by Zoë Fay-Stindt

Georgia de Lotz, figs in shadow, digital photograph, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

June, Eating

Zoë Fay-Stindt | June 2026 | Issue 52

Poetry

The grass beats its edges
on wind: in a great
white surge the moths
rise overnight: I watch
my lover eat her first fig
whole: pulped tongue: jellied
fingers at the neighbor’s
kitchen table.

We sing eggplants
tender through hot oil.
Hammock slung
between old stone, bent
over each other’s airborne
bodies: touch each other

sunned. Evening: swallows
pick up the tenor. Time
sweats, splits like a fig
in heat. Soon, morels push
their cratered faces
through soil, waiting
for the butter days.

Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist. Raised by both the swamps of Pomouik and Lumbee lands in eastern Carolina and the Hérault river of Languedoc, France, they are a sixth-generation settler currently residing on unceded Cherokee territory (colonially known as Asheville, North Carolina). As a writer, teacher, and facilitator, their work orbits entanglement, queer ecologies, belonging, and what it means to be in relationship with a land settled by their ancestors. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Center for Humans and Nature, Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.