from the editor's desk
‘A Dream of Salamanders’ by Nathan Erwin
‘A Dream of Salamanders’ by Nathan Erwin was published in Westerly 69.1 and we’re thrilled to make it freely available for everyone to read here on the Editor’s Desk.
Nathan Erwin is a land-based poet raised on the Allegheny Plateau, the northernmost tier of Appalachia. A community and institutional organiser, Erwin currently operates at the Pocasset Pokanoket Land Trust
building healthy futures for Indigenous farmers and organising around the 2023 Farm Bill and tribal land
repatriation. His writing has recently appeared in The Journal, North American Review, FOLIO, Bombay Gin, Poet Lore and Ninth Letter. His organising and his poetry are conversant, and so he writes about foodways, myths, medicine and wanting.
A Dream of Salamanders
The two of us, mother & son, our hands
empty, eating each spare word
by the vernal pools at dusk.
We eat
a rabbit’s shadow
suddenly in place by my boot.
A cloud wanders by hooting
at emptiness. We sit for days
on the earth & on the seventh,
thousands of salamanders are born wet, pouring
out of the fire.
Stroking our heads,
we leave the woods behind, covered in trees,
out of the gloom with sacks full of hellbenders, newts,
mudpuppies, & redbacks,
wriggling along the first arc of land, chattering
about bread & milk, milk, bread
& breaking.
