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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  • Wildfire

    1–2 minutes

    White dark and a hummingbird pressed into juniper,a ghost-god,wings unseen,and, hours later,a hawk, tail stripes larger than a planet’s rings,and, at dusk, a family of robinsbathed in the pink mottle,their sun kept in a drawer and cotton ball muffled,and a batflying above them.

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  • Siouxon Creek

    1–2 minutes

    Last night we camped by a waterfall. Even at midnight you could see it, a pale blue ribbon laced between moon-painted firs. All night we heard its gentle pouring, which by morning had become as smooth to our ears as the lap of the sea. Around the fire, we told stories about the beginning. How

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  • Chickadee Funeral

    1–2 minutes

    The cottonwoods told me that summer would end soon. I was already nostalgic for it, and for other summers that had passed. Dark clouds gathered over the treeline, warmed by the wind, touched by the grassy smell of late-August, as I made my way up the path, and greeted the false-solomon’s-seal, the ocean spray, the

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  • The Marshmallow Plant

    1–2 minutes

    Althaea grows best in the warm nights of late-July, when the air is still scented with heat, and the sky lingers blue around the edges; when the night creaks with frogsong, and the wind calls softly, coaxing the flower up, like a star from the darkness, its petals veined like birchbark, shaped just like the

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