Steve Castro, Christopher Citro & Dustin Pearson

Forgotten Village

The air moves like large animals. White sky visible through the branches.
We could call that light milk, say we're not waiting for the warmth to
return, so many leaves to grow from nothing and shut us the rest of the way
off. You say thin hands. I say sheets to read. You say quarter notes. I say
rivers, a map to itself. Are we competing? Whose sight and coining will be
most amenable to spring? The pollen will wash over our picnics, turn the
surface of the milk we’re having a pale green, but not to the point we’ll
stop drinking. We will be sick and we will look up less and we will be
happy abundance has returned in time to sit our ailing elders on the porch.
I say reminiscing. I go back to my youth sitting in front of the television
watching ants slowly empty out the picnic basket: slices of cake, cheese,
all types of fruit & meats, wine bottles. I go back to the porch as a child
stripping corn kernels from raw corn cobs by twisting on the cob with both
hands over a giant weaved basket. You say ignoring the present and where
do I see our future? I say a future so ancient, no one ever knew of our
existence.

Steve Castro's Conejo y Gallo was a finalist for the National Poetry Series competition (2024). He's a Costa Rican surrealist whose poetry was most recently published in 32 Poems; Image; The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review; Laurel Review; Bayou Magazine. Collaborative poems co-written w/ Christopher Citro & Dustin Pearson are forthcoming in miCRo series: The Cincinnati Review.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in Syracuse, New York.

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2022), A Family is a House (C&R Press, 2019), and Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing.