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"Alien Photobomb" by Matthew Fertel

Megan Denton Ray | Some Days I Taste Honey

                                                                                                     two years with Long-Covid taste loss
I used to burst into full aliveness. I used to be able                to burst                     into full aliveness.

Heaven already knows about this:     my excitability,           my tendency                 to look for God

in everything.                  Now, and only some days                   I may taste a bitty wisp        of honey

in my morning tea.       As in—aliveness          as in—joy       as in—nectar and                 elixir and

horse-like                         prancing through the forest              here comes my little fork,             full

of thorns again.              Daily we frolic               on and off     and some days, it’s    cold cardboard

or wet, sour wrongness—      think       salt-sharp, think    orange juice               after toothpaste.

Now I must eat                with my eyes                  and try not to wither away.               No one knows

about this:                         how I got sick and got sick and           got sick     and because I was alone

in a new city        unsure of what would come flapping out of my cupped hands:    my sick-self

my secret gallop             or my divine rearranging,             and after years of swimming the edge

of sustenance,     of nourishment—         I feel hungry     always            and never             and now

I don’t know what to do with all the honey I have left.                           I have so much honey left.

Megan Denton Ray is the author of Mustard, Milk, and Gin, winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize (Hub City Press, 2020). She holds an MFA from Purdue University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, Passages North, and elsewhere. She currently lives and teaches in North Carolina.

Matthew Fertel is a Sacramento-based photographer who has worked in the Photography department at Sierra College since 2004. Before that, he was a fine art auction house catalog photographer in San Francisco for over 10 years.

Matthew's current work focuses on capturing the minutiae he encounters in his daily life. He seeks to expose the hidden beauty in the everyday objects that make up the landscape of our existence. Going to the same locations over days, months and years allows him to capture images under different lighting and weather conditions, and to see objects change over long or short periods of time. There is art hidden everywhere if you learn to see it.

Learn more at his w​ebsite and on Instagram.
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