Dear Friends,

I’m thrilled to be included in the creative new anthology TRIBUTARIA – Poetry, Prose, & Art Inspired by Tributaries of the Ohio River Watershed

Overview by Managing Editor: Sherry Cook Stanforth & Literary Editor: Richard Hague

The contributions of poetry, prose, visual art, and photography in this collection form a creative tribute (using one meaning of the word) to one of the largest river systems in North America. The Ohio River Basin’s scenic and historic tributaries—rivers, streams, creeks, and rills—are flowing through nearly 204,000 square miles of territory, impacting more than 25 million people living in areas of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, New York, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and North Carolina. Nearly five million people drink water from the Ohio River itself, and millions more depend on the commerce, recreation, and transportation provided by its connected watersheds. The lovely living gift of the ohi:yó sustains us, body and soul.

And yet this precious lifeline, this vast and beautiful ecosystem, is being sickened by pollution, rewritten in the specialized, expressive language of dioxins, furans, PCBs, mercury, VOCs, phthalates, POPs, phenols, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, HAB dead zones, E. coli contamination, on and on and on. In 2023, the American Rivers conservation group listed the Ohio River as the second most endangered waterway in the country. This diagnosis came well ahead of the February 3, 2024, Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that dumped at least five different toxic chemicals into a cradle holding people, flora and fauna, forests, fields, farms, parklands, yards—and of course, ever-moving water sources. And so Tributaria sings an elegy for irrevocable damage to the living world, even as it celebrates its sacred beauty.

Former US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo witnesses for us all the practice of intentional connection, of learning to claim (and reclaim) what exists beyond our immediate senses: “When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to hear what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others.” May these words and images invite that accountable, curious tuning. Tributaria offers only a glimpse into the complex heart of Ohio River country’s flowing waters, riparian margins, diverse life forms, geological features, and industrial properties. The living energy of nature and culture cannot be contained by simple designs and functions. Our stories of water will move throughout time, while we remain bound to the unfolding plots and diverse settings that shape our essential well-being within all of creation.

Edited by Sherry Cook Stanforth, Richard Hague, Michael Thompson

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Excerpt

A Conversation with Uncle Clem
by Courtney Neltner Kleier

What’s my inheritance?
The Fourmile Creek
The dirt below your feet
A name intact

Where’s my money?
In the creek bed
Deep, with our buried dead
Gone, that’s a fact

What’s my name?
Neltner
Reis
Schack

Where you go, can I follow?
Yes, I reckon so
No
Maybe, in these last days

Where are we going?
To hell if we don’t change our ways

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Many thanks to Sherry Cook Stanforth and Dos Madres Press for the invite, an Ohio Not For Profit dedicated to the belief that the small press is essential to the vitality of contemporary literature.