spin your webs strong, your stories thick. send your words out from their corners
into the world and watch: they pull us along.
Winter 2025 Issue 3
NELLIE BRIDGE
Dandelion
Green dandelion, leaning on the curb,
you’re even resting one of your leaves on top of it there.
Your other leaves,
rooted in the crack between asphalt and concrete,
wave in the sun between brief rains.
You make an airtight case for being
when and where you are—
how could you be trespassing?
But city workers will get rid of you
when they tidy up.
Extremely at home
and kind of an outlaw—
of course I love you
NELLIE BRIDGE is the poet laureate of Clallam County in rural Washington State. She has been selected as the winner of the Best of the Bottom Drawer Global Writing Prize for her first full length collection, Holes in the Ship of Theseus, forthcoming in fall 2026 from Black Spring Press Group / Simon and Schuster. Nellie's chapbook, Poemas Sueltos, was translated into Spanish in 2019 for the International Poetry Festival in Santiago, Chile. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, New Delta Review, Volume, Vagabond, Press Pause Press and elsewhere. Several poems set in Sofia, Bulgaria appeared in translation in Bulgarian in Literaturen Vestnik (2024). Nellie is a solo parent and upper elementary teacher who returned to the town she grew up in a little over one year ago.