from a field guide to future flora
it’s amazing how the sun is a soft structure a suiter how the light returns the next day how systems flourish the end of a world is a continuance of another how mice digest owls is a reversal of expectations how cells gossip withselves how microbes tangle tiny dramashow for the bat a white nose is a mile-a-minute how a princess tree is a wind spinner a leaf is a limb a bad metaphor how floranauts demand labourfrom horse flies hummingbirds a possum is a friendly neighbour is a kind of bee a kind bomb a time bomb a realtor a mob how one colony is much like anotherhow the wasp trades with the flower how this meadow is pink or green lichens queue fists of wheat how repetition is a system how a stem is a neck craning with seasonal indifference how the flowerhead is a vagrant an intruder a network of dirthow a system is a verb a noun and something gross in between
Feature Date
- June 3, 2024
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
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Copyright © 2021 by Orchid Tierney.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Orchid Tierney is from Aotearoa New Zealand and teaches at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. She is the author of a year of misreading the wildcats (Operating System, 2019) and chapbooks looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023), my Beatrice (above/ground press, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX 2019), blue doors (Belladonna* Press), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF 2017), among others. Her scholarship has appeared in Venti, SubStance, Jacket2, the Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century American Poetry and Politics, and forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry. She is a co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics and a senior editor at the Kenyon Review.
Harpy Hybrid Review is an online literary journal that celebrates the many and varied ways literary and poetic expression can be combined.
Harpy Hybrid Review seeks works that are hybrid or cross-genre in form as well as visual art, including but not limited to prose poems, lyric essays, translations, song lyrics, diagrams, ekphrastic poems, multilingual work, broadsides, erasures, found poems, comics, collages, photography, etc.—not to be showy, but simply because they cannot be expressed in any other way.
Harpy Hybrid Review seeks to publish established and new writers, social justice and lyric works—anything that makes us look at the world in a different way.
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