February

Angela Voras-Hills

“February” is a stitched erasure of the essay “A Good Oak,” from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. I’d been thinking for a while about how climate change impacts landscapes over time, sometimes so slowly we barely notice, which makes it easy to deny it’s happening at all. When I came across Leopold's lines, “We were all awakened, one night in July, by the thunderous crash…but, since it had not hit us, we all went back to sleep,” my breath caught. How long will we all stay asleep? When will it hit us? I started removing as many references and images of nature from the text as possible, trying to make sense of what was left. What happens when all that remains is what we’ve created? I stitched the language together with colored thread to indicate section breaks and to breathe some life back into the otherwise scorched, black-and-white field of the page.

Angela Voras-Hills's first book, Louder Birds (Pleiades 2020) was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Sun, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets, and American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. She has received support from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, and Writers' Room of Boston. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, where she is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin and curates the Book Drop Reading Series.