Grand Canyon by Veronica Hosking (LANDMARKS Series)

Grand Canyon
by Veronica Hosking

No brick wall impedes
long trip down into canyon
I keep my distance

PHOTO: The Grand Canyon (Arizona) by Sonaal Bangera on Unsplash.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The Grand Canyon is practically in my backyard. Every time we visit, I keep my distance from the edge. It is a spectacular view, but not recommended for anyone like myself with acrophobia.

PHOTO: The author at the Grand Canyon (2019).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Veronica Hosking is a wife, mother, and poet. She lives in the desert southwest with her husband and two daughters. Her family and day job, cleaning the house, serve as inspiration for most of her poetry. She was the poetry editor for MaMaZina magazine from 2006-2011. “Spikier Spongier” appeared in Stone Crowns magazine (November 2013). “Desperate Poet” was posted on the Narrator International website and reprinted in Poetry Nook (February 2014).  Silver Birch Press has published several of her poems upon first accepting “Rain Drops” in  the Half New Year poetry collection (July 2014). She keeps a poetry blog at vhosking.wordpress.com.

Hermitage: Grand Canyon, 2015 by Jagari Mukherjee (LANDMARKS Series)

Hermitage: Grand Canyon, 2015
by Jagari Mukherjee

Taking in the Grand Canyon
from its South Rim,
slowly sipping a tall hot apple cider
I discover my own hermitage.

The interiors of my being
feel the balm.
Sore splinters of the past find relief.
I build a cool stone shelter
where dream catchers hang from walls
and Hopi dolls fill the shelves.

The nights are lit only by stars
cut into the velvet paper of the black sky.
With sunrise, I worship
the Vishnu and Shiva temple peaks
reddening at dawn.

I stir pink prickly pear syrup
into my coffee, and wonder how I,
(who apparently have nothing),
am the happiest person on earth.

PHOTO: The Grand Canyon by Sojy John on Unsplash

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I first visited the US (where my sister lives) in 2015 with my parents. It was our first family vacation after 10 years. We visited several places, but our hands-down favorite was the Grand Canyon. We took a cottage on the South Rim and had the most wonderful time. It was possibly the happiest moment of my life. Even today, whenever I think of the Grand Canyon, I am filled with what Wordsworth calls “the bliss of solitude.”

PHOTO: The author at the Grand Canyon (2015).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jagari Mukherjee is a gold medalist in English Literature, a Best of the Net 2018 nominee, as well as a DAAD scholar from Technical University (Dresden, Germany) and a Bear River alumna. Her poems and other creative pieces have been published in different venues both in India and abroad. Her latest book, The Elegant Nobody, was published by Hawakal Publishers in January 2020. She is the winner of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 for Book Review, Poeisis Award for Excellence in Poetry 2019, as well as the recipient of the Reuel International Prize For Poetry 2019, among other awards. She is a part of the Reviews team at The Blue Nib.

At the South Rim by JC Sulzenko (LANDMARKS Series)

At the South Rim
by JC Sulzenko

A blind man goes to the Grand Canyon. NO, it’s no joke.
He really travels there, asks his friend, What do you see?
He turns toward her, toward her reply.

She looks past him across long shelves of rock,
down, down, down to a mud-brown river.
She does not answer.

No wind, no rustling leaves rescue her
from the penury of her words.
What’s it like? he insists.

She squares her shoulders, picks up a rock,
a slice of shale. Puts it in his palm.
What’s this?

She closes her hand around his. Hold it tight.
Feel the ridges, the cracks, the rough edges.    
That’s the canyon in your hand.

Yes, yes. But so what? He leans forward,
two steps away from a drop of 2000 feet.
She pulls him back.

He grips her wrist.
I need to know. I NEED to know
what it looks like.

She tries again. Cliffs and plateaus contour down,
layer upon layer, ledge upon ledge,
to the river, thin as a ribbon from up here.

How far down, how deep?      
She squints at the staircase befitting giants and myths.
Stand 1000 men, each six feet tall,

shoulder-on-shoulder. That’s how deep.
He nods. Are there colours?
What colours?

She frowns, has never asked
if his eyes remember
mortal colours or know only shades.

Think of scales on a piano: the treble— 
high and sharp, cold and brittle
as the limestone below the rim.

Lower in the chasm, think of bass chords,
warm as the lava-red rocks that catch,
hold the desert sun.

The canyon, a concerto—its movements
aligned with the fanfare of dawn,
with the coda of dusk.     

She smiles, turns to her companion.
He nods his head.
I see, I see.

PHOTO: The Grand Canyon, Arizona, by JC Sulzenko.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My only visit to the Grand Canyon almost a decade ago led me to write “At the South Rim” years later. I had approached the lookout with eyes downcast. When I raised my head, I could barely take in the spectacle it was my privilege to see. I was not prepared for how this wonder’s scale and beauty would affect me and stay with me to this day.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JC Sulzenko’s poems appeared on Arc’s Poem of the Year shortlist, and have been featured in Vallum, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Oratorealis, Naugatuck River Review, and online — either under her name or as A. Garnett Weiss. The Light Ekphrastic and Silver Birch Press have published her work. In 2019, she won the Wind and Water Writing Contest and WrEN Award (Children’s Poetry), and judged poetry for the National Capital Writing Contest. In 2018, Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology (Mansfield Press) as well as the Poet’s Pathway and County CollAboRaTive projects featured her writing. Point Petre Publishing released her South Shore Suite…POEMS in 2017. Her centos took top honours in The Bannister Anthology (2016, 2013). She has presented workshops for the Ottawa International Writers Festival, the Griffin Trio, MASC, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, the Ottawa Public Library, and a number of Alzheimer societies, among others. She co-authored chapbooks Slant of Light and Breathing Mutable Air with fellow Canadian Carol A. Stephen, and currently curates the Glebe Report’s Poetry Quarter, plus serves as a selector for bywords.ca. Visit her at jcsulzenko.com.

Shelter in a Temporary Place by Leah Mueller (MY FRONT DOOR Series)

Shelter in a Temporary Place
by Leah Mueller

Wooden eye with heavy cataracts
opens and closes. I step outside
like Dorothy, hand on knob,
pale face exposed to color.

The sound of rain deafens me:
sloppy crunch of gravel as cars
turn the corner towards the alley.

The insistence of it. News
wafts inside like a bad stench.

A woman passes, face mask snug
across her nostrils: vinyl leash taut
as her dog still strains for the park.

My flimsy door won’t
hold back this tide much longer.
I flee towards another, more
sturdy than the one I borrowed.

Invaders always enter portals.
Locks beg to be broken,
wood splintered until the
hinges no longer hold.

I search for an opening
to a wide, undamaged street
and a room no one can enter
without my permission.

If I drive all night without stopping
I will outrun the bandits
and the law: the whole damn posse,
trying its best to take me alive.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:  I wrote this poem from the perspective of a Washingtonian, smack dab in the hot zone of a coronavirus pandemic, getting ready to flee the state and move to Bisbee, Arizona. Last summer, my husband was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. This dramatically altered our life plans. We sold our only investment, a tiny condo near the Canadian border, and bought a small house in Bisbee. Then the virus took hold. Some businesses shut down, and others struggled to keep their doors open. A forced meditation about the impermanence and fragility of everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Leah Mueller is an indie writer and spoken word performer, stuck in the void between Tacoma, Washington, and Bisbee, Arizona. She has published books with numerous small presses. Her most recent volumes, Misguided Behavior, Tales of Poor Life Choices (Czykmate Press), Death and Heartbreak (Weasel Press), and Cocktails at Denny’s (Alien Buddha Press) were released in 2019. Leah’s work appears or is forthcoming in Blunderbuss, Citron Review, The Spectacle, Bad Pony, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and other publications. She won honorable mention in the 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest. Visit her on Facebook and Twitter.

Taking Root by Jari Thymian (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

Taking Root
by Jari Thymian

In every first photo, I can feel the potential
for falling desperately in love with a place.

Here I am pierced with awe at sunrise by the ocotillo
and saguaro, the volcanic formations like a sundial

using shadow to erase human-era names through
millennia. A house and its history fade from the upper

left-hand corner, a bit of debris in a layer
of conglomerate in my thoughts like a past lover

that left a tender fingerprint on my ever-shortening
years. A coati anchors me earthbound while its tail

and torso undulate in the crown of a tree. I can drink
prickly pear wine or tequila while living here at this park

for a few short months, close to the source and force
of nature. At some unmarked time, it happens. Aphrodisiacs

take over. Love like no other. For a moment, although I know
I am transient and wander like wind to wilderness and forest,

to take other first photos, I feel like the Baja boojum tree taking
root in this foreign soil, finding home for maybe five hundred years.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My husband and I are fortunate to have a lifestyle that allows us to live in state and national parks and public lands of all kinds. We live and volunteer at a park from four to six months, then move to another park. We get to know not only the specific site, but also the area, the people, the history, the geology, and the wildlife. Where we live always has a heightened sense of adventure and novelty. We live in an RV and no longer own a house. Currently, we’re volunteers at Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior, Arizona, and the Tonto National Forest. This coming summer, we’ll be in the Black Hills near Spearfish, South Dakota. As park/wilderness junkies, we get to deeply love many places.

PHOTOGRAPH: “Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Superior, Arizona” by Greg Fischer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jari Thymian’s poetry has appeared in publications including Matrix, Ekphrasis, Ken*Again, Memoir (and), The Pedestal, The Christian Science Monitor, and American Tanka. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, The Meaning of Barns, was published by Finishing Line Press. She volunteers year-round in state and national parks in the United States while living in a small RV with her husband, Greg Fischer. No mortgage, few possessions, many stories.

Through the Chiricahua Range by Jeffrey C. Alfier (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

Through the Chiricahua Range
by Jeffrey C. Alfier

Not even a forest road, but a switchback shouldered
by crumbling granite. Broken undulations,

trampled byways, printed in the rise and fall
of contour lines that plait my map. From a foothill

road no one bothered to name, I watch corrals
bedded in the gorge of Horseshoe Canyon, train

my sights on horses no longer there beneath skies
gathered in the pewter shade of monsoons, above

debris and flood deposits left by forerunning storms
that quenched the languid fumes of ancient droughts.

With awkward grace a deer bolts through spinal
shadows of burnt ponderosa pine, wakes the infrangible

silence of my sunstruck gazing. A kestrel’s sudden
wing-shadow draws my line of sight toward shuttered

mine shafts, the open palm of San Simon Valley
beyond, where wolves once threshed the undergrowth.

I have come this late to these foothills, brow grimed
with dust and salt, but better now than in my youth,

mortality the sole plight of the aged then, none
of the unheeded toll of errors that own me now.

The sky westers in penumbral stormlight,
shadows racing me along rising cutbank walls.

PHOTOGRAPH: “Toward the Chircahua Mountains, Rt. 191, Arizona” (March 2014) by Jeffrey C. Alfier.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jeffrey C. Alfier is winner of the 2014 Kithara Book Prize for his poetry collection, Idyll for a Vanishing River (Glass Lyre Press, 2013). His latest work is The Color of Forgiveness, a poetry collaboration with Tobi Alfier (Mojave River Review Press). He is also author of The Wolf Yearling (Silver Birch Press, 2013) and The Storm Petrel – Poems of Ireland (Grayson Books).

Wait Till the Scorpions Come Out by Sara Clancy (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

Wait Till the Scorpions Come Out
— for N
by Sara Clancy

You hate the desert and I don’t,
it’s as simple as that. I point out
the blossoms on the clumped barrel
cacti, you show me the pack rat
midden in between. We are both

right, but since it is February
and temperate as any June day
on Cape Cod, the point goes to me.
The match will go to you soon enough
in the season I choose to forget,

as surely as the diamondback
disaster you saved me from tripping
over last spring and the other sting
of recognition from underneath the birdbath
we were foolish enough to move.

Originally published in The Toucan (Spring 2013).

PHOTOGRAPH: “Evening in the Sonoran Desert” (February 2015) by Sara Clancy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sara Clancy is a Philadelphia transplant to the Desert Southwest. Her poems have appeared in The Linnet’s Wings, Burningword Literary Journal, The Madison Review, Verse Wisconsin, The Toucan, VAYAVYA and Houseboat, where she was a featured poet. She lives in Arizona with her husband. They both look down carefully before stepping outside.

Desert Spring by Veronica Hosking (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

DESERT SPRING
by Veronica Hosking

Every morning I wake to greet
Sunshine and love my warm retreat
Back east they are shoveling snow
My desert spring lush in dry heat

Though the desert is not as green
I will not offer up a keen
Glad to miss seven feet of snow
Now where did I put my sunscreen?

IMAGE: “Sonoran Desert, Spring Bloom” by Scott McGuire. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Veronica Hosking is a wife, mother, and poet. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in English education at Buffalo State College before moving to the desert. Her poetry has appeared in Stone Crowns, Poetry Nook, narratorINTERNATIONAL, and Silver Birch Press. She was the poetry editor for MaMaZina from 2006-2011.Veronica shares poetry about raising her two daughters and being a housewife on her blog vhosking.wordpress.com.

Canyon de Chelly, poem by Simon J. Ortiz

CANYON DE CHELLY
by Simon J. Ortiz

Lie on your back on stone
the stone carved to fit
the shape of yourself.
Who made it like this,
knowing that I would be along
in a million years and look
at the sky being blue forever?

My son is near me. He sits
and turns on his butt
and crawls over to stones,
picks one up and holds it,
and then puts it in his mouth.
The taste of stone.
What is it but stone,
the earth in your mouth.
You, son, are tasting forever.

We walk to the edge of a cliff
and look down into the canyon.
On this side, we cannot see
the bottom cliffedge but looking
further out, we see fields,
sand furrows, cottonwoods.
In winter, they are softly gray,
The cliffs’ shadows are distant,
hundreds of feet below;
we cannot see our own shadows,
The wind moves softly into us,
My son laughs with the wind;
he gasps and laughs.

We find gray root, old wood,
so old, with curious twists
in it, curving back into curves,
juniper, pinon, or something
with hard, red berries in spring.
You taste them, and they are sweet
and bitter, the berries a delicacy
for bluejays. The plant rooted
fragilely in a sandy place
by a canyon wall, the sun bathing
shiny, pointed leaves.
My son touches the root carefully,
aware of its ancient quality.
He lays his soft, small fingers on it
and looks at me for information.
I tell him: wood, an old root,
and around it, the earth, ourselves.

NOTE: Canyon de Chelly National Monument was established on April 1, 1931 as a unit of the National Park Service. It is located in northeastern Arizona within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation. Reflecting one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes of North America, it preserves ruins of the early indigenous tribes that lived in the area, including the Ancient Pueblo Peoples (also called Anasazi) and Navajo. The monument covers 83,840 acres and encompasses the floors and rims of the three major canyons: de Chelly, del Muerto, and Monument. These canyons were cut by streams with headwaters in the Chuska mountains just to the east of the monument. None of the land is federally owned. In 2009, Canyon de Chelly National Monument was recognized as one of the most-visited national monuments in the United States. (SOURCE: wikipedia.org.)

PHOTO: “Canyon de Chelly” by Ansel Adams (1941)

Farm Notes, poem by Simon J. Ortiz

FARM NOTES (Excerpt)
by Simon J. Ortiz

…”What would you say that the main theme
of your poetry is?”
“To put it as simply as possible,
I say it this way: to recognize
the relationships I share with everything.”

I would like to know well the path
from just east of Black Mountain
to the gray outcropping of Roof Butte
without having to worry
about the shortest way possible.

NOTE: With an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet, Roof Butte is the highest peak of the Chuska Mountains, which run in a north-northwest direction across the Arizona-New Mexico border.

PHOTO: “Roof Butte” found at surgent.net.