NISHA ATALIE
Brown
come winter we mourn
trees leafless and empty
fields dull
and
brown
but on the streets
squirrels, rabbits
raccoons, owls
cold air in their lungs
brown
and alive
and the hardened trunks
and the fractured soil
and my body
brown
and alive
sometimes the universe
gets so brown
I can feel it about
to burst—
all life
shooting out
from the fervor of
its brown
Nisha Atalie is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. Her poetic and scholarly work investigates the intersections of ecology, race, and colonialism. Her poems have been published in CALYX, Blood Orange Review, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She is currently a doctoral student in literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.