White desk with pink notebook, roses, keyboard, and gold paperclips that Francesca Varela uses to write environmental fiction

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  • The Rabbit Kingdom

    1–2 minutes

    The aspen trees shimmered above us, silver as starlight, and the cottonwoods streamed, feral, across the grass sea. Something brown and close to the earth darted toward the stage. A rabbit. White cottontail. Soft brown fur, close-cut and smooth like moss. We crept closer. Two more rabbits surfaced from their bush kingdom. I tip-toed closer.

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  • From Emptiness to Emptiness

    1–2 minutes

    I close my eyes and imagine the blanketed oceans, how they quaver beneath the starred sky. The sun hides coolly in the corner, overshadowed by the dull blink of the crushed moon, orbiting us like the rings of Saturn. Underwater, the sky burns red, and the world is, for a moment, still. Nothing is alive

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  • Cedar

    1–2 minutes

    I had a dream about you, cedar tree. That you were gone. I ran to the empty space where you had once been, and I knelt in the rusted leaves. The sun fell over my hair, and over the fine, carved lines on my hands, and I ran my fingers through the blistered earth, as

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  • The Bent Air

    1–2 minutes

    The untouchable bends, a bowl that spools the air, unwinds it, throws it up and towards us and catches the ravens’ talons in the bristles of it, the pinyon pine, the turkey vultures in a square, sailing together toward the dying sun, and the moon, up from the dense, bent echoes, the dark, still places

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels