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Ecotopian

@ecotopian.bsky.social

4547 Followers 6825 Following

Cover of Extinction Song (Tupelo Press, 2026).
THRUST // The purple-stippled, / brindled cultivars defeat / the heat, wrest moisture / from topsoil desiccated / by the sun's dialectic / with the earth, ripe plums / further ripened, the fogged light / chalked across their skin / gesturing to the red flesh: / the plant supplants a word, world.
IOWA, JANUARY In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow. Over and over, he enters the furrow.
In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain, a child was born in a cave in order to save the world; it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart. To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother’s breast, the steam out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar. He was but a dot, and a dot was the star. Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away— from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star was looking into the cave. And that was the Father’s stare.
“Coroner in the Kitchen,” from A. H. Jerriod Avant’s Muscadine (Four Way Books, 2023).
Krystal Anali Vasquez’s Lady Without Land (Texas Review Press, 2024)
Pastoral A peach tree in the snow. A black cloud in a peach tree in the snow. I am talking, now, to a consultant from the online tax firm about a form that needs fixing and this flimsy piece of former wood wavers in the hand. In the wind, in the hand. It could have made peaches, or framed a house’s bones. Instead it serves as background for columns of numbers that signify financial decline. A real and imminent catastrophe. It is Greek, catastrophe, meaning “downturn,” and derives primarily from theater. A peach tree in the snow. Paper leaves in a peach tree in the snow. Across the street, some men fell a tree, a rigid pine whose torqued enormity reminds me of the clustered redwoods lining the campus creek or logged to build Victorian structures hulking Telegraph’s curb. They put the wood in a machine that makes wood chips. The smell of burning gas precipitates a real and imminent catastrophe. A peach tree in the snow. Wood chips in a peach tree in the snow. Sheep, deer, wild elk. With their antlers they terrorize the bark. Anthers. The purple flowers throw their seed and other flowers catch it. Spent stamen, little rusted pistol. A bullet lodged in the trunk. My daughter decapitates dandelions, cradles the heads in her hand, watches as the old ones scatter in the real and imminent wind. They float on unimpeded in the hand, in the wind. A peach tree in the snow. Shell casings in a peach tree in the snow. My species is industrious, dapper and intelligent, formed in the lucid substance between the sublime and the belligerent. Ice caps retire and slip into a warming, gorgeous sea. We place granite on our counters, white stones in the garden. We watch the turbines turn. A black cloud in the snow. A peach tree in a black cloud in the snow.
to swaddle the rifle, to wipe clean its lip / to sponge dried milk from an infant’s cheek / to dribble the oil, to torch it completely / to scrape the whole whale from the beach / to stack gold plates, illustrate utopia / to soak the sun’s light from the pitch of the roof / to pace time, its sugared circularity / to unfold its mountainous chain / to husk corn, shuck calcium from mollusks / to shear the lichen-eaten willow oak / to garble the language, gum the words / to tattoo the script on a canvas of palm / to cradle the cycle, censure the system / to scoop, from the floor, a loose silverfish / to swirl the garbage, to compost the knife / to temper the rage in the hurricane’s eye / to filter the fire, to breed the abyss / to pluck bottle caps from ribcages of birds
Text of "By the Pond: Watching the Goldfish," by Carol Snow. "(why?)—the body passive, / small eye movements (as though in a dream)."