Silver Branch series:
M.S. Evans
M.S. Evans is a writer and visual artist. Originally from Seattle, she currently lives in Butte, Montana. Her photography and writing are published with Icefloe Press, Black Bough, Anti-Heroin Chic, Versification, Re_Side, Daily Drunk and Stone of Madness Press.
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M. was first published in February 2020.
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Twitter: @SeaNettleInk Instagram: @permacrust
"My aim with writing is to find the truth behind feelings and actions, and the elements of a place or person. There’s always the hope that someone reading my work will feel it reverberate in their core. In that way, it feels like poets are all working to tune parts of an instrument. I hope also to share life experiences that are often tokenized, forgotten, or imagined secondhand."
M.S. Evans
Copper Hill
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A mile down,
tongueless throats
of tunnels gape.
Along walls, damp with sweat,
private offerings remain;
worn coins and glass beads.
Tokens of a sunlit world,
to help them find their way.
Atop the mountain’s
dusty back, miners’ shacks,
shoulder to shoulder;
a brotherhood of rough planks
and liquor’s breath.
At night, we open
the cellar’s hatch,
to let the shifts of spirits pass.
Published in Black Bough: Deep Time (vol 1)
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Ideal Nest
I’d cup you in my palms
and place you
high
on a sunlit hill,
a nest in tall evergreens,
a view of the sea.
A garden
trespassed only by deer.
A path, through top-heavy flowers
and birds
to stir the air.
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Forthcoming publication in Black Bough poems 'Freedom/ Rapture' edition.
Listen to 'Copper Hill' on the Soundcloud Deep Time playlist.
Sequoia Night
I’d gone to greet the moon when I slipped out
of time, on a hillside above an old-growth grove.
In the valley below, a milk-white Eel River, coddled blackened redwoods.
An expectant hush. A living service,
a thrumming underground. The darkened world grew embodied.
I searched the horizon for evidence of time: an electric light, a car, anything to lead me back to now. But there was no sign we had ever been.
A bird silently glid past the river’s light, heavy as extinction,
reabsorbed by blackness on the other side.
Breathless, I fell.
At my feet, hardened mud, embedded tracks of a logging truck; a fossil of now.
A horrible proof of reality.
I wonder, what part of me changed that night, when I fell through time?
What parts of us are lost, if we don’t?
New Jersey
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1 AM, stifling heat.
Wedged on a bed
between
my grandmother and her portable TV.
My voice, thin as vase-water.
Her’s, loose river rock.
We hefted words
smooth skipping stones.
The TV made kites,
darting white light;
paper planes across the distance between us.