Featured Poet
Erikka is a fiction writer, educator, and baseball enthusiast. She is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University’s Mountainview MFA and was the recipient of the program’s Safford Book Prize for best Fiction thesis and the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize. Erikka is working on her first novel (about a bi-racial daughter’s relationship with her Korean mother) from the corner of her newborn’s nursery in Southwest Ohio. She dabbles in essay writing, cold water surfing, and chocolate chip cookie eating.
Middletown
I am marooned,
shipwrecked on land
surrounded by acres of a golden sustenance
that dilutes my blood with syrup,
fuels my circadian migrations.
Land,
land,
land
as far as the eye can
– sea.
I miss you
and your misty mornings,
salted kisses, dew
on the little shoots of sandy grass soaked
against the shoreline,
every high tide.
I miss its air.
The breath of fresh
forever that flows from beyond
wherever it is the sun sets.
It is, perhaps, what I miss most of all.
Everywhere I search for Land’s end and
it is everywhere around me,
somewhere around me,
but not here.
Here, the earth suffocates
me with rows
and rows and rows
of dreams and domesticity.
There are no waves here.
I long for the cold
spray of ocean,
to swim and swim and
endlessly swim
until my body sinks
and I am drowned
in the waters,
free.
Wind Traveler
Do you hear it? The swoosh of the western gale guiding the weary travelers around the village,
around the wilting woods, the forests where the fox scurries to and fro, and then, finally, around
the soft hills where stones stand erect, earnest obelisks reaching up and towards the Elysian
fields. The wisest of winds takes them to the place where it rains rivers. Glittering fish with
scales of sapphire swim up the streaming waters, up into the nascent lights of sky. And the
travelers, subsisting on their last breath, standing shattered in the river, are renewed by its waters,
by the life of the brilliance that swims by them. Soon, they too are sapphires, swimming up
towards the sun, the waters unburdening them of dust, decay, of substance.
Perhaps it is the whisper, the softest shhh of the eastern wind that pushes you, the unsuspecting
shine of its seduction luring your sheared defenses to fall, to follow this current that will lead you
away to mountains dense with mosses and grasses and this, this is a fine fate for one such as
yourself. For there are Brobdingnagian roots there on which you can climb, down, deep into the
depths of the massifs, until you are submerged in the earth. There, you are planted, a seed, and
there you grow, up through the dirt, the confluence of death and resumption, fueling your
movement through the ground, up and up and skyward, you reach until you break, breathe in the
fresh scent of life. And this, this is where you find freedom, finally, where your form is of good
stalk, and where you, unencumbered by old life and of fear, can grow ad infinitum, towards the
sun, that brilliant star of rest and repose.
The Field Guide Poetry Magazine 