Air Travel

There’s something magic 
when an airplane coming 
in for a landing casts 
its shadow on you. 

A shadow pregnant 
with three hundred lives. 

At night now, you’re 
watching a plane 
as it crosses the moon. 

Now the ripe plane silhouettes 
the sun’s reflected light. 

Meta/physics

When the eclipse happens, the sun 
and the moon caught in a dance 
named for the moment they cross 
each other, the world stops. 

Sitting in the temperamental twilight, 
I imagine people of the past with different 
knowing blaming an angry god, a season’s 
light sacrifice, the serpent of discord 
swallowing the egg of the sun whole. 

What do the elephants who hold a palm leaf 
aloft and sway in the moonlight do now? 
Start their prayer early, celebrate twice? 
Do the crabs on the beaches, whose internal 
clocks keep time with the tides so fluently 
they are accurate even in space or miles 
underground, feel the deception and retreat? 

How does astrology make less sense than bees, 
who fly in spite of physics, or the electron 
cloud that keeps us from ever really touching 
anything even as we reach for each other across 
time, over and over again? Even as we hold 
hands, heal bones, break bread, gather honey, 
climb trees, grind herbs, build homes, smooth 

the cycle of Sisyphean accomplishment, cracking 
impossible over our knee in our most effortless 
deeds. How else do we make sense of these 
magics, things we know in a way that can’t be 
explained or understood, except by treating them 
like ghosts, and humoring those who pretend 
they haven’t always had many names? 

Totality

When I looked 
through my telescope 
at the moon 
when I was a kid, 
it seemed strange 
that I couldn’t hear it. 
I suppose I did hear it 
in the tide, 
in the waves 
both on the Pacific 
and in the earth 
that made the house settle, 
that shifted buildings just a little. 
Now watching the eclipse, 
here in its totality, 
it seems strange again 
that it’s a thing 
you can’t hear. 
Such a large thing, 
I should be able to listen to it. 
All I hear are the ahs 
that escape my neighbors as 
day turns into night. 

Circumnavigation

Growing up on the Pacific, 
the only waters that ever 
compared were The Ionian. 
When I stand before 
a strange sea, I remember 
every other ocean, how they 
all breathe the same current 
in and out. I think of harvesting 
water in vials as souvenirs, 
each dip the same except for 
the molecule’s orientation 
when they were taken, 
a journey across the globe 
I should be able to hear 
if I hold the glass shell 
up to my ear and listen. 
The drip of red Sahara dust 
in Amsterdam melt? Cycles 
of ancient Rhine rain? Dead sea 
salt tinkling like a wind chime? 
Caldera mist in the crackling heat? 
Nile micro-sprites dancing to a lute? 
If you were to put a pearl’s 
drop on a slide and consult 
it with microscopic eyes, 
what would you see? 
What is really a telescopic 
view of the world transforming 
sea into cloud and back again? 

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

Shaymaa Mahmoud

has a Master’s degree in International Relations with a Historical Perspective from Leiden University, and two Bachelor’s degrees from UC Berkeley, one in English and the other in Gender & Women’s Studies. As an activist, writer, poet, and travel and nature enthusiast, she is most interested in work that gives marginalized voices the platform they deserve and creates more awareness of and context for decolonization.

She was the Poetry Editor for Rind Literary Magazine for several years, and her work has been published in places like Chiron Review, CLAM, East Jasmine Review, and Village Poets Anthology. She is currently working on two flash-fiction novels and lives in Jamestown, drawing out plans for a tiny house and trying to fill it with the witchiest stuff she can find.