wildscape. literary journal

On the Precipice in This Perilous Moment: A Triptych
by Nancy Flynn

When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline
and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling
how low the one will fall or where the other may stop.

—Frederick Douglass

I.	Bitter Root

                                         dateline June 2025

I don’t know about you. For now?
My day-by-day remains unsettlingly 
at ease, even those nights when I’m un-

             able to catch my breath, at a loss to take 
             it all in, let alone tally the exhaustive list
             of wrongs undertaken, their wrongs yet

waiting to be wrought. I can still hide
in my envelope of green, rallied to life
by the thriving of a hot pink Lewisia rediviva,

             the thrum of wild bees circling their knot 
             in the maple, a whiff as the jasmine asserts
             its vining dominance over the alley fence.  

We are living both drought and deluge
but the history of our landscape is not 
on the side of relent or regret. For there is 

             bitterness at the root, maybe even a poison 
             we seem unwilling to extirpate, a bloodlust 
             we are powerless to shake. And so it continues

to grip while we wait and wait and wait, 
doubtful their munitions will miraculously 
fail, and spare all the innocent heads.  


II.	Make Room for Wonder

a found poem culled from “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” by Renée Nicole Macklin, 
winner of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize,
who was murdered by ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, 
in Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 7, 2026

Remember salt and ink,
high-gloss pictures plucked 

splintering and hard-edged. My palms
under the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, and Qur’an.

The dumbed-down, easy-to-read
tercets in pentameter at the corner of

rocking sunsets and coastal sounds.
Clippings of the moon to study and repeat.

What dies there,
how often and how well—

fickle faith and heckles
exhaling from the mouths?

All my understanding is summarized 
as the ruler by which I reduce all things.

Now life is merely scribbled
from knowledge, 

from the piddly brook of my soul.
Make room for wonder.
 

III.	An End Must Be Put to All of This

First they fascinate the fools, then they muzzle the intelligent.
             —Bertrand Russell (on the start of fascism)

Somewhere in Oregon, I am lost 
again. In a country where they want 
to throw us all back, there are days 
when I am unable to navigate, to exist

forever in spin. Last week, they shot 
a prize-winning poet, four bullets aimed
at her goddamn face. What had been
previously desired was (merely) this: 

to study the clouds in their formation 
above the nature patch at Alberta Park, 
parading away from the sky after 
the Japanese maple lifted its fire-

red branches in defiance of an early 
morning fog. Can such (fleeting) instants
offer a stay, a strategy to counter the end-
lessness of vex—coronations, gilt, tracery

of cursive, typos, errors in capitalization, 
the ahistorical plaques, frippery plus phony
smiles, debasement of the simple 
thumbs up, a firehose of (neverending) 

untruth, mangled syntax, masked men 
with armaments, the bulldozers, rattling 
sabers, and AI architectural slop that forgets 
to add a door, levitates a stairway into thin air? 

On the table, there is whimsy—a wind-up, 
backwards somersaulting frog. The alebrijes 
cat on the sill struts its parenthesis
tail, luminous in the afternoon light. 

Welcome to the hell of our own making, 
where we’ve grown numb, where we 
wail into a void. No one is coming 
to save us. Put an end to all of this. 

about the author // Nancy Flynn