Concretions

shilo virginia previti & Grant McMillan

Winner

North Dakota Badlands
July 2020

 

send me beauty send
me girl tadpoles between
syntax O send me
badlands rocks

broken by concretions
resonating outside any binary:
organic animal nucleus O sweet plains
spadefoot surrounded
by calcium carbonate mounds

O unconstrained flaming spirits
wind spirits of salt radiant
silt spirits sacred
sun punk flame beings O divergent
conflagration of outlaw toads
just send me beauty
O sapphic radiation sun

rose & birthed a being now
welcome all to the genderless future
& especially so all fellow beautiful
survivors of accident survivors of
beautiful circumstances beautiful
survivors of assignment welcome
O pessoian constellators to a future
when I send you beauty also

O nucleus girl frog we are becoming
myself & resonating
beauty even
resisting
erosion &
constellating all
who are becoming
we breathe
& breathe & just so
please
send me beauty

Grant McMillan is a lazy individual who wishes for nothing more than a long stretch of productive unemployment. The most important thing he did this week was observe a tremendous white-tailed jackrabbit cantering across the snow-covered outfield of a disused baseball diamond on the outskirts of town. He may eventually finish his dissertation on utopian environmental literature, but he will certainly watch for more jackrabbits this winter. Grant McMillan is a photographer, writer, and educator based out of Grand Forks, North Dakota.

shilo virginia previti (any/all) was born near the marshy outskirts of noirish Atlantic City, NJ (Absegami, Lenapehoking). Their writing appears in or is forthcoming from The Rectangle, Poeticanet, California Quarterly, and elsewhere. Their first book, Campus Building, is “a raucous tribute concert and a love letter to the role that buildings play in our experience” and is available open-access from the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.