By Gabrielle Campagnano
So you are bowling in Ohio, and
what you do not know
is that I tried to identify every leaf
I walked past today just so I could
call you and say I identified every leaf
I saw today, and then named them
for you slowly: Mountain Ash,
Quaking Aspen, Sumac, Witch Hazel.
It’s too late in the year
to pick apples and worry
about what to do with them.
If given the chance to deliver
a speech on affection at the state fair
4-H Ted Talk Tent, I would not pull
a white chocolate cannoli out
of my bag. And no well-kept letters,
no photography shrines, no vintage
blankets, no choose-your-own-adventure
novels stolen from the shop and then framed
inside a glass box. Today I realized I need
someone else’s language to identify
every leaf that is not maple, shade tolerant,
ovary bearing flowered, helicopter fruit
you can split in half and stick
to your nose. The species can live
despite being tapped, hung from
and drained out, dry.
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Gabrielle Campagnano is an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a teacher in New Haven, Conn. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Tule Review, Kenning Journal, and Salamander Magazine, among others. She is at work on her first full-length collection of poems.
Art: Self by Morgan McComsey
Morgan McComsey is a Lancaster, PA native, born in 1988. Throughout her lifetime, Morgan has loved and experimented with many different art forms. Her creativity has grown far beyond the earlier years of her sketching with charcoal to fine metal work, lost wax casting, mold making, sculpting, beading, and painting with watercolor and oil. These days Morgan finds delight in painting the female form. She feels that a woman’s figure is powerful, intuitive, fierce, tender, beautiful and many other things. Morgan’s style was once smooth and delicate. As time went on, and her life changed, so did the way she expresses herself on canvas with a more generous and liberal application.