Issue > Poetry
Anne Champion

Anne Champion

Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press), The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press), and The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press).
Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper, Cotton, Leather (Press 53), Malak (Platypus Press), and several chapbooks.

Spell for Crops


Pull down the water.
Keep out the dying animals.

Ask the bees, blind, to heel.
Plants understand

touch. Brush their stalks
to sleep, a small girl's

recess hair. Tell the juke
joint owners to open

their doors. Pick one bud,
wear it in a shoe until

your field is strong and wild
and finally here.

Spell for Machines


Men think they've tamed the wild
with their ploughs mauling dirt,

their gears keeping time
by the hushed cracks

of even handed ticks. They've invented
factories that churn pesticides,

mutate tomatoes until    
they resist both God and drought.

Our skies choke on drags of smoke,
our polar ice caps liquefy—

They thought they could make
everything stay.