White desk with pink notebook, roses, keyboard, and gold paperclips that Francesca Varela uses to copy edit for romance, science fiction, and fantasy authors

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  • Snow Clouds

    1–2 minutes

    The clouds are threaded with mountain-pink, andthe kind of muted purple that reflects from pondwater as it lies still at the moment of dusk, and the ravens blink the snow away, calling in their Cascade dialects, throaty songsthat catchin the fir needles like sunlight, and the snow falls in patches between the canopy and atop

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  • Rain on the Ocean

    1–2 minutes

    The ocean is waiting there, pock marked in the way that dew hangs from jeweled firs, how itmelts the soft snow beneath it, and farther out, the white painted light is made ghostly where the horizon meets it and the white foam fray and the clouds brushed and bruised and half the ocean drawn through

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  • Moonlight on the Windowsill

    1–2 minutes

    I see the moonlight blank against the windowsill sunk into the grains of wood, into the etchings of pencils and pressed fingernails carved like insect-scarred walking sticks we used to find in the forest, and mossy flakes from screen windows open too long in the summer, and they are golden, far too golden, and I

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  • Fallow

    1–2 minutes

    All of this—these windowless warehouses, these factories made, seemingly, of styrofoam; these used-car prairies that glare pink in the sunset. All of this used to be fields. Just ten years ago there was a cabin, there, made of rain-darkened wood, roof caving in, half rotten, clung over with moss, and there was a wagon wheel

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Francesca Varela specializes in copy editing for romance, science fiction, and fantasy authors