Two Poems

1. This disappearing, how it makes

house become island, as inland pushes out
land. Outlandish, you say, this push and pull—
in your hurricane’s eye, everything calms
while disasters swirl at your outlets. You reverse
butterfly. If some coral reefs necrotize in some part
of the world you eyelashed one holiday, then
what of you? If some cities along the coast freeze
suspended in a puddle of sweat, well welcome the
reprieve. A strophe is a turning. Catastrophe, a sudden
turn. Both you and I, complicit. We ate of land, us
landed men & women landing on shores
making earth from Earth, unmaking Earth. We
will glut on her mineral veins until the blood spills,
the oil spills, the levees break, the planet
breaks. Both you and I, forgetting. Nature is not a god
of proportion.

Maria S. Picone is a Korean American adoptee who won Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. She has been published in Ice Floe Press, Bending Genres, Whale Road Review, and more, including Best Small Fictions 2021. She has received grants from Kenyon Review, Lighthouse Writers, GrubStreet, The Watering Hole, SAFTA, The Speakeasy Project, and others. She is the prose editor at Chestnut Review, poetry editor at The Hanok Review, associate editor at Uncharted Mag, and managing editor at Emerge Literary Journal. Her work explores identity, social justice, pop culture, and multilinguality. Her Twitter is @mspicone.

Edited by Emilie Menzel and Teri Vela.

The featured image is “Factory — Study for ‘Ironworkers, Noontime’” by Thomas Anshutz (1880), selected and manipulated specifically for Maria’s poems by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

1. This disappearing, how it makes

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