Sundog at My Window on a Midwestern Winter’s Afternoon

By Claudia Monpere

“The debris is mostly cleared, but this land is a black ulcer. I walk around my acres, dark skeletons of madrones, pines. I walk to the fairy ring of redwoods where my son and I made elf houses and at night cuddled in blankets drinking hot chocolate.”

By Mizuki Yamagen

“I know your order by scent before I see you—lilies, always lilies, that quiet kind of white, the kind used for altars, for memorials, for weddings when people still believed in vows holding through worse.”