by Kerfe Roig
Wasting
Once time slowed across this coast, textured with life: the frond’s caress, each stipe’s bend, a forest lacing fingers through the light’s reach. There is no chain to anchor us to the past, no imprint upon the sand to bring back what was lost. Unmoored, we drift while the urchins teem their pointed hunger (the only language we share) making moonscapes of the forest floor, the astral plane laid bare. Time shifts, legion and desolate. Our brightest stars were wasted—now, there is so little to touch. Barren, we gnaw through greyscale, coming up empty with purple teeth.
Jared Beloff is a teacher and poet who lives in Queens, NY with his wife and two daughters. You can find his work in Contrary Magazine, Rise Up Review, Barren Magazine, Bending Genres, The Shore and elsewhere. He is the editor of the Marvel inspired poetry anthology, Marvelous Verses. His work was nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize for 2021. www.jaredbeloff.com.
Adrian Dallas Frandle (he/they) is a queer poet & queerer cook. A poetry editor for Variant Lit & reader for Okay Donkey Lit Mag, they have poems in or forthcoming in the South Dakota Review, HAD, Kissing Dynamite, Daily Drunk Mag, Moist Poetry Journal, Stone of Madness Press & elsewhere. More online at http://adriandallas.com – Tweets: @adrianf
A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Silver Birch Press, The song is…, Pure Haiku, Visual Verse, and The Ekphrastic Review, and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, the Raw Art Review, The Anthropocene Hymnal: Songs of a self-defining eraand several Nature Inspired anthologies. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/ (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/, and see more of her work on her website http://kerferoig.com/.