Amelia L. Williams
Firefly Season
Slowly, warm summer air blurs and chills,
mist seeps in bands above unmown
dogbane, buttonbush, fescue of river field.
Sparkles begin, flashes above grasses, under
saplings, inside dark shrubs, at the crown
and on the ground beneath the black trunk
of the old cottonwood: Chinese Lanterns,
called Low Slow Glows, early evening fireflies.
This, then is love. Me in rubber boots against
ticks, swatting mosquitoes with the field guide,
your stopwatch timing pulses as Mercury rises.
Bio
Amelia L. Williams, PhD, a medical writer, hiker, and amateur naturalist, lives in central Virginia. Her #NoPipelines poetry/art installations have included "LandEscapes," "Triage," "Spooked," and "Soundings." Williams coordinated "The Ties That Bind: A #NoPipelines Collaborative Art and Story Project" of over 250 fabric braids made by impacted citizens to protest proposed fracked-gas pipelines in Virginia. Sales of her chapbook "Walking Wildwood Trail: Poems and Photographs" (Wild Ink Press, 2016) benefit regional environmental organizations. Her full length collection was a finalist for the 2022 Wandering Aengus Press Book Award. Twice a Pushcart nominee, she served as Assistant Editor with OneEarthSangha.org, and earned a residency at the Hambidge Center. Her poems and hybrids have appeared in Shot Glass Journal, TAB, Streetlight Magazine, The Healing Muse, The Hollins Critic, ANMLY, Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry, Nimrod International Journal; Present Tense Lit Mag, K'in, The Hopper, Poetry South, and elsewhere.