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NEW-CUE, Inc. is a non-profit, environmental education organization founded primarily to assist writers and educators who are dedicated to enhancing the public's awareness of environmental issues.
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Marthine Satris
Marthine Satris is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is happy to be back in her native state after five years living on the East Coast and in Dublin, Ireland.
Stone Collector
Our Landfall was Canada
Speechless by Cindy Johnson
It was your secret way
It was your secret way, once,
down the steep narrowing grade,
stair-stepped houses
locked faceless dwindling down
the hillside.
High hedgerows façading
that this is not city land;
their pitched branches
net the motorway drone.
It was a July time of sunshine and nearly-leaving when we
last were there in
the privacy of ourselves
trespassing in the oldest church left
roofless and untended, and the high grass
we pushed aside on our way to
somewhere no passerby could overlook.
Past a dumped car, an overgrown wall,
slim trees latching into Liffey silt.
Warm enough for mosquitoes and for us
to unbutton, undo
in a creviced cornered space.
We must have left ourselves
there, past the thickness
of brambles and under-touched wildflowering weeds.
You cannot keep it for yourself alone now,
I will know my way again
to the closed aluminum gate.
But to that selfsame place
we laid the blanket down --
it's impossible to find there without you.
There, next to the churn of the river
with just room to match
rhythms that sounded, seem to resound
off unseen valley walls
and heavy chapel walls
still standing.
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Our landfall was Canada,
the highway –
a white thread
laid down by thumbs
across the mapped land.
snow stays and stays
unabsorbed – a hard line
does not change course
does not give
I think it hits up against the horizon
Black and white lakes
like mirrors
holding light
or milk breaking up at depths
gone black at the river mouth
From green and green divided,
it's all stark, barren, endless.
That last moth-eaten corner --
it could have domiciled me.
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