I Dream of Crows and Then I Try to Sing Myself to Sleep

I have no ear for holding the just right note,

but any sound tends to carry, especially

at night, especially in the cold. Nights

like this I remember how my great-great grandmother

knew to leave, and then to keep going.

When I am frightened, I say the prayer

her daughter’s daughter wrote and, often,

the world frightens me—the way we human

through it, wavering, in vibrant strokes.

All vision is revision, a sort of seeming:

this small house, these soft lights,

this old dog, newly washed and sleeping

on the couch beside me. All things so close.

All things so far away. I think she’d tell me

there are no bombs here, not yet.

There is no siren scream or whistling

shriek to make the air hold its own breath.

Not once this week, this year, or any year

of my life have I had to throw my body

on top of my child’s—my own shrieking

a shock to myself.

Rebecca Brock’s awards include the 2025 Lascaux Poetry Prize, The Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest, the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize and the Editor's Choice Award at Sheila-Na-Gig. Her work appears in The Threepenny Review, CALYX, Mom Egg Review and elsewhere. A MacDowell Fellow, she is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023). Find more at www.rebeccabrock.org.

Deer Skull

Antlers in the air like a pale boy’s hands

at a metal concert. A sly, defiant look

in its hollowed eye sockets.

I could have been something

like this, something mysterious and clean.

I grew up walking the trails of Pittsburgh parks

named for the industry barons who

carved them into the city landscape:

Carnegie, Frick, Mellon. Among those

soot-soaked trees, I smoked and drank

like something wild. I didn’t get picked over

into bone. I came out of those woods, dazed

and blinking at the lights on Schenley Bridge,

an animal still. Trying and failing

to evolve into someone who knows

how to live in the tamed world.

Onna Solomon’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hobart, Hopkins Review, and Iron Horse, among others. Her poem “Autism Suite” was awarded the Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI. onna-solomon.com Instagram: @onnasolomon

Directions to Our House

Heading northeast you will pass a wall of evergreens roughly the length of my ancestors,

standing awkwardly on each other’s shoulders. Some came steerage, others sipped in estates,

all of them live here, all of them tower above me. Each contains the naked seed, unafraid. For

what would fear solve? The seed cannot be abdicated. Look for the mile marker that says how far from civilization we are. Take the second exit. By late afternoon, there will be obdurate shadows. Signs say coast but the earliest sign of life is movement so stumble down to the Trask and squat

and watch for speckled alevin, moving from gravel to freedom.

Merridawn Duckler is a writer and visual artist from Oregon and author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press) IDIOM (Washburn Prize, Harbor Review) MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press) and ARRANGEMENT (Southernmost Books). She won the Beullah Rose Poetry Contest from Smartish Pace. Work in Seneca Review, Interim, Posit, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, and Best Small Fictions 2025. www.merridawnduckler.com Instagram: @merridawnduckler