'Survivors', by Amy Barone
Cahows re-emerged on Bermuda’s Nonsuch Island
after a 300-year absence. They thrive amid
native flora, wildlife, and limited access to man.
Tangier Island in the middle of Chesapeake Bay
supplies the world with soft-shell crab.
Where water defines life, where home and country matter.
The piping plover, hailed one day each summer
for its resurgence in the Rockaways, New York,
lives protected in camouflaged nests on the beach.
Shadowboxing Arctic hares, clinging jellyfish, bonebeds
and badlands on Fossil Freeway in South Dakota.
Me—I’m the woman with medicine in her voice,
a forest bather mating like a corpse plant, melting into time,
floating toward a twelfth life like a trumpeter swan.
Amy Barone’s latest poetry collection, Defying Extinction, was published by Broadstone Books in 2022. New York Quarterly Books released her collection, We Became Summer, in 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing). Barone’s poetry has appeared in The Café Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, New Verse News, The Ocotillo Review and Paterson Literary Review, among other publications. She belongs to the brevitas online poetry community. From Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City and Haverford, PA.
Photography by Manojmk B.