Made Visible
by Johanna DeBiase
My dog's barks became loud and incessant. I was worried she'd wake the kids. I rolled out of my sack on the bottom bunk and tried to quiet the creak of the door as I stepped outside the yurt in my long underwear into the cool night air. Five feet deep of snow rolled out like a blanket, across the meadow between the pine and spruce to the creek below and beyond atop the higher peaks further in the distance.
The full moon made the snow meadow glow like a fresh water pearl and accounted for my inability to sleep – super moon, vernal equinox. I unfastened my dog's leash and beckoned her to join me by the fire inside. Instead, she stared intently to the south along the side of the yurt, her snout pointed forward, her chest engaged and ready to leap into action.
I leaned over her to look. My heart startled. A black silhouette contrasted sharply against the iridescent snow – an animal, sitting upright, bigger than a cat, smaller than a dog, pointy ears and a bushy tail, which it waved across its body affectionately. It was staring back at me. I grabbed my dog's collar and pulled her quickly inside. My heart thumping out of my chest. Out the window, the fox continued to walk across the field and into the trees beyond.
Foxes live in between – night and day, meadow and forest; because of this, they are known for their ability to camouflage. Tribal people across the world revere fox medicine for its power of invisibility. Yet, this fox, this fox wanted to be seen.
Spring.
Moon.
Fox.
the fullness of it came closer
by Robin Powlesland
I can layer these names
into the texture between
morning and its due
possibly see the shadow cast
in midnights from before
I was young then and younger now
knowing that you have left
nothing behind you other than this
layering of camel buts
shorn and tossed about
my patio
I can see in the glare
of this moon
how this place has made
me what I wasn't before
Untitled
by Charles Clayton
Archetype of emotion
born of violent collision.
Reflecting pool reveals chunks of stardust
rejected by Sun's gravity embrace.
Far from the light, elliptical roaming,
then plunge towards a terrestrial speck
seething spinning coalescing cooling.
COLLISION.
Man on the moon a chunk of
Mother Earth, a chip off the old block.
Gray dust settles.
Mountains cast long lonely shadows.
Wax wane.
Tug at the sea.
Soak up gamma rays.
Eat meteors.
Light up the primordial night as
the blue orb below manifests bacterial
(r)evolutions from sea to slimy sea.
Billions of trips around the Sun.
Silver beams shine upon
trilobite backs
jellyfish glow
triceratop horns
mastadon woes
flecks of chipped stone
firepits and charred bones.
Every so often:
“Wolves are eating the moon!”
Eye of Horus, stolen.
Cough it up, sky dragon,
Shaman’s going to yank that arrow out
And make it all right again.
Untitled
by Eric Mack
During what would be my last year, I spent much of it traveling to the surrounding villages, recording oral histories from Native elders for the radio station. One old man in his late seventies from a northern village that sits just below the Arctic Circle shared a simple anecdote about how he used to monitor the extreme cold temperatures that had since become less frequent occurrences due to climate change. Sixty below is still common in Fairbanks, but the nights of minus ninety are long gone. In the 1940s, it seems, thermometers were a luxury not readily available in the villages, so the old man had developed his own scale for taking temperature when traveling overnight by sleddog team.
“50 below, that’s easy… you seen that before – just take a cup of hot water off the pot on the fire, throw it up in the air. If nothing comes down, you hit minus 50,” he explained, referring to a phenomenon that’s now widely demonstrated by awe-struck college students in Fairbanks on numerous Internet videos. “Now, 70 below… don’t see that much anymore these days, but back then, when your kerosene turned to jelly, you knew you hit 70.”
The old man paused, took a sip of watery coffee from a styrofoam cup, moved the microphone on the table in front of him back a few inches, then continued:
“Then, at 90 below, my dogs’ tails just fell off.”
He stood up, grabbed the cup and headed for the coffee pot in the other room.
“But, wait… what happened to the dogs?” I called after him, completely missing the point of the story and no longer concerned about his proximity to the microphone.
“Oh, they was fine… Sometimes maybe one of ‘em would quit, usually the older or sick ones… just lay down and die. Nothin’ you could do for ‘em. But most of ‘ems would be just fine, you just hook ‘em up to the sled, and they’d just run, they just leave them tails behind and just keep movin’… gotta keep movin’ to survive.”
Untitled
by Gary Feuerman
It was something that had not happened in hundreds of years. Before Shakespeare, the telescope, the Mona Lisa; just after the dark ages. 1378. Man was still relatively few and dealing with plagues. America did not exist and the United Kingdom was not so united. Venice thrived, and my lineage was lost somewhere between Crusades-scarred southern realms and forested hills in the mid north of Europe where wild boar and wolves killed some of my nervous ancestors. And here I was with friends, on a couch sitting on a dirt driveway in northern New Mexico, sipping vodka, craning my neck to see the orange moon, like a pill in the sky, like a globular glass of Lipton tea. December 21, 2010. A gathering of writers, wild souls watching ravens in the high tree branches, meteors streaking in green-white glitter, and the moon-sun dance, choreographed and timed to the minute, organization and deliberation among chaos. It was mild for December 21st. No snow on the ground, sweaters enough at midnight and later. The slow shading and unshading of the moon gave us patience. We sipped slower than usual. Not since 1378 had anyone witnessed this. Who saw it then? A shepherd? A monk on a mountain top in Tibet? A writer at her table scribbling by candlelight. An executioner with insomnia feeling vaguely guilty about the next head? Did anyone write about it? The printing press had yet to be invented. Did the Anasazi view it from the sacred circle of stones? Did they know it was coming? Most of the people went inside soon after the moon was covered. A friend and I waited it out. Full light returned near 3am. I was not sure what it meant or will mean to me, but it felt like the completion of a cycle.
