swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

 from Plaited Poetry
Kate Strong Stadt & Zebulon Huset

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from Stanza Trades “Where Waves Roll Tiny Particles of Rock”

Glowering with eyes like the last coals from a beach bonfire,
the new-car sheen was now fully abraded away it seemed.

What was revealed was gritted, divoted, like sand after rain.
Might as well scatter the ash, nothing to save.

The white noise of waves took place of conversation.
A parataxis they’d grown both used to, and so hateful of

But it was better than silence. Or moving away.
Or so they said. Or didn’t say. Creatures scuttled

after bug snacks, whether wanting an early breakfast
or following a nightlong standoff with the moon.

The glow of the moon was nothing like embers, blazes.
In the night, pale light from dead stars made even the sea seem new –

a gigantic glittering present humans have explored one-twentieth of,
their four years together that familiar bit of one’s expected lifetime.

from Stanza Trades “Seedling Cycle”

Far from the crashing waves of Pacific on jagged rock
inward from the Sunset Cliffs and the beaches both
pristine and covered in trash, past valley and gully,
past palm trees and jacarandas and chaparral scrub,
the valley’s heat is waiting to wrap itself around you.

You want to wrap yourself in a valley’s heat,
you want to be anywhere that is unlike home.
You wouldn’t mind the dead fish gumming up the gorges
except that you used to swim the depths of them
and you can’t say the reason why you can’t anymore.

You’ve used all of your can’ts in incantations
locked in the locket of the past—untouchable
but both pretty and painful to look at, as though
there were a choice. Whoever can peel their eyes
from the past is a magician you don’t wish to meet.

Maybe magic can live in this place without magicians.
The new and nameless flowers, vines, tendrils tending towards
new and nascent valley light know some secrets you could know.
You don’t need what you had to love this place.
You touch the soil and it feels like you.

from Exquisite Variations “1.2 Into the Brightest Bit of Fire”

exploding from the quiet of night
i said the city was electric but she was the city
a lone tambourine struggling with the rhythm
straight out of DuckTales
the center of the world is the absence of a drumbeat
slow and silver and fading
caramelizing the sugars on the surface
until it snaps. the universe is indifferent
it’s begging you for freedom from having to mean anything

we went out west of wherever. we were
far from the roar of rockets.
i’ve never wanted a creature who wants to need me
but these weren’t saturday morning cartoons.
it’s coming home or we want to believe it
whatever the end

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Kate Strong Stadt is a former children’s librarian turned knowledge worker. Recently, her poems have been published in Iron Horse Review, The Collidescope, and Sparked Literary Magazine. Her latest obsession is blacksmithing.

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Texas Review, North American Review, Meridian, The Southern Review, Fenceand many others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked.