Quail Bell is a magazine for “real and unreal stories from around the world.” Today, that includes one of my poems!

Any creation story is both of those themes — in infinitely unfolding ways, infinitely worth unpacking. Click to read this one at Quail Bell, along with visual art that may let you see it through a different lens than this one that I have chosen. 

(If you enjoy the poem, please feel free to “like” it or leave a comment at Quail Bell, so they know folks are enjoying their selections. Thanks!)

Creation Story

​I want to live as madrone tree sheds her bark.

She never stops, you know.
The process is a spiral in
from cinnamon
that curls back as bread just come from fire

and reveals that hue
in a breathless noon, that smells like that moment
the sun sits up
and sips the cup of dew from rested grass.

Singing, that one fissures, as everything does.
And madrone tree, listening hard
at the beautiful wound,
effortfully, confidently, tears the old in two

and makes more
room.