Mantis 21 (Summer 2023)
To Raise a Glass, or Down It

Vicky MacDonald Harris


The Whisky Had Other Plans

In the old world where you

tromped freely around the mountain

Highlands, where geology housed our branch

of the clan, the small primrose

and thistle tacked west. Now riven,

the fiddles and violins carve

the song of the new, spin wood

into notes, and bows into perfect

dry strung fifths.


In print, VICKY MACDONALD HARRIS’s poems reside in the NaPoChapBook and The Lincoln Underground. Her poem, “Disaster Capitalism,” was published in The Flat Water Stirs: An Anthology of Emerging Nebraska Poets in 2017. Online her poems can be found at Tiny Poems, Two Cities Review, Poets and Artists, Hobble Creek Review, the24project, The Prairie Sage, and in Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants Tumblr. Recent work in Fiery Scribe Review, Janus Literary, Strange Horizons, Ellipsis Zine 12, and Great Lakes Review.Forthcoming essay in Whale Road Review.