Saffron City Press

Jack Philips

Lebanon / United States

This time the local sea-monster was blown aside whereas before it was cut and parceled into things and bodies in earlier versions the bloodlets mingling with sandy land each of us made of clay. Even divine presences tear open spaces within for Levantine leviathans for Tiamat or Tehom for half-moons and crescents every cell divides, seeds break open to make a world of what is already there a gap is needed to grow. The morning star pulls the worm peels the sky cleaves deep a green breeze, writes on porch swings the cosmogonies of the day.

Jack Phillips is a naturalist, poet, nature writer and founder of The Naturalist School, a nonprofit organization devoted to connecting with nature more deeply through creativity and deep encounters with wildness. He is a Pushcart nominee, poetry editor of MagpieZine, and author of The Bur Oak Manifesto: Seeking Nature and Planting Trees in the Great Plains and co-editor of Treasures of the Great Plains: an Ecological Perspective. His poetry has appeared in Hymn and Howl, Wild Roof, Flora Fiction, EcoTheo, Canary: a Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, The Good Life Review, and THE POET.  He is the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, has dwelled and traveled throughout the Levant, and currently teaches ecospirituality at Creighton University School of Medicine.