- Alani Hicks-Bartlett
wanderlust
2020 Contest - Runner-Up.

from this precipice she sings
with her raucous voice and
asks what all the wasting
is about.
the bird song
falls like pearls of rain
or dew, the bees’ provisions
brim full on the comb,
and the lazy heifer eyes
the rocking rook.
the scale
is off, I tell her,
from this crest, and gay,
we see the butting sheep
below, small substances bustled back
and forth by winds.
she cries
that autumn slows the
footsteps and the mind and
looks for foragers among the
blades of grass.
the frilled
lizard by her hand blooms
bright with blood, the murderous
sight a bruise upon her
brow. treading lightly goes the
springing cotton rat, the grass
below lays flat and low
and dry.
we’re made
to leave the ridge for greater
homes, but find them small
and tight and keep on
passing by.
Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett is a writer and translator whose recent work has appeared in The Stillwater Review, IthacaLit, Gathering Storm, Broad River Review, ellipsis...literature & art, The Fourth River, and Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation, among others. She is currently working on the following projects: a novel set in Portugal, translations of medieval French love poems and sonnets from early modern Petrarchan poets, along with a collection of villanelles.