Dear Water

Dear Water,

You are as empty 

        as my name. Your language

flows, unconstrained, more gesture

        than meaning. Stone-hold, 

fish-home, existing below 

         the surface of your implied color. 

Like you, I am snow-grown, winter-

         nurtured. I’ve been told 

my ancestors crushed grapes 

        to liquid beneath their toes.

I doubt that. But you know 

        where you’ve been. You trust 

the ground eroding below you.

Holt

Kristen Holt-Browning is a poet, writer, and editor. She is the author of the novel Ordinary Devotion (Monkfish Books, 2024) and the poetry chapbook The Only Animal Awake in the House (Moonstone Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, The Westchester Review, and several other publications. Kristen holds an MA in English from University College London and lives in Beacon, New York. Learn more at www.kristenholt-browning.com, or follow her on Instagram (@theholtbrowning).

 

 

Ellie Hauptly: Always inspired by the world around me, I have been creating for as long as I can remember. Capturing my life has always been important to me: in photographs, in sketchbooks, in journal entries and short stories. Most mediums in which I have sought to capture glimpses of my life had always felt fleeting, like the photographs shoved in the shoebox under my bed, or the sketchbooks collecting dust on the shelf, that is until I found metal. I am an aspiring jeweler, studying as an undergraduate, attempting to encapsulate moments of my life in a medium that feels eternal. “Fish Cuff” was inspired by a visit to the Seattle Art Museum, which houses Chinese porcelain found amongst a shipwreck, covered in coral. “Fish Cuff” evokes a similar feeling of wonder, that maybe the cuff itself was pulled directly from the ocean floor to become a wearable treasure.