by Lisa Hibl
Spreaders, weeds,
Asiatics.
A (blue) heaven
of its own beauty.
Pupae.
Firmament.
Blue cowls.
Insects.
The toad.
Underground webs that talk to themselves,
the frilled fungi.
My solitude.
The stone toad.
The fence.
***
photo credit: Jesse Bouer, Unsplash
Lisa Hibl directs the Russell Scholars program at the University of Southern Maine, a small living-learning community that promotes a sense of belonging through connection to place. Her poems have appeared in Writing the Land: Maine, the Black Fly Review, Puckerbrush Review, California Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Untidy Candles: A Maine Poetry Anthology, and the Spoon River Anthology. She was a semifinalist for the 2023 Terry Tempest Williams Prize at North American Review. Her recent work appears farther afield, in The Goose, a Canadian journal, and Speculative Nature: An Anthology, published by Guillemot Press, UK. She lives in Woolwich, Maine, where she maintains a perennial garden on the edge of a salt marsh.