My mother, eighty, tiptoes on the edge
of air and earth. Moments before, we crossed
warped boards on an eagle scout’s bridge,
an old White Ash, felled, cankered by moss.
Now we gaze across the floodplain, try
to spot West Rock and Mad Mare Hill, the tip
of a faraway landscape under sky
where, for fifty years, with my father, she has lived.
In less than a year he will have died—
and never do we see how highpoints form,
how sea floors crack, continents collide.
How the land on which we stand is ripped, torn,
how lava rises, flows, and then declines,
like sap in a tree, cancer in a spine.

[Poetry | Issue 11]

Peter Sagnella

The Overlook

Pushcart Nominee and Edwin Way Teale Writer-in-Residence, Peter Sagnella lives in Connecticut, where he teaches Composition, Poetry, and Environmental Literature. His work has been exhibited at the Yale School of Forestry, and appeared recently in New Limestone Review, Shō, Poet Lore, and Hayden's Ferry Review. In 2023 Cathexis Northwest Press published his chapbook, Coming to Terms.