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Trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue

by Genevieve Kaplan

A grass, the heat rising, short breath of a tree, cawed.

A tree can shoot up from the tree itself, dead branches drop on their own—it is perfectly
suited for life. For the heat and the night and a relief coming.

The mountain splits itself, the stream runs there, in winter, and muddies
all, to continual dodging of the road against trample, against hard-baked clay.

There is not straight travel, no safe travel to be had.¹

________

¹In these parts. The woods sing with it and act as if unsurprised.


Genevieve Kaplan is the author of In the ice house (Red Hen, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s poetry publication prize, and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013), a chapbook of continual erasures. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in many print and online journals; recent work can be found in Entropy Magazine, small po[r]tions, and ZYZZYVA. She lives in southern California where she edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose.

What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue”?

“Trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue” was first drafted during a self-directed summer writing retreat in the San Gabriel mountains of southern California — the poem itself is very flat, the opposite of the mountains, which is something I like about it. The poem is straightforward, isolating: one distillation of mountain living; but, it’s not lonely: this poem also lives as one piece of a longer yet-to-be-published series.

News

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

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Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

01/13 • Edward Thomas-Herrera
01/20 • Zero Laforga
01/27 • Jack Bedell
02/03 • TBD
02/10 • Gaurav Bhalla
02/17 • Callie Dean
02/24 • TBD