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

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  • All the Waters I Have Seen: A Collection

    160 words

    These prose-poems, narratives, and photographs focus on the various waters I’ve come upon in the last several months. Whether lake or river, at home or traveling, water proved a captivating companion, one that brings to mind sustainability, human experience, and our place among the greater world. Water can serve as the scenic focal point of…

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  • Desert Notes

    55 words

    With each step the rocks are new Pink sunset, blue distance, pale but not brittle Against all my judgement I have the feeling that the rocks are alive We all move in the sun Naked, curled trees; one smooth branch of juniper in a slot canyon Raven on the sandstone gluck-gluck-click I am not alone here…

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  • Mountain Ravens

    156 words

    The raven in the Wasatch does not sound like the raven in the Cascades; one is the sound of yellow aspen trees, the other, the sound of fog lifting from the river. They both honk, and so crackle like untended fires, but one is space, and one is movement; one is fields of asters–tall, velvet, yellow, purple–and one is the weight of…

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  • The Desert Mountains

    126 words

    I see them, distant, in the space between buildings, brown and rounded and without snow. They are much like islands, risen high above this glinting sea. They do not turn pink at sunset; the sun, rather, is absorbed by their dense soils, like a dwindling fire, or the dust of embers. At some angles their…

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