When cholera threatens a nation or troops open fire in the rain

I just wanted to spend my afternoon announcing the poetry acceptance I woke up to and then finishing my film review from last night, but instead there is armed sedition—terrorism, treason—at the Capitol and I had so much wanted the stoking of this violence to be like the specter of a shooting war at the polls in November, all talk. I have not wanted a shooting war. What I want is this obscenity burned down and the earth where it grew salted and then burned over again. What I want is an actual democracy to survive.

And stay till I come home again

He remembered that Merriman had said, long before, that the most dangerous peak of the Dark's power would come at Twelfth Night. Was that time now come?

—Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising (1973)

Before the reaper gathers us up

My poem "Digging In" has been accepted by microverses: a hub for tiny speculative narratives. It is a new market for me and my first acceptance of the year and I refuse not to celebrate it, because it is as real as the rest of the day. The poem has its roots, literally, in a cornfield visited by me and selkie in November 2019, which truly does not feel more than a year ago. It came out a spell.