rm mist

Wasteland as cradle, as briar patch, as tomb.
Let’s decide where we are in the story.
It’s begun with wasteland yearning to be wellspring or promise.
Then enters an old woman; she moans and conjures.
Patience is not her virtue.
We might wonder about her mood upon waking, 
her phantasmagoric visions,
the phase of the moon.
Lucky for us a river flows through this scene, old as dirt, full of debris. 
River as mother, as redeemer, as cart.     
Let’s revisit the characters.
A river to embody the divine of possibility-
Isis or Eve, Kali Ma, Danu.
An old conjurer calling her raven 
as she opens her harmonium, hand on the bellows.
Her dirges.
Lucky for us, the wasteland answers first - 
broken and vast but offering open sky.                      
Now, a twist with new characters.
Two lines of sodden seeds wash up in the sun. 

rm mist (she/her), queer Boomer, lives in Western North Carolina and has published three chapbooks, a full poetry collection, and a new trilogy of illustrated poems, Composting Temples (Wild Rising Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Sacred Fire magazine, Friction, Sundress, and in several local anthologies.