This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from There are Still Woods by Hila Ratzabi (June Road Press 2022).
Element
Under the curtain
of the Sitka spruce
I stand dumb
Beneath my feet
a stony language
buried in green
And the birds
I can’t handle the birds
Urgent chirps
behind my back
Grass lined up in lowercase l’s
italicized by the wind
The cloud opens its mouth
breathing vowels and light
I will never get over the earth
how each element invisibly
accommodates the next
It looks so easy
I think I could do that
stitch air to grass
slip into water
spin dervishly
in the wordless wind
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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