And yet, who is perfect? The world is full of melancholy and fever, and the work we do often damages us, even as it compels and thrills us. There are no 100% marks in life, no simple answers to the difficult questions of how far to push or when to stop striving.

’s poem “Power” is about these questions, and a lot more. She describes an excavation that unearths an old “tonic / for living on this earth,” and we know immediately from the description that there is no such panacea. The world is difficult and demanding, and there’s no “perfect…hundred-year-old / cure.” We will have to learn to live with our wounds.

Rich finds an example of such wounding in the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, who discovered the element radium and died of radiation poisoning. Rich describes the illness Curie endured: cataracts, cracked skin. Her achievement made her “a famous woman,” conferring on her a kind of power.

This poem feels like a superhero story to me, but without a happy ending. A hero is irradiated, gaining special powers; but although she saves the world, she pays for it with her life. Rich is interested, I think, in the tension between wanting power, fame, that perfect ending – and the inevitable flip side, which is decay, change, and loss.

What I think is remarkable is how Rich invites and welcomes wounds. Instead of denying our hurts, as Curie did, Rich asks about the possibility of embracing what harms us, of even seeing it as necessary and formative. For a perfectionist, that kind of invitation is sweet indeed.

Power

Living������ ������ in the earth-deposits������ ������ of our history

Today a backhoe divulged������ out of a crumbling flank of earth

one bottle������ amber������ ������ perfect������ ������ a hundred-year-old

cure for fever������ ������ or melancholy������ ������ a tonic

for living on this earth������ ������ in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

she must have known she suffered������ from radiation sickness

her body bombarded for years������ by the element

she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes

the cracked and suppurating skin������ of her finger-ends

till she could no longer hold������ a test-tube or a pencil

She died������ a famous woman������ denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds������ came������ from the same source as her power

Adrienne Rich was one of the 20th century’s most famous poets. She published many books, including Diving into the Wreck, which won the National Book Award. She was a queer feminist thinker, an intellectual, a poet, and an activist. She won a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Bollingen Prize, and a MacArthur grant, and was given the National Medal of Arts, which she refused to accept at the White House for political reasons.

My first reaction to the weather was a rising anxiety. I’d been reading about how the drought in the western U.S. has become so pervasive that it’s not really a drought any more, just the way things are. Climate change is reshaping our relationship with the sky, the land, and the seasons. Everything seems out of whack. Are these frenetic extremes what my children will know as spring? Are Oregon’s mild, gentle summers gone for good?

But my tulips survived the snow. They raised long, milky-green necks and lifted big red mugs of color toward the sun. I saw a rabbit in the front yard, brown and speckled like a river rock (it was probably trying to eat the tulips). The storms had downed branches all over the city, but the trees that remained were speckled with delicate white and pink blossoms.

Ross Gay’s poem “Sorrow is Not My Name” acknowledges and reveals in this duality between life and death. The “pull toward brink” is always there, just around the corner. We can’t escape the sickle of the vulture’s beak, like Death’s reaping instrument. And yet the Gay finds joy (or at least some sweetness) in the beauty of this sickle-shaped beak, and in the ways we live in the knowledge of that inevitable “deep sleep.”

, a gardener, poet, and self-proclaimed student of joy, is a master of this balance. The first half of the poem is full of the imagery of death. And then, just like that, the living things of the world rush in to fill the gap: agave, persimmon, purple okra. Even more so, the language of the living, with “names so generous as to kick / the steel from my knees,” animates the world. The neighbor sings. A girl runs through a field. There’s basketball to play. It’s spring.

What has pulled you back from despair? What “naturally occurring sweet thing” keeps you ticking and tocking? What beauty keeps you grounded when you’re worried about the future?

Sorrow is Not My Name

—after Gwendolyn Brooks

No matter the pull toward brink. No

matter the florid, deep sleep awaits.

There is a time for everything. Look,

just this morning a vulture

nodded his red, grizzled head at me,

and I looked at him, admiring

the sickle of his beak.

Then the wind kicked up, and,

after arranging that good suit of feathers

he up and took off.

Just like that. And to boot,

there are, on this planet alone, something like two

million naturally occurring sweet things,

some with names so generous as to kick

the steel from my knees: agave, persimmon,

stick ball, the purple okra I bought for two bucks

at the market. Think of that. The long night,

the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me

on the bus taking notes, yeah, yeah.

But look; my niece is running through a field

calling my name. My neighbor sings like an angel

and at the end of my block is a basketball court.

I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring.

—for Walter Aikens

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine . Ross is a founding board member of the , a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.

For the poetry nerds out there, here’s on how this poem traces its lineage back to Gwendolyn Brooks and the ancestry and lineage of Black American poetry.

On one hand, I too bemoan my lack of focus. For me it’s not just being in front of a screen; it’s the everyday horror of the news, the isolation caused by coronavirus, the general sense that everything we know and rely on can evaporate overnight. All these things contribute to a feeling of skimming the surface, constantly multitasking without ever going deeper.

On the other hand, I don’t think inattention is anything new. The human mind loves to flit around and get distracted. I find some comfort in poetry because poets allow their minds to lead them. What they notice shows up on the page. If those observations are weird, disconnected, or distracted, so what? Poems track the action of someone thinking, and to me, thinking is super interesting.

, a contemporary poet, adapted an old Japanese form of essay called the zuihitsu into her poetry in her 2006 book The Narrow Road to the Interior. She was searching for a poetic form that had “a sense of disorder.” The zuihitsu was originally an essay style “consisting of brief essays on random topics” Hahn quotes in her book, but she says that zuihitsu nowadays feel closer to poetry. The zuihitsu Hahn writes are loose, random, and beautiful.

“Wellfleet, Midsummer” is such a random assortment of thoughts. I immediately notice how much space and time each section covers. In the first, she’s sitting in a chair in midsummer heat. In the second, dozing in the grass. In the third, inside a cabin looking at pine trees. They are written at different times and places, and then clustered together on the page. It’s very disorienting—on purpose.

When you put the random fragments together, they tell a story: the recently divorced speaker is on a vacation at the seaside with a new love. She’s also mourning her mother’s death. We can kind of figure out that she’s feeling sad about those big changes, but also hopeful. Still, the way this poem moves feels like a kind of delightfully attentive inattention, what the poet Ross Gay calls “fleeting intense attentions.” In other words, Hahn pays attention to one thing really intensely, but very briefly, and then moves on. She doesn’t feel compelled to make connections or tie it up in a bow. This writing is just a record of what she sees, feels, and notices while at this place (Wellfleet) and time (midsummer 2000).

Is it a series of diary entries? Is it a poem? Who knows? In a pandemic, when our minds and bodies are scattered and sore, the zuihitsu form feels like an invitation to embrace the chaos.

So here’s an invitation for you! If you like this style and are a С��è��ý student, join me for a free creative writing workshop this week: Keeping a Pandemic Diary. Observing the world is part of what makes life interesting, especially in a time of isolation and crisis. Learn about how the Japanese zuihitsu form can be used to keep a diary of your observations, and practice writing a pandemic diary of your own. March 10, 7:00 – 8:30 pm, on Zoom.

Wellfleet, Midsummer

(2000)

1

In midsummer heat when I cannot sit in one chair for more than a few moments, like Shikishi, I feel sad for no reason.

2

Dozing in the grass, I wish I had paid attention to my mother: I

cannot distinguish one birdcall from another.

9

In the room overlooking pine, I stop thinking of Mother’s death and

think of my lover’s hands only to recall Mother brushing knots

from my hair.

5

Far from the former husband, this rain-soaked marsh is where I

know a downpour will last. And the lover’s breadth.

6

From my bedroom, branches of pine are white, blanketed with

ancient lichen. If we are as fortunate.

7

On the third day of rain—nature from indoors is without a scent,

even ozone. All—excepting his humidity.

10

At low tide this marsh pools around the road, the vein from the

illicit cottage to the unfeeling world.

8

It is the heart-that-is-afraid-to-be-heard, this bridge over the salt

marsh at high tide. Still—it is passable—

3

He picks up a box turtle in the middle of the road. He’s fifty-two

but believes it will bring childhood back in a box.

11

The tide pulls out and the grasses simmer alive in the twilight. If my

heart were only this marsh!

12

From grasses fretting with oysters and crabs, the mud stutters and I

can tell you wait for another dusk to ask me. And I am not

impatient.

13

At low tide the water empties below the service road and the mud

twitches with seven kinds of crab. Now you can leave but won’t.

14

At dawn, wading in the bay’s shallows, I am pinched by something

sharp—I still feel beside myself.

15

Do not think of the past for the moment—except for the tree my daughter

planted from a lemon seed when her grandmother was living.

16

Insect cries cannot compete with his single-finger touch-typing. Or

perhaps, this midmorning, it’s my hearing.

19

Where have the geese gone? I wonder this in the corona of my lover’s

sleep—as Princess Shikishi wondered the same from her vestal

services.

20

He cares for my so much he buys a slice of mudpie then scolds me

for eating it. It is early summer! So what!

22

In the tidal pool a half dozen hermit crabs scuffle over an empty

shell which the largest wins but cannot fit into. That.

is the author of ten books of poems. She also writes for film and the visual arts. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the N.Y. Foundation for the Arts. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at .

That’s how “Donetsk,” by , begins. She hears the name of a Ukrainian city on the radio and because it is foreign and hard for her to pronounce, she immediately begins to associate it with other sounds: her daughter’s voice, birds, a waitress at the diner.

Her poem moves so far, and so quickly, it’s easy to forget what she’s comparing these things to. By the time she gets to her neighbor’s knuckles cracking as he chops wood, and her baby soiling the bathwater, I had almost forgotten that the poem began with a “tragedy on today’s radio.”

But that’s Kuipers’ point, I think. Donetsk has been a site of violence and separatist activity since 2014; as I write this, it’s been formally recognized by Russia as an independent republic, perhaps in a pretext for war. But for Kuipers, “on the other side of the distant world,” it’s far removed from her daily life.

Which doesn’t mean that Kuipers doesn’t care. Indeed, I think she cares deeply, and struggles as we all do to come to terms with how to stay present with tragedies that do not affect her directly. The poem’s real question is not ‘what’s happening in Ukraine?’ but how we stay mindful of difficult circumstances in far-off places, when what’s happening here and now wraps us in our own consuming, personal context.

What I love about this poem is how indirect it is. Kuipers clearly wanted to write about what she heard on the radio. But she doesn’t give us scenes of political violence in Ukraine. Instead, we follow the poet’s mind through Cracker Barrel pancakes and memories of childhood pets. Everything is like something else, taking her farther and farther away from that original tragedy — and she can’t quite square what she’s heard on the radio with the sun, the warmth, her daughter reading a picture book.

How do any of us make sense of tragedy? How do we acknowledge that something terrible is going on elsewhere, when what’s right in front of us is okay? It’s a difficult set of questions to answer, but in a time of huge, almost inconceivable global concerns — the pandemic, climate change — Kuipers’ questions feel like the right ones to ask.

Donetsk

The tragedy on today’s radio sounds like my daughter

trying to say “donuts” for the first time,

or like the chirp of the two lovebirds I loved for just

a year when I was fourteen, their eager

hiccup when I took them from their cage

and placed one on each shoulder. It could be

the voice of the waitress at Cracker Barrel,

a pen in the corner of her sour pucker,

asking if I’ve finished with my plate of soggy

pancakes, or the pop and crack of my old

neighbor’s knuckles as he grasps the axe

and takes a swing. Or maybe it’s the hushed

suck when I pull the plug from the tub drain

after the baby’s shat in her bathwater

and I have to wash it out and start all over again.

It sounds far away, the way everything does

here where it’s always warm, always unseasonably

sunny, where I’m always somebody’s mother

turning the pages of some forgettable picture book

on the other side of the distant world.

Writer and editor Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems: Beautiful in the Mouth, Keys to the Jail, and All Its Charms. Keetje has taught at universities across the country, including as an Associate Professor at Auburn University where she was Editor of Southern Humanities Review. Keetje was appointed Editor of Poetry Northwest in 2020. Keetje lives with her wife and children in Missoula where she is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Montana. She is currently at work on a fourth book of poems, as well as a novel set in Wyoming and a memoir about the seven months she spent living alone and off the grid, two hours down a dirt road from the nearest human being.

The poet and nonfiction writer captures that delight in “Commute,” a paean to subway riding and the fleeting joy of being momentarily together. In the poem from her excellent collection “Trophic Cascade,” a street musician plays harmonica at the subway stop. I can hear the music in Dungy’s lines, which mimic the repeated lines and of blues:

…Baby, I’m tied to you

forever. I’m tied to you forever. I can’t quit you, baby.

I can’t even put you down. This tunnel looks like love

gone hurtling into darkness…

Suddenly the poem has shifted. We’re not in the blues song entirely anymore, but inside the physical scene of the subway station, where a couple taps their feet and appreciates the music. There are people waiting for a train, separated by distance, watching each other across space and sound waves.

It’s a brief, almost boring moment of interaction. Dungy doesn’t make it more than it is: a nice moment,

& then

their train.

What I love here is the transitory nature of the delight. It doesn’t last. Likely, the couple immediately forgets the musician as they board their train and head to work. But doesn’t that make it sweeter, and more raw, that it’s so brief? And the longing in those lines is poignant, as if we’re leaning across the empty space, hoping helplessly for touch: “I’m tied to you forever.” Except we’re not. We vanish down the subway tunnel, and are gone.

In this pandemic winter, what random human interactions are you wishing for? What boring commute experiences do you think on with fondness? What is the subway music you’re missing?

A reading tip: Think about a poem as music. Like music, it has a beat. Like music, it has certain repeated lines and structures that organize the ideas. When you read a poem out loud, does it sing? Does it swing? Often when I feel confused about a poem, I stop trying to understand what it means, and just hear it as music. Who cares what it means; how does it sound in the resonance chamber of your body?

Commute

He remembers the harp in his pocket and the tune

to a time-winding blues. Baby, I’m tied to you

forever. I’m tied to you forever. I can’t quit you, baby.

I can’t even put you down. This tunnel looks like love

gone hurtling into darkness. Across the track

a couple nods, appreciating something they can’t

put their fingers on. He tucks the harp back in his pocket,

thinks to smile at her. It’s all quiet for awhile but the wind

& then

their train.

Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Dungy is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. She lives in Fort Collins, CO with her husband and child.

My kids are white; the kids in ’s “A Young Man” are not. For Brown, that changes everything. In his poem, Brown examines how the older son’s protectiveness toward his younger sister is suddenly seen as a danger, rather than a sweet sibling bond. In a society that sees young men of color as threats, the innocent boy’s “swagger” on the playground becomes horrific harbinger for the future: one day, someone will see that boy’s anger as threat and put him in prison.

The narrator loves his children. He admires his son, maybe is even a little jealous of the way he acts “like a bodyguard” for his sister. Maybe fears it a little. “They are so small,” he says. The siblings are ignorant that their playground anger and love for each other could ever be threatening. They’re just kids. He writes,

“They play. He is not yet incarcerated.”

Brown tears out my heart with that “yet” in the final line. Skillfully rhyming “red” and “incarcerated,” he creates a sense of inevitability, like a door slamming shut. But he also opens up hope: the boy is still innocent, still free, “not yet” an adult with the burdens of the adult world on him.

I read this poem on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day of action and reflection. Reading “A Young Man” got me thinking about Dr. King’s words in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” As Brown’s poem shows, we haven’t yet become that nation. Poems like this can remind us how far we still have to go, and why it matters to keep trying.

A reading tip: Look at the shape of a poem. Like, literally, observe the distribution of ink and white space on the page. Is the shape wide, skinny, long, short? Are there fat bunches of words or skinny bunches? Are there patterns in the way the lines are distributed, perhaps groups of two or three or four lines together? Different shapes have different effects on us. What does this poem’s shape do for you as a reader?

A Young Man

We stand together on our block, me and my son,

Neighbors saying our face is the same, but I know

He’s better than me: when other children move

Toward my daughter, he lurches like a brother

Meant to put them down. He is a bodyguard

On the playground. He won’t turn apart from her,

Empties any enemy, leaves them flimsy, me

Confounded. I never fought for so much –

I calmed my daughter when I could cradle

My daughter; my son swaggers about her.

He won’t have to heal a girl he won’t let free.

They are so small. And I, still, am a young man.

In him lives my black anger made red.

They play. He is not yet incarcerated.��

Jericho Brown��is author of the������(Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the��recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

How to find the tender underbelly

of grief, to turn it down

onto its side, so you can hold it,

kiss it and rename it…

All of us have grief inside right now. In this COVID-19 pandemic, everyone has suffered some loss: a loved one sick or gone, a missed opportunity, a job lost or income reduced, friends isolated and distant. It’s been a hard time, with a lot of sadness.

What I love about Davis’ poem is that he asks us to be tender with ourselves. The poem centers on the speaker’s mother, and the core of the poem reveals memories of her, cooking in the kitchen, transforming meager ingredients into something delicious for her kids. She teaches them an important lesson: we feel pain / large like this for a reason. In the mother’s voice, loss becomes a teaching, an appreciation of the human capacity to feel deeply.

The mother’s injury is physical: her eye has been damaged in an act of domestic violence. But Davis approaches this injury with such tenderness, describing the beauty of his mother’s fading eyesight as shallow green water in Puget Sound, calm blue cornflowers, and yellow piano keys. Instead of feeling the expected rage or grief at the end of the poem, we feel instead a kind of wonder. Davis has found the “tender underbelly” of tragedy and held it close. He doesn’t deny the hurt or harm, but loves it until it transforms.

Reading this poem from , I wonder how we all can “kiss and rename” our grief in this season. How can we too show kindness to ourselves and to our losses. How we can hold each other in tenderness. In that spirit, enjoy “Like This, For a Reason.”

Like This, For a Reason

How to find the tender underbelly

of grief, to turn it down

onto its side, so you can hold it,

kiss it and rename it:

my mother taught this. The lost dog

became patience. And finding it

dead along the road meant go ahead and cry now.

But then, with her fingers spread

against our sobbing chests, we feel pain

large like this for a reason.

Each month, the money thinned

and she stood alone in the kitchen

humming the last bit of our food

into songs of tomorrow…

Even her cataracted eye, the one

my father punched years ago,

setting the unhurried cloud into motion,

we’ve since claimed as victory.

Though, before the surgery,

she never mentioned an absence of color —

the hues fading slowly enough

to manage the heart’s break. Everything’s so soft,

she’d say, and meant it: the sharp dive of green

growing shallower in the Sound,

cornflower blue calming itself

shade by shade,

the keys of yellow muted to a familiar

flatness she called spring.

Geffrey Davis is the author of two full-length collections: (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the from the Academy of American Poets, and ​(BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the. He also co-wrote the chapbook (URB Books, 2016) with LA-based poet and friend . His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, New England Review, ​​The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Originally raised by the Pacific Northwest, Davis lives with his family in the Ozarks on the traditional lands of the Osage, Caddo, and Quapaw people.

Where were you standing when you felt that way? A mountain, with layers of ancient volcano rock? A forest of huge trees, thick with shade? Maybe it was just on a streetcorner in the city, looking up at the sky and noticing the blue between the buildings.

Jennifer Elise Foerster’s poem “Canyon” is about that experience of smallness. Foerster is the author of two poetry books and a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. In her poem, the speaker stands in a canyon somewhere in the U.S. Southwest. We know this because she mentions yucca and saguaro, plants native to that region. Looking at the rocks around her, the speaker “reads” the geological history of the region: “erosion-stripped script of ledges…crenelated lava scrolls.” The words “script” and “scrolls” relate to language, but Foerster’s narrator is simply looking at rock layers and imagining back thousands of years to when this region was not a desert, but an ocean. She imagines the inland sea that once covered much of the United States, so that water and desert collide in her mind.

In this contemplation of deep time, the narrator feels awed and small. Good-small. She also notices the ways in which time moves in a cycle. What happened before will happen again, she thinks; water will return to this landscape.

That return is not necessarily a good thing. Foerster’s book��Bright Raft in the Afterweather explores climate change and its effects on landscape, as well as on people. I think her reference to the “coming storm” at the end of the poem is a warning and a truth. She’s thinking about the metamorphoses that global warming will wreck on our landscapes, as rising sea levels make our familiar places unfamiliar.

But, Foerster seems to say, landscapes change. We change. History is longer and bigger than individual people. Time circles back for us, and it’s good to be humble in the face of that big scale.

What do you imagine about the landscape where you live? How has it changed over time? How will it continue to change? Keep that in mind as you read “Canyon.”

Happy reading –

Caitlin

A reading tip: Read poems out loud! Poetry is an oral tradition. Often the sounds jump off the page when we speak them. Foerster’s got some great sounds in here, like the rhyme of “dust/upthrust” and or the hard k sounds in “stark/flanked.” See if you can listen for the sounds of these words as you read them.

Canyon

Brush over star’s dust,

upthrust shale,

erosion-stripped script of ledges—

sloughing scales off

our hands’ finned imprints,

slow-aging metamorphic skins

quartz

������ ������ schist������

������ ������ ������ �������ܳ�—

marine bones bedded in the drainage.

The basin overflows with wind.

Horizon—phantom barges,

a shore once lush with cane.

Moon—a relic in the azure sky,

gray face cut from the mountain’s spine.

A line of dust divides us—narwhale

and ghost—ancient stream

whose sound remains

floodland

������ ������ arroyo

������ yucca

������ ������ saguaro

I dive with pipevine swallowtails

down winding stairs, crenulated lava—

scrolls, fossilized in radiant strata, read

prickly pear

������ ������ silver cholla

������ ������ ������ spicules of sponge

Here in this rain-shadow’s stark

flanked gully, two blue-bellied lizards

streak across sand—vanish

inside a conch shell. Arrived

at the bottom of the world, I write.

Buried in the canyon’s

spiraled larynx—

a raft for the coming storm.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018). She is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), University of Denver, and the Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Foerster is of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent and is a member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma.

Each С��è��ý campus has its own unique literary magazine, and Rock Creek proudly produces The Bellwether Review once a year every Spring term. What was previously called the Rock Creek Review was taken up by Rock Creek’s Editing & Publishing class in 2011. At this time, the students adopted the name Bellwether in honor of Rock Creek’s notable sheep population on our campus farm. A bellwether is a reference to the bell worn by the alpha sheep of a flock, though by today’s understanding, it refers to one who leads the way. Our editorial team embraces this ideal as we publish The Bellwether Review: we want to initiate artistic expression and foster creativity at our campus and beyond.

Ines Rossi Y Costa is a student of С��è��ý. Her poem, “Bonneville Dam,” brings to life the pain of a love lost, but then shows how you can persevere by the freedom provided in its aftermath. With beautiful word choice and athletic metaphors, every reader will feel the emotion interlaced throughout her writing. This is: “Bonneville Dam.”

— The Bellwether Review��2021 Editorial Team

Bonneville Dam

By Ines Rossi Y Costa

Across a body of water far wider than the Columbia,
your letter spills equations solving for distance.
Your words engineer power from Oregon
all the way to France. Adam, I will be your bride.
Bonneville: a good city. Promises made in good faith.

Ahead above groundwater, canals irrigated,
we navigate this New Deal downstream.
Two powerhouses, we electrify tides.
Your reactivity leaves me off-balance,
drunken hydraulics wreak havoc
on my ecosystem and soon,
short circuit my allegiance.

You build a lock around me, raise and lower boats,
control the waterway, erode my embankment
and still, I swim against your current to spawn.
Tag me, a mere statistic of depressed populations.
Monumental pressure and obstruction
turn this reservoir to sewage until

The levee breaks and floods our soluble bond.
I dredge a riverbed. Watershed.
A stray sturgeon, I slip through your fingers,
climb the fish ladder upstream.

Alone, I now dive into a clear basin,
follow the tide to my center,
my scales shimmering,

again.

Each С��è��ý campus has its own unique literary magazine, and Rock Creek proudly produces The Bellwether Review once a year every Spring term. What was previously called the Rock Creek Review was taken up by Rock Creek’s Editing & Publishing class in 2011. At this time, the students adopted the name Bellwether in honor of Rock Creek’s notable sheep population on our campus farm. A bellwether is a reference to the bell worn by the alpha sheep of a flock, though by today’s understanding, it refers to one who leads the way. Our editorial team embraces this ideal as we publish The Bellwether Review: we want to initiate artistic expression and foster creativity at our campus and beyond.

We are thrilled to be publishing “Road Trip” in this year’s issue, an exquisite poem by Laura Evans. A post bac student at С��è��ý, Laura is a veteran in education. She first got a BA in Art History in 2008 and keeps coming back for more. Her passion for writing shines through in her graceful use of imagery that’s sure to capture the attention of any reader. “Road Trip” is a poem that allows us to dive deep into the hardship of love and learn how in the sight of danger, only one thing truly matters. This is: “Road Trip.”

—��The Bellwether Review��2021 Editorial Team

Road Trip

By Laura Evans

We bore down on the highway,
in a Ford adorned
with bumper-sticker-reminders
of trips we’d taken Before.
Silent hours evaporated
between your father and I.
The air inside was a wet towel,
soaked with the newness
of our triad.

We drove through the Illinois
countryside in a cornfield trance:
a man with new worry lines,
shuffling through playlists
for his old favorite songs,
a baggy-eyed woman, scrolling
through other people’s reviews:
the Top Things To Do in the City,
(with kids),
and you, our mystical cherub
cum carnivorous houseplant,
sleeping newborn sleep,
stinking up the back seat.

The weather went rainy
two hours outside Chicago.
We didn’t think much of it,
until the sky turned violent green.
The car began to rock
in the wind.
Instantly we were strangers,
trapped in an elevator,
hurtling downwards,
too fast.
The tempest was endless.
Your atheist father implored
thunder gods,
his fingers gripped the wheel
against the force of gray torrents.
I could see the outline
of his forearm muscles;
I choked on
my own screams.

And then you started to howl.
I climbed towards you,
was thrown as we swerved.
I don’t remember doing it,
but I made a bottle.
Somehow measured formula,
mixed it.
I swear I saw a twister touch
down across the fields.

You latched onto the fake nipple,
like a nun holds a rosary.
That milk was gravity,
and with every covetous suckle,
you demanded survival.
You made the car so heavy, with it,
you kept us from spiraling
into the eye of the storm.