What is the landscape of
my life these days? Mudflat
sounds about right—the mud
part and the flat part, messy,
shoe-sucking, unpredictable
depths of murk in the vast
expanse, a floodplain that
stretches and contracts with
seasonal rainfall like my own
deluges of past trauma within
very real ecosystems of hope,
balances delicate, survival fierce,
the place where riverflow meets
salt: ocean, tears, that which spoils
crops but allows brackish-loving
creatures to thrive, animals built
for estuary, transitions and in-
betweens, in a way that I’m not
but perhaps wish I had been,
like grasses that bend with wind
and wave, instead of breaking
and breaking again, brittle with
change and too damp for kindling,
vulnerable to whatever comes next
From the North Carolina piedmont, Lisa Lundeen is a lover of words and wonder, especially all things nature. She is a grateful parent and a board certified chaplain, and she prizes the work of accompanying people through their toughest—and often richest—times. This is her debut poetry publication, and chapbook Wood-Solace, or a Return to Belonging is forthcoming with Plants & Poetry.
Clairette DG is a visual poet and book designer, born in France and currently living in the beautiful Central Coast of California.She practices art and writing everyday and designs books for indie presses and authors. She's also an occasional French teacher and the Artistic Director of Mad Gleam Press, a bilingual collective of writers and artists based in Monterey CA, New-York, and Paris.