Terrain

Fire Season Polygamists discuss their crush          sell fermented food at the outdoor market. The women must be hot in long dresses long, buttoned sleeves. Winds gust their large braids and fire over the mountain, where 17 homes already burned. Violent air strung with smoke                  cracking tree limbs and windowpanes             raging fires     wars everywhere.

There are places that are destined to seem like gates. One can’t avoid the sensation of being sucked through a portal. – Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven A decade ago, I got the chance to enjoy a Seward Peninsula natural hot tub, and as part of my job no less. It was a fly-in trip with two clients I guided, to Serpentine in western Alaska’s Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, a stretch of tundra bigger than Hawaiʻi’s Big Island.

Kinglet For fifteen minutes now I’ve been studying the motions of a kinglet as it crazes about a scrawny pecan tree in the back alley. It starts and flits. It has no plan discernible to me. No direction. Except maybe them all. If it could split in two I think it would. It points its beak no bigger than a tack at the trunk, at one of the last measled leaves, at a goitered branch, at outer twigs knurled with hard buds. I’ve no idea what, if anything, it eats.

tic tic tic By Heidi Seaborn Cornerstone Press | 2025 | 101 pages From the dedication, “For my children and their children,” to the final one-poem section of her third full-length book, tic tic tic, Heidi Seaborn creates a sense of the unbroken line that anchors us to the natural world, to the planet, to each other, to the past, and to the future, moving back and forth through time in ways that suggest we set aside our linear notion of time and glide with the poet.

Somewhere you have never heard of there is a guillotine and the pocket of your vintage bootcut blue jeans is the basket into which the cuttings fall. (Some people find this upsetting.) In the interest of keeping level heads out of slanted headlines (try harder to understand), the executions have been censored—but you may pick through the aftermath. So you decrypt the dead under a cracked spyglass, scan the contortions of their mouths for traces of hurt to misread as indignation.

The Terrain.org Podcast In this episode, authors Kerri Schlottman and Caroline Tracey talk about salt lakes, ecological collapse, empathy, environmental justice, and storytelling. The Terrain.org podcast is… Fascinating conversations with authors, artists, scientists, and others who share Terrain.org’s passion for place and focus on climate, community, and justice. We delve deeply into guests’ work and imagination, exploring internal and external landscapes to reach the soul of place.

The One in Philipsburg, Montana After his brother goes west to Oregon, taking his half of their jokes and running routines, my youngest son is left with the apartment looking out over the Pintlers, the moraines of grassland that stretch below zippered with gravel roads against the lavender mountains cut out against the sky.

When I was a boy, I was fascinated by outer space. It was an interest initiated by a coffee-table book about the universe that I pored over obsessively in our living room in a small town in southern Ontario, staring at the remarkable illustrations of the planets, trying to fathom the staggering size differential between Jupiter and Earth.

Whitewater We begin on the slow upper curve of the river, feeling our way in current and wind, the sudden tug of power beneath us. Just ahead water rolls darkly over stones that break the surface. This is our first jolt of spray and it hits me how deeply water takes us in. Plunge and we’re lost to the quick surge of blood in our lives, the whole river picking up speed. It’s not until we hang in the air that we see the blaze the pool becomes.

To Archibald Thorburn Kneeling in the Snow near Inverness In memoriam, A.T. (1860-1935) Against the blue-shadowed snow these winter-white ptarmigan—six, ten, twelve of them now—nearly disappear as they settle down to shelter and to feed. Who cares how cold it is if you can see so closely their sleek long backs, blunt beaks, the lines of black and orange around each eye? Here where a bit of gray-brown brush pushes past the crust of snow, one hunkers down into a hollow.