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[hey!] bales

(March 2023)

Lovely CC Readers:

Welcome to the second installment of [hey!] bales, where we round up the month’s posts and link to them all in one convenient spot. If you’d like to be notified whenever we post, just mosey over here, scroll down, and enter your email to subscribe!

And now, without further ado, here are our March offerings:

You watched your grandmother cut back the blackberry canes every spring, saw how she bore the thorns and the loss. This is love, she said, when her skin split and her blood dripped into the soil.

Mom plucks an inchworm from the desert willow, knowing how much I like to let them tickle the foothills of my toddler toes and take them on adventures. It inches me through childhood, to the time my sister stands atop the ladder Dad built against the olive tree in the backyard, belting a melody about the moon, until she falls and breaks her arm on the earth. Continue, the inchworm asks. Yes, I say.

  • Howl by Eric Scot Tryon

The alley is a skinny vein between City Lights and Vesuvio, two buildings that ooze history from the cracks in their foundation: Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg. But she’s read none of them. And she doesn’t care for the bright mural that splashes the alley walls. And she’s slept there for weeks, but has not once read the painted poetry that shouts at her from the wall opposite her sleeping bag.

That’s all for now, but stay tuned for April!

~ CC Staff

Lead image: “Cut rows and bales” (via Flickr user Bruce Guenter)