As the river goes

Eloise Longmeier, Madison Middle School

I carried their secrets, before they had names

Moving life along with me, on my basalt banks

I split mountains, the way salmon cut through my ribs

I have seen it all, the lies, the threats

The homes taken from the people

who knew me first

Then they built around my radiant edges,

burying the glow with their layers of waste

an impatient fever in the deep earth,

feeding at my limbs and my heart

I watched my creations fade and run

What was once beautiful, undone

Now my body sits,

heavy with lies -

running cannot save me this time

Untitled

Urso Blackburn, Academy at Charlemont

The elks are walking,

but what does any of it mean to them?

Surely budget proposals and funding means naught,

neither does Strontinium-90.

The phrase Tank C-107 is as incomprehensible as the language of an alien.

Perhaps we are aliens to them,

walking in our strange suits,

in our strange way,

so strange,

harming ourselves to harm others.

There is ignorance among the elks,

no fear among them.

Perhaps that is better than the human fog of fear ,

but perhaps its worse,

not just a

silent

odorless

painful

invisible

killer,

but one you have no knowledge of,

no way to guard against.

We must protect the elk,

and we must protect ourselves.

An elk in a radiation suit wouldn’t look right,

because it isn’t right,

not what we do to their species,

or our own.

A Nuclear Prayer

Oonaugh Foster-Bill, Evergreen State College

Derek Sheffield is the eighth poet laureate of Washington State (2025-2027). He is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is the co-editor, with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and, with Elizabeth Bradfield and CMarie Fuhrman, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His awards include the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year in Nature Writing, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.

And if you're looking for some additional inspiration, check out some of Derek's favorite poets: William Stafford, Gary Soto, Mary Oliver, Li-Young Lee, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bass, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, Sherman Alexie, Robert Hass, Rhina Espaillat, A.E. Stallings, Galway Kinnell, Gwendolyn Brooks,  A.R. Ammons, Rainier Maria Rilke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Joy Harjo, W.S. Merwin.