HCE received a lot of high-quality submissions for The Green Issue – sadly, too many to fit inside the magazine! So we offered some writers and artists who’d sent in work the chance to be published here on the website. Keep an eye on our social media for more great work like this, now that The Green Issue print magazine has been released! (For more information or to purchase your copy, visit our shop.)
Lynne Shapiro
Track Signals, Turn Green
Lean in to see out
as the train slows, glass becomes framed mirror.
Greenery becomes you, flannel caresses your one-time youth;
How liquid we are, here and gone, broken open by dappled greenery,
engulfed by revered fusion of beauty and its opposite,
periphery and its opposite, interiority and it’s opposite.
The window of plenty induces an emerald ecstacy.
Pinholes of the past collide in the lush tracery. Liquid jade hardens,
into something you can hold onto as the train rolls to a stop.
If I lived here, would I be like ivy?
Warm light from high above enfolds like a blanket in a greenhouse.
From deep within the public address, missives blare, remind us
that there are schedules to keep, that the track goes both ways,
and that there’s another you up ahead.
Lynne Shapiro’s work has been published in such journals as Contemporary Verse 2, Mslexia, Platte Valley Review, and terrain.org, and in anthologies such as Eating Her Wedding Dress, A Collection of Clothing Poems and Decomposition: An Anthology of Fungi Inspired Poems. She co-edited Dark as a Hazel Eye: Chocolate & Coffee Poems. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.