National Poetry Month : Lana Crossman,

 

 

Photophobia

 

Change isn’t always blossoms, a jubilant ripening, sun-warmed seedlings. Sometimes change happens in the shadows. It’s the bat saving itself in a state of torpor, the bear’s cells expressing themselves through six months of sunrises. There’s a freedom in darkness – power in a place far from perception, where the faintest thrum moves something of matter. Where a mushroom picks up a pulse. Whispers along the hyphae. An embryo rolls. Something shifts, there in the shade.

 

 

 

 

Lana Crossman is an Ottawa-based poet who grew up in rural New Brunswick. Her work has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Room, Untethered, Pinhole Poetry, flo., and other journals, and in her chapbooks, Pics or it didn't happen (Pinhole Poetry Press, 2024) and Buoyant, at last (Rose Garden Press, 2022).