Wash Me in Intention by Jaya Avendel (HOW TO HEAL THE EARTH Series)

Wash Me in Intention
by Jaya Avendel

Mosaiced at the banks with
Pink, blue, and yellow plastics
Water chokes between the drowning
Colors, cuts into the earth and
Sinks ice into skin.

Ask for paper
If the cloth on your flesh
Cannot warp into a bag.

Ask for paper
If your golden locks cannot
Braid into a basket.

Press glass to your cheek
Scatter rocks dipped in sugar syrup
For the bees; preserve in honey and wax
Dreams and moments of sweet intention.

PAINTING: Beautiful rhythm in the lotus pond by Dayou Lu (2019).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: My sisters visited the James River a few months ago and told me the water was thick, muddy-yellow, clogged with plastic bags and trash. Plastic waste is one of the biggest threats to marine life. Plastics also impede our ability to maintain a healthy, clean water supply on earth due to short life, increased use, and poor waste disposal. It is not much but asking for paper bags at the shops and using reusable shopping bags is one of the many small things my family and I are able to do to help reduce plastic waste in the want of a cleaner future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jaya Avendel is a micro poetess and word witch from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, passionate about life where it intersects with writing and the dreamscapes lost in between. With writing published at Green Ink Poetry, Lamplit Underground, Feral Magazine, and The Anthropocene Hymnal Anthology, she writes at ninchronicles.com and tweets as @AvendelJaya.

Witch Brooms by Laurel Benjamin (THOUGHTS ABOUT THE EARTH Series)

Witch Brooms
by Laurel Benjamin

Some of us will not make it, expire singing
the same chord with rattled tongues
but don’t worry, we’ve signed our wills
burned our love letters—

water locust
Texas walnut
chalk maple
pyramid magnolia
two wing silver bell

Rip out their lungs, the tree managers
and climate experts, then like us they cannot
breathe. Grate their fists to pink cardboard
strike a match to their hair.

Tell them to stop salting roads
whole towns of deformed buds
welting and drying off, stunted
branch tips, witch brooms.

We can make up for what is lost
like a waist cincher. Small branches hanging
don’t whittle us
black cape and pointed hat

raise us like your own children
peeling like paper
leaves greened then yellowed
arms reaching to gather sun

Previously published in Tiny Seed Literary Journal (April 2021).

PHOTO: Witch’s Brooms by Licht-aus.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Extinction is one of the topics I write about, in concert with nature metaphors overall. I read many journals about natural history and topical articles, including one that discussed the problem of salting roads in winter, in colder climates in the U.S. The only way to express the problem was in a persona poem, making the disturbance even more intimate.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laurel Benjamin is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Black Fox, Word Poppy Press, Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, South Florida Poetry Journal, Trouvaille Review, One Art, Tiny Seed, California Quarterly, MacQueens Quinterly, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and the Port Townsend Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College.