I wander
      through fallow fields of mind
absent of trail or tramped lines led
by currents of a sea within
                                                I tread
through solidago yellows
and cured brome
            as they etch my skin
            in ancestral pleas

My grandmother’s
language reads
idi kući

She tells me to go home
but I blur my eyes to see
Go on

An orb weaver warns
of previous

crossings to these
unsought lakes
of unlearning

beguiled by temporal
submergence

an utter loss
of spatial
awareness

to be all
and now
all at once

One time
a leopard of wetted fur
ran past holding paper and pen
apparently

cataloguing the kind of disorder
that will go on forever
without us

Nicolette Ratz is a Wisconsin-based poet and seasonal worker in science support and farming. Her most recent adventures include assisting climate science on the Greenland Ice Sheet and operating a picker for an organic Northwoods cranberry farm. She uses poetry to explore the influence dreams and imagination have on personal growth in relation to the natural world. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Citron Review, Ghost City Review, The Antarctic Sun and Rue Scribe.