When we finish digging the 3-foot by 3-foot hole
for the peach tree—a dormant branch, barely
orange, bought off the internet—you call,
as you always do when I am doing something
I love. You talk about medical appointments,
a watercolor class, your suspicion of social media.
My wife returns to the yard with glasses of ice water,
you hear the sound through the phone and recount
the story of a man who claimed ice crystals react
to human intention. He grouped people around glasses
of tap water, made them pray, or share gratitude,
express anger, and love. Under the microscope, he saw
that fractals formed pleasing patterns when influenced
by words like peace and acceptance—the geometry
grew along symmetrical vectors—perfection.
In contrast evil, Adolph Hitler, heavy metal, hate
caused the crystals to contort, their dimensions
deviating from normative forms, unrecognizable
as frost or ice. You tell me you've started your own
experiment in your freezer: a single glass of water
wrapped in a rubber band and a slip of paper,
the word Love penned on its surface. You tell me
all you’ve got now is a glass full of ice. We say
I love you and goodbye, our words a shroud
around what is unsaid: the lying, the conversion
therapy, the glacier of slow growing tolerance.
The water gone, I roll the ice left in my glass
and look at the sky. Soon it will rain and I think
of the tree, waiting to be planted. The rain will
be a good start toward soft, round peaches,
the kind with flesh that slips easily from the stone.

Carling McManus (she/they) is a queer poet working in Appalachia. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Pleiades, Meridian, Moist, and the Beloit Poetry Journal. Prizewinner in Poetry for Carve Magazine's 2021 Prose & Poetry Contest and long-listed for The Poetry Society's 2020 National Poetry Competition, Carling is a two-time Rona Jaffe Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and a Community of Writers alum. A survivor of conversion therapy, she is an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ civil rights. Carling lives on a mountainside with her wife and two border collies in Mink Shoals, West Virginia. Find more of her writing at carlingmcmanus.com.

Predominately a sculptor, Naeemeh Kazemi began painting in 2020 when the lockdown started since she could not get to her studio. She worked on these magical canvases in her one bedroom apartment in Iran, which helped her escape the confinement of quarantine and transported her to fantastical places. Living in Iran, Kazemi has had to take creative approaches to her meanings through symbols, so as to not get in trouble with the Iranian government. Her themes of environmental and virus anxiety, feminism, and humanity are disguised in her enchanting paintings through tokens and motifs of the natural world, classical paintings, and quotidian objects. In her most recent “La La Land” series, she depicts a world that is intertwined yet fragmented. It is as if familiar pieces float strangely in space. In her complex yet highly composed paintings, Kazemi ponders the questions “Could the whole history of the world be a mere misunderstanding?” and “Is it possible that man, with all his discoveries, developments, culture, religion, and global wisdom is just lingering on only to the outward of life?”