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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  • Home

    1–2 minutes

    I want to ask the sky to guide me to that unfurled shorein the distance;I want to ask the sunto dance with me,the long-willowed dance of my ancestors,the two of us on the slopes of some mountainbelow the suns of other worlds;I want to ask the moonto be my home,wherever I am–great stirrer of oceans,

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  • Driving the Forest at Night

    1–2 minutes

    In the darkness, the air begins to smell of drops of water on fallen needles, and rain pulled densely into moss, startled like glass. Can you hear it, there, the shifting of the old mountains underfoot, slumped by wind and the slow trickle of water, the clay skin, the granite stones, the piles of old

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  • The Vine Maple

    1–2 minutes

    Here we are,my head rocked back,your hands gently unfolded,soft and creped, andlit by the sunlike paper lanterns. Here we are,combing spider websfrom our hair,like strings of silt,like the baleen of whales. Here we are,watching the osprey drift,wings rocking like the mast of a ship,our own feet sweetly stuck here,bathed in earth, in moss, in these,

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  • Tree Spark

    1–2 minutes

    Tree spark,watching the red-winged blackbirdsail to the east,its warbling song like a raven I once heard in the desert.Tree spark,do you see me? Holding my hands up to you,stringing down your spirit the way rain falls into a river,the way moonlight falls in cupped palmsand is drunklike springwater?

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