SPRING
2025 | Issue Two
Mary Oliver asks me what it is am I going to do
Kate Kobosko
“with my one wild & precious life, in white / chalk, on a board centered above the dish bin.”
“scales flashing silver, pink, / and that bruised, deep red / of beginnings nearing their end.”
Sophia Rollins
The Year of the Salmon
“I study the MRI, make the neurologist explain / the words global, endocarditis, brain bleeds, / and repeat them back like memorizing / directions that will take us somewhere safe.”
Driving Home Between Two Mountains
Leslie St. John
“One day I want to be loved / So violently I disappear”
The Rat Hole
Haley Olds
All My Fathers — Gone
“I celebrate you, watermen, web of islanders, woven warp and weft / of my flesh.
Ann Howells
Two Old Men Sitting on a Park Bench Discussing Death and Smiling
“The oldest man, / voice sifting through sunlight, begins: / when I die, and the other accepts / the soft elegy, content and patient.”
Abigail Fitzpatrick
The Sky Is Still Full of Swallows
“the sky is still full of swallows there are so many / What does it matter to lose just one or two”
Jennifer Kearns
“It sounded like forty years of wandering the desert. Like sifting through ashes on a holy site. Like the yawning chasm between mother and daughter.”
Nina Francus | Fiction
The Tree of Life
Things That Don’t Kill Us
“Once we got the detector, it didn’t make me any less anxious. Because then, it felt like if we needed a special detector for it, it must be dangerous... and imminent. This thing was like Chekhov’s gun to me - now that we had it, I knew at some point it had to go off.”
Julie Pearson | Nonfiction
Issue cover by Rachel Coyne
Peonies
Peonies
Issue cover by Rachel Coyne
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“My grandmother grew peonies throughout my childhood. When I moved into my first home with my husband and child, we transplanted some of her flowers. For generations in my family, home is synonymous with little yellow houses with pink and white peonies in front.”
Rachel Coyne is a writer and a painter from Lindstrom, MN. She experiments with a variety of forms and mediums, often incorporating natural and found materials into her work.