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one forest by Suzanne Beaumont
all trees together
by Suzanne Beaumont
silently make one forest
right in front of us
My home faces east with a view just beyond the yard of a few acres of woodland. I often sit in the living room, reading or writing, but always finding respite, upon looking up, in the view of those trees; they are my most constant companions. I have spent years gazing at them as they cycle through the seasons, enduring the harshest moments of each one, steadfastly advancing what the seasons ask of them. Whatever competition is being waged there, it does not come amidst the clashing of wordsmithed-swords or undignified flash-bangs and handcuffs. That is left to their human neighbors who continuously mistake their brief lives as zero-sum endeavors. We could look to the trees that stand next to each other, sharing sky and earth so that all can survive. Above and below, the trees eschew sole ownership of their knowledge, giving and taking whatever is at hand; they are through each other.
There are many texts and studies now that confirm and quantify this way of life. Crowns grow only to the width that will allow their neighbors to co-flourish. The tallest beings shelter the understory inhabitants. Each member of the woodland flora and tree communities, acts as a sentinel, standing guard and proffering chemically coded messages, borne through the air, of threats that could break them all. Below, in shallow and deep earth, thick roots and thin mycorrhizae and mycelium do likewise. Abundance is shared, warning messages are propagated, something we learn, but briefly, during dire events, like covid-times. Even in death, the trees continue to nurture and provide for their community, like haiku poets whose words find resonance beyond their time with successive generations.
I don’t recall what I was reading or writing or what feeling I had conjured, when something about the still constancy of the woodland gave me a silent lesson in community; perhaps they wrote this haiku as a gift, and so I offer it to you.
Further reading:
‘Trees Have Their Own Way of Social Distancing: A treetop expert explains the mystery of “crown shyness”’, 2020, Baillargeon, Z., Atlas Obscura, available: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-trees-social-distance
‘Better Understanding of Trees & Their Ecology’,2010, Cachat-Schilling, R., ecological landscape alliance, available: https://www.ecolandscaping.org/03/designing-ecological-landscapes/trees/trees-a-challenge-of-perspective/
‘Underground Networking: The Amazing Connections Beneath Your Feet’, Horvath, W., National Forest Foundation, available: https://www.nationalforests.org/article/underground-mycorrhizal-network
Permaculture Apprentice: https://permacultureapprentice.com
Author bio:
Suzanne Beaumont writes to know herself and to explore the world around her. She has studied writing with Natalie Goldberg and is currently studying haiku with Clark Strand. Her work can be found in The Wake Forest Review, Trash Panda, Haiku Pause, and the California Urban Forests Council Instagram.
before fall by Jerome Berglund
down
by Jerome Berglund
the wormhole time
and space bend
Alice reached wonderland following an unusual rabbit down its hole, just as 31 year old author and math wonk Lewis Carroll discovered disgrace and reviling via proposing marriage to an eleven year old he’d based the character upon. In Stephen King’s classic short story Mrs. Todd compared her shortcuts to folding a map to bring two points closer together, suggesting she had discovered a warped version of reality akin to a wormhole. On Stephen King’s twitter account less than a year ago he famously scoffed, “The Epstein client list is real. So is the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.” Surely striking depictions in the Shining and the Outsider, the original ending of It, bearing certain distinct resemblances to relating characters and practices is as coincidental as all the Solomonic, Luciferian magic and Cereal Killer conventions in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, just so with beloved terf, theme park instigator and yacht buddy of Jeffrey’s miss J.K. Rowling’s massively popular fantasy series and its Hogwarts Express bringing young muggle goycattle to be tutored by a tall, silver-haired wizard who the author ‘always thought of as gay’.
If you work in the sciences, and aren’t monstrously participating in some conscious or indirect way, you’re probably also at present growing increasingly alarmed by recent headlines emerging demonstrating how technology and research appear intricately woven in the larger, gruesome picture taking shape as the media and justice department (oh, did you hear Ghislaine had control of 4chan, was a super mod on Reddit, hacked Wikipedia, seems to be running interference on Google?) turn blind eyes and mute lips from the frightening details explicitly communicated, irrefutably confirmed in the publicly released Epstein correspondences.
This intelligence has been entirely discovered, deduced, disseminated by a furious, highly capable and discerning public of sleuths who have been following these stories for decades, are elated to finally have smoking gun evidence of long known, bone-chilling truths, indeed a cornucopia of proofs and meticulous detailing the likes of which even the most suspicious and paranoid of us never dared guess at. Besides the occult and blackmail angles, as long alleged and credibly accused it seems their shadowy cabals were indeed investigating, researching, experimenting, funding all manner of esoteric, exploratory, downright surreal technological, biological, medical, physical, metaphysical, and all other manner of groundbreaking, hair-raising potential breakthroughs, from the mildly ethical to the profoundly problematic.
If you are able please consider digging down your deep dive of choice, the implications of these exchanges, the data which may eventually be available to your profession and niche communities could be rather staggering, even earth shattering by all accounts.
Below are a smattering of highlights selected at random from what I’ve chanced upon amidst a whirling maelstrom of nightmare fuels. Please note, these are not all for the faint of heart, so approach with caution and sense.
‘Toys contain explosives’
‘Moderna mentioned for RNA drug development…before COVID hit…’
‘They talk about gene editing and making a virus that causes Alzheimer’s’
‘Middle East is “perfect” as a laboratory “to test clinical wearables and experiment with remote telemetry due to no legal or policy restrictions” ‘
‘Yacht with a morgue on it’
‘US leaves the World Health Organization and suddenly everybody is curing cancer’
‘False Memory Syndrome Foundation established by an incestuous pedophile’
‘Eugenic fantasies…baby ranch…desire to create a super-race….’
‘I’d like to see the haiku written by computer. Haiku is not that hard.’
Further reading:
‘Epstein befriended a slew of scientists. New records contain ‘orgy’ allegation against one’, 2025, Dashupta, S., Miami Herald, available: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article283847883.html
‘Jeffrey Epstein E-mails Reveal Depth of Ties to High-Profile Scientists’, 2025, Vergano, D., Scientific America, available: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-emails-reveal-ties-to-prominent-scientists/
‘What we know about science and tech figures named in the Epstein files’, 2026, Barrett, M., Scripps News, available: https://www.scrippsnews.com/science-and-tech/what-we-know-about-science-and-tech-figures-named-in-the-epstein-files
Author bio:
Jerome Berglund has published haiku, haiga, haibun, most recently in bottle rockets, Frogpond, Presence. His collections Bathtub Poems, Funny Pages and Eleusinian Solutions were released by Setu, Meat For Tea and Mōtus Audāx press, a chapbook showcasing his fine art photography is available now from Fevers of the Mind.
After the Final Photon by Norazha Paiman
entropy wins, slow
by Norazha Paiman
the last star dims its language
silence without ears
The heat death of the universe is thermodynamics made personal. Over timescales exceeding 10¹⁴ years, the last Population III stars will exhaust their fuel. Black holes will eventually evaporate through Hawking radiation. Entropy, the measure of disorder in a closed system, trends toward maximum.
What remains is not darkness in any dramatic sense, but equilibrium: a universe with no temperature gradients, no available energy, no work possible. No observers. The second law of thermodynamics does not negotiate.
“Language” in line two gestures toward stellar spectroscopy, the idea that stars speak in emission lines, in wavelengths we decode. When the last photon redshifts into nothing, the question becomes genuinely philosophical: can silence exist without a witness?
Further reading:
‘A dying universe: The long-term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects’, 1997, Adams, F. C., & Laughlin, G., Reviews of Modern Physics, 69(2), 337–372. https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.69.337
‘A larger estimate of the entropy of the universe’, 2010, Egan, C. A., & Lineweaver, C. H., The Astrophysical Journal, 710(2), 1825–1834. https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/710/2/1825
Author bio:
Norazha Paiman teaches English and Greek and Latin in Scientific Terminology at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, where his research bridges psychometrics and poetics. He writes poetry that reimagines how science feels, with work appearing in Poetizer, Substack, Consilience, and Poets for Science.
Read another sciku by Norazha: ‘Light’s Posthumous Letter’.
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