Category: Reckoning 7

Podcast Episode 35: After encountering the grey whales in El Burbujon, Laguna Ojo de Liebre

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Hi folks, this is the Reckoning Press podcast, and it’s me again, Michael J. DeLuca, publisher. This month we have for you Naila Francis’s poem “After encountering the grey whales in El Burbujon, Laguna Ojo de Liebre”, read by the author. This piece originally appeared in Reckoning 7, our “oceans” . . .

Pushcart Nominations 2023

The Pushcart nominations deadline has snuck up on us again, and we got ours in just under the wire. 2023 is the year of our oceans issue, Reckoning 7, edited by Priya Chand, Octavia Cade and Tim Fab-Eme. As is the case every time we’ve had to pick just a few pieces to submit for any award, I bristle at the implication all our contributors might be anything less . . .

A Scarcity of Sharks

Bruce is seventeen feet long and would’ve weighed around two tons when he was murdered by a trophy hunter. Killing rare creatures for sport is supposed to be a relic of the past now that most of the world’s wild animals are some level of endangered. But for some, the desire to prove something runs deeper than the fear of punishment. Thanks to a bartender’s tip about . . .

History of Orconectes

I

In ethanol, the chitin of a crayfish fades,

a carapace of rubber and silk.

Its joints articulate, tail spreads under pressure, uropods from telson

under a microscope, the jaggedness of its mouthparts, a question.

 

The lab is silent as I inspect ten-legged aliens, door open for fumes.

Is preservation respect for the dead?

 

II

November, I am split, cephelothorax . . .

How to Place an Intravenous Line

The Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus,

is not a crab at all—

more an ancient, armored spider,

here 500 million years.

 

Choose the right vessel: long and straight.

Choose a good insertion point: key to success.

Tourniquet, swab, stab, advance,

occlude, connect, untie, secure:

the sequence for an intravenous line.

 

Horseshoe crab blood is blue

from . . .

Yellow River Burial

It was Bobby’s last wish to be composted and spread over their vegetable patch above the Yellow River, just a couple of miles upstream of its confluence with the Mississippi. They grew peas, eggplant, tomatoes there; firm, tasty lettuce, cauliflower, and kale; even a patch of wheat that yielded symbolic amounts of flour, but that Bobby had been passionate about. . . .

Issue 7 Author Interview: Aparna Paul

Aparna Paul’s story, “Little Apocalypses,” unfolds as a series of stories told first by a mother to her daughter and then by the daughter to her aged mother as their world cycles through disasters large and small.

We spoke about the work of living through disasters and finding hope in our relationships with each other.

This conversation has been edited for length . . .

Sublease of Land

I come from another ocean

just as deep, just as mazarine

 

with tides that swell and churn

of cloves, anise, cardamom,

 

a constellation. Where north?

Where east? A foreboding task

 

for someone so close

to the equator.

 

Do not drown. Do not drown.

A leatherback turtle

 

clutches together

an archipelago just for you.

 

In a hushed patois,

you gill fish and hem

 

layers upon . . .

A Glass of You

“This is my home,” my mother says to me one overcast day.

Picture this: mother and daughter are sitting on the couch together, our ponchos pooling and swallowing us whole. We are looking at a picture on the internet, a snapshot of the valley in Petorca. My mother was born in that Chilean city, a tiny bird nestled in the bosom of the Andes, gasping through thin air and . . .

Issue 7 Author Interview: C.G. Aubrey

In C.G. Aubrey’s “A Predatory Transience,” mysterious text messages direct a kayaking eco-defender to a boat of booze-soaked white men who are shooting bonnethead sharks for fun. We spoke about the importance of individual action and systemic overhaul, and artificially drawn divisions between human and non-human nature.

Our conversation, which contains . . .