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Come with me into the expansive gift of poetry to experience a disruption of habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. The magic of poetry happens when it is spoken, heard and felt as vibrations in your body.
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 photo by Leah Berman
 "Pacto" Linocut by Eduardo Robledo
 Living from the Depths by Doug Van Houten
 Aurora Light During the Night Photo by Mike Lewinski
 My DNA results came in. Just as I suspected, my great great grandfather was a monarch butterfly. Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone. I am part larva, but part hummingbird too. There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow. My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine. Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin, but I didn't get his dimples. My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka, but I descended from Ravanna, not Ram. My uncle is a mastodon. There are traces of white people in my saliva. 3.7 billion years ago I swirled in hydrogen dust, dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis. More recently, say 60,000 B.C. I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge joining Sweden to Botswana. I am the bastard of the sun and moon. I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops and cougar scat. I am made of your grandmother's tears. I am the brother who sold you, and marched you to the sea. I am the merchant from Savannah, and the cargo of blackness. I am the chain. Admit it, you have wings, vast and golden, like mine, like mine. you have sweat, dark and salty, like mine, like mine. You have secrets silently singing in your blood, like mine, like mine. Don't pretend that earth is not one family. Don't pretend we never hung from the same branch. Don't pretend we don't ripen on each other's breath. Don't pretend we didn't come here to forgive. - Alfred K. LaMotte  Painting by Cindy Wood. Used with permission.
 Painting by Cindy Wood. Used with permission. For their heronness, you know what I mean? The way they are long, and thin, and still, and elegant, and shaggy, and awkward, and not at all awkward, and lean, and gangly, and knobby-kneed, and bluegraybrown all at once, and slow and dinosauric in the air but liquid-quick with their bladed beaks. I never yet saw a heron that did not instantly amaze and astound and confound and provoke something very much like awe. Is the divine spark in the heron? Yes. In its ferocious murder of the frog, and startling-quick gobbling of the frog, leaving only one webbed foot wriggling for a last moment in the world it just left? Yes, somehow. In the big red-ruddered hawk who descends upon the heron like a burly nightmare and tears its breast from its spindly bones? Yes, somehow. In all of this is the Breath, the Imagination, the voice that said I am who I am from a fiery bush, long ago. In the beauty of the animals who grew to be herons and hawks over millions of years of experimentation. In the wiry wave of reeds in which this story was written before my eyes one day on a river headed to the sea. In the mink and the crows who will also eat the rest of the heron. In the musing man standing hidden in the alder thicket; he too is here fishing for mysterious life for a moment until a dark hawk comes for him; but meanwhile he knows enough to sing his companions in the wild miracle of the worlds we share. And so: amen. - Brian Doyle 
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Xochi Trout
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