It was always the mountain
and me. Paris Mountain.
The woods were mine:
tree tops, rocks, creeks,
space between. I topped
for the first time on leaves
straddling felled trees.
The way they laid across
space, over huge limestone,
and moss, rocks begging me
to shimmy across. I laid
on my belly, wrapped
my young arms and legs
around her girth. I couldn’t
reach my own fingertips,
pressed into the rough bark,
pressed my ear too, so I
could hear her breathe.
This was around the time
my pelvis had a body
of its own, my pubic bone
close to anything at all
and a rhythmic rocking
took over. I let myself
be all pelvis, all fingers
and ears, all torso and legs
and tongue. I was a child
who’d pressed herself
into many things but
the forest took me in.
I came alive, moaned
like an animal, looked
around. Was it me, or this
tree? Or the wild, how it
always seemed to see?
Alone, usually, but not
here. She, the trees. She,
the mountain. She, the space
between my sound and hers.
We came up together, I learned
my body, she taught me what
it is to be alive, how to be a wild
beast on this blue green earth.

Tara Burke is from Paris, Virginia and teaches at VCU and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. Her poems were recently published in Screen Door Review, Shenandoah Literary, Khôra, and Southern Humanities. Lately, she’s absorbed in making shorter, surreal love poems, speculative stories, handmade quilted things, and clay houses.

there will still be humans, my lover says 
though we might not be included in that.
our kind isn’t just going to die out immediately,
to which i envision the skin of the ones who’ll 
live. visit a Titanic museum—to predict which 
persons will survive, you’d need to know their 
statuses. an iceberg does not discriminate, nor do 
fires, but people? we aren’t natural. did you know 
the world is running out of sand? we’re not even 
wealthy enough to know what to hoard, to hide. 
for now, i can get water whenever, i am rich with 
someone else’s thirst. our guide this summer 
was from Quảng Trị, & didn’t know of electricity 
until 2004. while he used candles, i moused 
computers, i watched tv. during covid, i witnessed 
my relatives pray for the vaccine already in my body 
waters away. watching is another kind of pain. 
that’s why they use it as torture, too. what’s as 
un-human as having no power to change what’s 
in front of you? bó tay as it all sinks. is it a good 
thing i don’t know what species we’ve lost? which 
cats are the last of their kind? my phone keeps 
turning off, says it’s too hot to function. the summer 
construction workers have a tip: turning off the AC 
in their homes an hour+ before work helps them 
acclimate to the heat. elsewhere, they’ve invented more 
ways to survive. but we are a country of litigators.

Thanh Bui was born in Gò Vấp and raised in Dorchester & Alief, and is a writer & actor based out of Austin, Texas. She loves constantly.