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      June 5, 2023IdiotsAleyna Rentz

      made this place.
      Providence Canyon:
      one of the seven wonders of Georgia,
      a two-hundred-foot dent in the ground
      of Stewart County, courtesy of farmers
      with bad irrigation techniques.
       
      Imagine the luck: fucking up
      so massively your failure
      is designated a state park
       
      where millennial couples
      in hiking boots climb down
      the valleys of your ineptitude,
      taking selfies, smiling,
       
      and park rangers
      in khaki shorts and bucket hats
      patrol the edges of your shame
      so nobody else falls in.
       
      A photographer twists her lens
      and aims—merciless!
       
      The world is cratered
      with quieter fuckups:
      your footsteps, mine.
      A pillow’s soft sinkhole.
      A body missing
      like a ditch dug out of air.
      Every fist an asteroid,
      every low mood a trench.
       
      And sometimes red clay and limestone
      gape at the sky like an idiot’s drooling mouth,
      dumbfounded and asking forgiveness.
      Believe me, it will come: in cairns and tents
      and kids who pay a quarter to look
      through a set of fixed binoculars,
      seeing magnified nothing
      but what’s right there.

      from #79 - Spring 2023

      Aleyna Rentz

      “A few years ago, I visited Providence Canyon (or what Georgians like to call the ‘Little Grand Canyon’) with my family. Though we’d lived near Providence Canyon my whole life, I’d never been, and I was stunned—who knew we had such an incredible landscape so close to home? I thought it was hilarious that a whole 1,000-acre state park existed solely because some farmers back in the day didn’t know what they were doing. It also made me feel a bit better about myself. I wrote this poem in the car on the way home.”

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