Altar
count the days
and bones beneath your shirt
when berries of the mountain ash
line the empty pond
trace the knot in the wood
where the branch used to be
scrape the jar
yield to winter
Samantha Malay's poetry was recently published in Heading In and Out: Transient Life Poems (Poets’ Choice, 2024) and will soon appear in Mantis. Steel Toe Books short-listed her chapbook Realm (2023), and Shark Reef Magazine nominated her poem ‘Between’ for a Pushcart Prize (2020). She grew up in rural northeastern Washington state, where her family built a cabin with timbers salvaged from an abandoned homestead, hauled water from a creek, and read by kerosene lamp. Her experiences in that time and place continue to shape her work.