This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from As If This Did Not Happen Every Day by Paula Lambert (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).
Silt
a golden shovel, after Adelaide Simon’s “Panther”
The way of the world is slow but sure. Silt
gives in to freefall, lets itself go where water is
bound, down, ever down, and in its falling
remembers the stone it was, hard and
unyielding, until the glaciers spread, the
wind roared, and finally, finally, river
carried what was left. Silt knows life grinds
us into what we were meant to be, slowly
and fiercely tearing at all that held us down.
Paula J. Lambert has published ten collections of poetry, and a new book, Terms of Venery, Revised, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Also a visual artist and literary translator, her work has been recognized by PEN America and supported by the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at www.paulajlambert.com. 
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, she lives in her hometown Boston, working as an advocate for the homeless, and teaching in the PoemWorks community.
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