Bissell & O’Malley – August 2025

Allie O’Malley and Mirande Bissell traded art and words. Allie shared this image, titled “River Canyon,” with Mirande:

In response, Mirande wrote this poem:

Canyon

How will we promise each other
anything
if there is no openness

between one wall and the next,
no light
swept up onto shale?

A skylit river below sleeps
under rockfinches
on blue ledges

and pines shivering
through the heat. It pours
through the gorge,

dotted by churring islands,
sandy waystations
that dry out and wash away

because, like us, they are easy-come.
No matter how deep it cuts
between shores,

a river only means to touch
everything. Strange
to say, but the world will be

alright. Steady, even. Between one
rock face and the other, song
and life, a great deal of air,

and all that sway, the softness.
Weird metamorphoses, wishful thinking,
all the I mistook you for’s.

And after that, the mourning doves,
the sandstone walls—galactic
to midges, world without end.

* * * * *

Mirande shared this poem with Allie:

An old habit, to think of time
as a place so I can get the scale right.

After love, time expands, high-skyed.
The trees—old growth and leafy.

A finger on the lips. We can’t
call out in this blotched light,

with little to steer by except
the sycamores that chalk five lines

against the dark, those flashes at the last
bend before the river and I part ways.

In response, Allie made this image, titled “Sycamore Moon”: