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Natalie Young
Follow the link to learn more about All of This Was Once Under Water, Natalie Young’s limited-edition, full-color hardcover book available in 2023 from Shop Quarter Press.
The Alien Takes the Human’s Tears
After “Topography of Tears” a photo series by Rose-Lynn Fisher
places them under a microscope
to reveal primal language
dehydrated and inspected, the salt formation
a suspect
of circumstance:
Grief crystallizes in empty streets, the dismantled
brick walls
of a looted city.
Onions plant a fern quilt in a snowflake
sheet. Geometry’s
hard edges and blocks burst
from drips of laughter. Ice, metal
work and coral collide to build a blue print
encompassed
by crowds dispersing
in the uncertainty of change. And with a blink
a slide of the lid
waters
a cutaway of earth, roots reaching
beyond human
experience
like a drop of the ocean.
About the writer:
Natalie Young is a founding editor for the poetry magazine Sugar House Review. By day, she works as an art director for an ad agency based out of Salt Lake City. These poems are part of a manuscript that mixes factual scenery and history with speculative fiction, in order to explore peculiarities in human nature, culture, and environment. Poems from this series have been published in Green Mountains Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, South Dakota Review, Drunken Boat, Pilgrimage, Spillway, and others. Natalie is left-handed, half Puerto Rican, and a fan of Carol Burnett and broccoli. Natalie Young is the Featured Writer at O:JAS&L for November 2018.
UPDATE: All of This Was Once Under Water is a limited-edition, full-color hardcover book that contains this and five other of Young’s poems published by OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. The book, illustrated beautifully by the German artist Maximiliane Spieß, is now in release from Shop Quarter Press.
Image: Ridgeline of the Organ Mountains at Sunrise by Andrew Marshall. Watercolor. 6 x 15 inches. By 2018. By permission
About the artist:
Andrew Marshall is a painter, writer, and photographer living and working in the eastern Sierras. His paintings, photographs, essays, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Open: The Journal of Arts & Letters, The Offbeat Magazine, Gravel Magazine, Trampset Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, Junto Magazine, West Texas Literary Review, Upventur.com, and Backpackinglight.com. Andrew Marshall is the Featured Artist at O:JA&L for November 2018.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation supporting writers and artists worldwide.
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