Amphibious Daughter Amphibious Daughter Amphibious Daughter

By Isabelle Siebert

Welcome to wasteland: water-logged, wretched, humidity so heavy you could wring water from the air, and we have to, since what’s left in the lakes is something darker than sludge, something deeper too.

Some days, I believe we could stand on what’s left, we could become a miracle of Biblical proportions. I am one often, when I walk where the water used to be: forging ankle-deep in mud and decay, searching through the skeletal remains of fish or freighters, held afloat in mud 229 metres deep, clinging to the idea that there is something here worth saving.

Once, when I was a child, I saw a mudflat and under the sunlight I thought it looked like heaven. Many places do until you have to live there. Now, I miss the water: when the world seemed endless, glittering, when there was somewhere to wash the mud off, the possibility to be purified.

These days, I want to walk out from the shore until I find the heart of Lake Huron and I want to stand there until I sink down to the centre of the earth. I’ll fall beneath the fossilised remains and the polluted galaxies still suspended in the dead, dark mud.

I will become a remnant and all of these thoughts will be nothing more than the silt coating the inside of my skull.

Twining Tendrils Twining Tendrils Twining Tendrils

By Kiersten Fay

Life begins to curl into itself. The tyrant gate in the garden begins to yield to the garden it invaded, and I struggle against its rusting chains, against the metal that wasn’t meant to be there, and it starts to look more and more like you.

Who knows? Maybe my pounding heart is the reason I am so well guarded; my garden locked shut. I am feeling everything too much.

I am grasping for anything, at roots pulled too early from their pot, a dry, dark, devastating shrivel of its more youthful self, and petals, once a vibrant crimson, now crumbling shells of themselves which you pretended were still alive despite your hands crushing their heads.

And I know this place, where the Earth begins to reclaim the ground that’s seen better days and worse. There are no more intruders as I give this place, a shielded emptiness, a new identity.

Then, as I try to ignore the collapsing shadows by the gate, the morning mourns, but I clap my hands together like a child again.

The remnants of the burning, corroding iron are buried by the freshening buds and clumps of green which defy the shade and the weight of frozen soil and I no longer have to see you in my garden but

I have never been good at letting things go.