You

Run.Feet crush the leaves; waves of terror crawl your spine.Slide.A tree – a savior! Red drops drip down from your ears to the ground.Crack!Terror returns like an old friend. It seems now is your end.Look.A challenge beckons you. Leaning around the bark, you peak into the clearing.Empty?Before you can contemplate, a hand wraps around your throat.“Missed me?”The version of yourself you keep locked away smirks at you.“I’m afraid of the dark.”The clearing dissipates as you are released.Clink!Chains now hold you down.“I don’t want to disappear.”

From Guest Contributor Sydney Clark

Prairie Phantom

Sand rolls steadily along the prairie with a wild wind. The fox finds his home between the sagebrush and through the sunflowers. He leaps airily at ease with his snout grinning. Atop the hill, he shimmies about and slides down while birds depart. Below he creeps to the cemetery and waits for night to lay a veil. A gentle chill glides along as starlight washes over weary stone. With a swift bark and a bound, he weaves among the graves. Moonlight tickles his whiskers and mist wanders in. Here the fox dances with ghosts who once called his prairie home.

From Guest Contributor Kristi Kerico

Kristi is a psychology major at Pikes Peak Community College. She is studying to become a horticultural therapist. She currently works at a bookstore and volunteers at a zoo and nature center. She began writing after enrolling in a creative writing course at PPCC. She enjoys poetry the most, considering it's brief yet complex beauty. She also loves writing with a focus on nature.

Along The River

Tawny wings tail the Arkansas and their shadows brush Russian olive. A hoo! drifts along begging recognition. Drowning the scuttle of waves, a quavering reply invites determination. Feathers ripple towards cottonwoods, nudging the fading sunlight across leaves and between branches. He allows a hoot to stray ahead asking for her to answer with a wandering whistle. The night approaches with a dimming silence that hushes happenings of the day and offers silhouettes. Moonlight shifts over a hollow as a frayed figure sails with unfurled wings. They settle below the canopy and dust bark with steadied feathers, ceasing flight for tonight.

From Guest Contributor Kristi Kerico

Kristi is a psychology major at Pikes Peak Community College. She is studying to become a horticultural therapist. She currently works at a bookstore and volunteers at a zoo and nature center. She began writing after enrolling in a creative writing course at PPCC. She enjoys poetry the most, considering it's brief yet complex beauty. She also loves writing with a focus on nature.

Arborists Cultivate Trees That Look Like Cell Towers

They are pollinated by wind, insects, and calls from former porn stars to their fathers. They disperse packets of data via winged and plumed seeds. They host mosses, mistletoe, birds, and full-duplex digital transceivers. Ultra High Frequency bands of bark, cork, geolocation, quinine, tannin, code division, salicin, syrup, microwaves, and tearful confessions. Across their collinear arrays of dipoles, clustered characters of fury, lust, and suicide notes are passed among their branches. And, late at night, handed over from tree to tree, lined along the Interstate, in streams of ones and zeros, the fathers forgive their daughters and invite them home.

Dale Wisely co-edits Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unlost Journal, and Unbroken Journal. www.dalewisely.com/literary

Bee Grudged

The creature basked in the sensory experience that was home, almost oblivious to the otherwise hypnotic aroma of clover which wafted in from beyond the hive’s entrance each summer.

To most fauna beyond the narrow and disguised access, this was an old tree clinging to its few remaining vital branches.

Rejuvenated, the worker set to follow the next wave out to forage for more nectar and the inadvertent spreading of pollen on which the rest of the planet depended.

Its world ended when a great hairy paw collapsed walls, mashing bee with wax and bark as the bear claimed honey.

From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid

Unwelcome

The skittering as her nails scrabbled at the tiles on the front door hall: impotent in the face of his grip on her favourite leash.

The desperate eyes and face as she strained against a collar she could have slipped off her wasted neck; had her limbs moved that way. That is my last image of Honey.

Her frenzied bark in the background of the terrible phone call I took from traction was the last noise and the reason I vowed never to have another dog.

I’m going to kill the spoiled little Shitzon which pisses on my book collection.

From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid