by Veronica Kornberg

Either end of the same street.
Same neglect, same shaming.
Same keepsake maple leaves
pressed between pages
of World Book Encyclopedia.

We had the creek and bust-out laughter.
Caged beagles that licked us
through chain-link. And shadows coiled
in the verges. Delight and fear
twinned in our hearts.

At night, we walked each other
halfway home, toed the asphalt's
center line. Always, moths plastered
the milky streetlamps. Always a flicker of bats.
I'd walk you halfway home, then

all the way. After that, you'd walk me back,
the shifting distance too fierce
for either one of us
to brave alone. Eventually,
on a count of three

we broke and ran. I always paused
to turn, am turning still, to see
the empty cone of lamplight
where once you stood, a long-limbed girl,
barefoot and alone.

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Recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry, Veronica Kornberg's work appears in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Calyx, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Plume. Veronica is a habitat gardener on California's Central Coast and a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review. Her debut collection will be published by Wandering Aengus Press in early April of 2026.

by Veronica Kornberg

—After Ada Limón

All that birdsong in the winter scrub,
wrentit and fox sparrow, drab towhee
under cover of green tongues—
coyote mint and wild lilac.

Listening, you say
it’s like the sound of thinking.
Or camouflage, I say,
the earth

masking its secret music.
Now we hear the freeway
hum in the distance
and I remember

our walk on the salt flats
in Death Valley, the silence
there,
huge and physical, pressing

so we heard nothing
but
our heartbeats,
stood listening

with our bodies
to our bodies,
the rivers braiding inside us, two
creatures under a wallop of sky.

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Veronica Kornberg is a poet based in Pescadero, California. Recipient of the 2018 Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and Crab Creek Review, among other journals. See more at veronicakornberg.com.