Monthly Archives: December 2025

Stone

I am soaring miles above the earth.
Below me,
the smooth surface of the precambrian shield
is flowing like a river.

Water snakes and winds around bedrock.
Vast swathes of forest and wetland
are changing shape,
dancing with the living granite.

The stone tells me:
“Everything good lives on forever in spirit
and returns to the Earth when it is ready.”

I wake and remember Kateri,
their hand on a boulder,
saying, "This is the speed
at which Spirit moves."

Silas Foxton is a tattoo artist and community worker meandering around the great lakes basin. Their work picks at a simultaneously strained and reverent relationship to land, ancestry, and identity which draws on experiences of dream life and things only seen out of the corner of one’s eye.

Dominion

is not exploitation’s synonym,
reason’s rationale for ruined resources,
permission to pursue people as assets,
a commandment to act as God.
 
it calls us to be
secure in our skin
so others can be in theirs,
acknowledge that abundance means
enough for all not more for me,
understand equality and equity
are not the same,
see the forest and the trees,
know the village it takes is lifeless
until we dwell in it.

Duncan Smith grew up on a farm in southeastern North Carolina in the 1960s in one of the nation’s historically poorest counties. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A public librarian who started a database company, he published his first poem at the age of twenty. Decades later he published his second poem, reclaiming writing and poetry as a long-lost and recovered passion. Duncan’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in BRILLIG, Broad River Review, The Crucible, Kakalak and online in North Carolina Literary Review, Red Eft Review, Table Rock Journal.

Waiting Hours

This month, there has been no revelation,
no miraculous sign, no sudden turn.
The earth spins slowly and my poems end
without the Spirit stealing my pen.
He does not work the same way twice, I know,
and still, the ache for Him to work at all:
I know You could heal me if You gave me the words.
I know what it feels like to be surprised.
I read once of a type of bamboo that, once planted,
didn’t show a sprout for three years. In a day,
it grew straight into the sky.

Elle Rosamilia grew up in upstate New York, moved to Mississippi for college, and spent the next three years teaching English in North Africa and studying theology in the UK. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she can be found reading poetry on her lunch breaks and writing in the pockets of free time she has amidst her retail job. Her latest poetry collection, The Mourner’s Almanac, explores seasons of grief and hope, and she has poems published in Prosetrics and Vessels of Light.