Camille Norton is the author of two books of poems, A Folio for the Dark (Sixteen Rivers Press) and Corruption (Harper Collins). She is a professor of English at University of the Pacific, in Stockton and a member of Sixteen Rivers Press. Her new work is from a manuscript called The Souls of Animals.

Itself

A forest returns to itself after a great harrowing.

How alchemically a forest burns,
clean to the char of the earth.

Bootblack polishes its very root.

The root molders five winters under deluge and snow,
deluge and snow and springs tarry thaw.

Summer's tufted hair grass, fairy rings of mallow,

little bluestem and rustling ryegrass,
spiderwort, milkweed, and the spiked purple thistle

from which a solitary sparrow
                                          flings itself into a meadow.

From A Folio for the Dark (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2019)

Stella Beratlis is the author of Dust Bowl Venus (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2021). Her first collection, Alkali Sink, was one of six nominees for Northern California Book Awards in poetry in 2016. Her work has appeared in California Quarterly, Penumbra, Quercus Review, Song of the San Joaquin, and Harbor Review, among others; and in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. Beratlis's work has been served as Modesto’s poet laureate from 2016-2020, is co-host of a long-running reading series for the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, and works as a community college librarian.

Memory's Nettles

Do you remember biting into
the soggy forkful
of dark stem-and-leaf,
tasting the startling sweetness
of Greek mountain afternoon? In that rocky lot
dotted with wild cyclamen, your sisters—
my aunts—walking slowly, pointing out
clumps with their knives. The oldest, my namesake
in widow’s black, telling the story of boiled
nettles. The soldier who, missing his own
young daughter, wanted to adopt you.
We young women, always the American girls
with tied tongues and half-understanding smiles, know nothing
except the greens. That day we picked
armyra, italika, vlita, radikia; stuffed
our weeds into plastic bags and walked to Lia’s,
where we removed the roots, bathed
the greens in a large zinc tub, and tossed
them into a pot of boiling water. I,
steak knife in my hand, racked my brain
for a word—remember?