IMAGINING OKJÖKULL FROM CASCO BAY
photo by Allison Guan
by Julia Morrison
The tree has too many hands
for me to trust it’s from anywhere
but the future
I keep trying to leave
you before night
falls out of my body
Too many birds
at bedtime
I don’t have enough blue left
for another morning
Oleander tephra, volcanic ash and glass
layers of the glacier under the microscope,
otherwise we don’t see it.
The noise and snow of the image
developing, agog for light in the red-smog sky
The weather makes sad shapes now
in our summer coats
and I confuse this moment for its recreation
Out of one sculpture of us damaged at sea,
another, then another
Julia Anna Morrison is a writer and filmmaker with an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her first book of poems, Long Exposure, won the Moon City Poetry Prize and was published in 2023. Anna's poems, films, and nonfiction deal with themes of motherhood and the intersection of film and poetry and have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and have recently appeared in Best American Poetry and Narrative (third place in 14th annual poetry contest). Anna teaches at the University of Iowa. You can find her at www.juliaannamorrison.com
Allison Guan is a poet and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area. In her free time, she can be found falling down Wikipedia rabbit-holes and figuratively consuming textbook pages.
