark,
place one hand over the other
until the trembling stops.
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.
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dressing the Bear by Susan L. Leary - May 13, 2026
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dressing the Bear by Susan L. Leary - May 12, 2026
- Sundress Reads: Review of The Mothers - May 11, 2026