The Museum of Trees

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Susan Wardell

Maybe one day
you’ll visit the museum of trees.

Maybe one day, trailing behind the class
you’ll get ‘accidentally’ lost,
find yourself ducking under the ageless arms
of an oak, find yourself moving
quite alone, from beech to beech.

Maybe you’ll fantasize about a museum sleepover
where they let you set your spine
along the bough of a elm, in a mimicry of limbs
and maybe, when the museum air is still
and everyone else is sleeping
you’ll hear the willow whisper
through its thousand green mouths
behind discreet green fingers
the story of its youth.

Maybe one slow Sunday afternoon
you’ll beg from your mum
a few coins, to go again
and stare up at the myrtles
through glass, and realise
they miss their birds:

but the museum of birds
is five blocks down
on the other side of the subway.

And maybe, nearly in tears
in front of a case of maples –
august in their mysticism,
and no-one to pray palm-to-palm with them –
you’ll let the sadness sublimate
from your eyes, down into your throat
ball up, shoot like fire into your fist
which will smash the case
and you’ll reach through the shards
to touch them, hold them
and your fingers will find

plastic. Only plastic.
Each bark-notch and leaf-line
machine made.

And you’ll leave the museum of trees
bleeding a little, bleeding a lot
all the way down the street
and you’ll never, ever return.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Snow Fox

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Kyle Guest

On last of all rivers, Snow
Fox paws the black
ice crust, spidery thin
webs creaking silver-wet out
from paw pads.

Her ear pressed on cold
ice she auricular measures
thickness, fearing the dark
dense undertow rumble,
the digestive slush of the planet.

Remnants of heavy-boned beast behind
her knuckle the frigid bank.
Curlew, uncompassed, breaks
his beak on nuked-shut mud.
Dingo claw-flints on buckled steel,
gnaws on fallen light-
wires.

Snow Fox is the last, one-eyed
rare colonist, alone crossing over
into the last adaptive zone.

Her fur phosphor smoulders.

She sniffs limps

on mistings of species

in ice.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

The Language of Flowers

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Ali Jane Smith

The very glossy dark leaves of camellias
mean ‘boredom’

the papery bougainvillea
mean ‘turning out better than expected’

and the yellow and white frangipani flowers
mean ‘get it while you can’.

Some things
are strange, but not interesting.

Some biscuits
not ‘Niece’, only ‘Nice’.

Tonight the surf club is a dojang and people have gathered together
in their glamorous martial arts suits, sparring courteously.

Our laundry and the Parthenon
are both still standing, no thanks to the golden mean.

The dream you had that your bins moved in the night?
It’s coming true. Hear the rolling wheels on the guilty footpath?

There was something before and after.
Possum sits in the driveway.

Possum runs up a tree, but I can still see possum.
Possum doesn’t act too worried.

The bird is like the tree, the bird is like the flower
the wallaby’s fur is the colour of shadowed bark.

Been a predator? Prey? Know that likeness
means you’ll go hungry

unlikeness means
you’ll feel the snap of jaws.

Be a metaphor
or feel your own flesh rip.

Where’s Pop? He’s down the back. Oh.
Digging onion weed out of the lawn with a butter knife.

Onion weed means something’s really given Pop the shits.
In the morning, back to normal.

I’m writing happy middlings.
Endings can be downers, easy ways out, or revelations

but I’d like endings
to be estuaries, full of nests.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Under the House

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Jennifer Compton

I would put on dress-ups and run around our house singing. You could run
right the way around our house. I would run, a little bit skippingly, with
draggle skirts and shawls awry. And the song I would sing was not in words
exactly. It was sighs and moans and shouts and also laughing. It was given
to me. It had a tune. A toneless tune. Just as the dark came in one night I was
belting down the long side, singing, flapping, and I came upon my young
and beautiful father sitting on the back steps weeping. I stopped, and drew
my shawls about me.

I would slip away and push open the wooden hatch to the underside of our
house. I would creep in and squat in the dry powder of the earth. I would
hear the life of the house going on above me. There were unconsidered
footsteps, and above them, everyday voices.

To the left of me, in the gloom below our house, was a hump of earth with
stark prickles of growing things struggling upwards. These upright shoots
had no colour. Even then I could not understand how they lived, in a place
where there was no rain and no sun. But something was trying to live and
grow. I do not know what it was. It was probably a grass. I was scared of it.

I called that hump of earth with its strange bristles ‘the giant hedgehog’. It
looked like a hedgehog slumped sideways in an extremity of exhaustion, of
birth or death, and something growing up out of its hulk, reaching.

As long as I lived in that house, above, I knew there was a giant hedgehog,
underneath.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Upon the Passing of Tomas Tranströmer

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Joel Ephraims

The world has come up to my window
to tell me it’s not too late
to tell me yes yes you too are still alive

The gods and demons of the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa
have left their eye lids
along with their creation, destruction saliva
in recesses of the purple wood
where my monkey-self swings
watching shadow bubbles column
like oil from disappeared planes

How often I have felt like a gaudy insect
in those gloomy, effulgent kitchens where
gods and demons and poems
loom above my lamb steak
and the profundity is knowing
that they too will overlook the fur
that trellises me but I can’t see

My head anti-missile chaffs and flares
and it feels like the tails of the comets are conspiring
against me in my latest dark irrationality
Or is it my super awareness? It is it is in this fringe of the park
which is a page the drug lords also read

I will refuse to be a wolf beyond my white banishment
I will walk through the banistered puddles
of stated houses in the sense of an incorporeal cube
not slowing down

The sleeper trains are mating
The slender comets have treacled from their sky warrens
to be folded arm-over-arm
and fused as sun is into grass

Today it feels like sundown
The islands look violated and majestic
All the fire and all the black

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Rules is rules

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Jilly O'Brien

I started with an interesting title
to hook the reader in
added a bit of magic twisting balloon giraffes,
inspecting ice
holes
in Montreal waiting for the seal to gasp
I learned that taxidermists
prefer the term mounting over stuffing;
and realistic dialogue,
like “Oh!” and “no thank you”
occurs when offered a cinnamon oyster

or the way out.

I remembered to show, not tell.

I gave hints,
hid clues in the third drawer down and under stones,
waited for the smoke to rise in letters
that spelt my truth sold secrets in the souk
amongst sacks of turmeric and cumin
stuck notes like grillchecks on a narwal horn,
drummed
my
nails
against the harbour wall in a king tide
and followed the march of the lemon ants.

I’m done with showing

Today I’m telling with the whistle of a blue whale, vibrating
your vision, making it temporarily difficult to swallow

telling with the aural bullet train
before the earthquake

telling with the tiny snuffle of a newborn firstborn

with full mouthed hawking phlegm untuned bagpipe drones in A&E

rural volunteer fire crews in high summer

and the daughters of the river god, Achelous

telling you

that I don’t think your rules
ever fit my story

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Fatberg

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Damen O'Brien

Help, I’ve fallen in a fatberg and I can’t get out.
I have spelunked the greasy caverns of Johannesburg,
I have scaled the dripping chasms under Tokyo,
I have seen the tallows glowing under Texas,
and now I’ve fallen in the frying pan.
I’ve fallen in the fry and I’m worried I will die.

Rancid carbohydrates, rank oils send me visions.
Ahab skating over a white tidal wave
of fat in search of whales of blubber bubbles
far beneath Manhattan’s streets.
Whales and whales to wash away the world,
and I am in God’s glaucous eye,
balanced on the scales.

Fat angels, chubby cherubs
flexing their pudgy biceps in these clotted catacombs.
Michelangelo’s Steak Night. Raphael’s Taco Tuesday.
Pray for me, oh buxom angels. Pray for me,
oh big boned Venus, labouring out of the narrow confines
of a shell.
The fumes batter at my brain and I am undone.
Help me, you phalanx of broad Valkyries,
lay down your deliveries of Uber Eats,
set down Wong’s Dumplings, Bob’s burgers,
for they have laid me low.

Beware, beware. A clotted cream maw has opened
and it speaks of doom.
A maelstrom clings to my hips and threatens to
liposuction me in.
There are grottos here:
toilet paper lying in streamers,
tendrilled mucous, treasure to be found,
pound for congealed pound,
eddies which can take me under until
I scream. I scream for icecream.
I scream to the Lard, but it will avail me nothing.
I have fallen in a fatberg, and I can’t get out.

There’s a mountain of plastic somewhere in the ocean.
A floating island. Tir na nOg, Avalon, Brasil.
I’ve read it’s guarded by a Moray Eel
grown monstrous on microbeads of plastic.
Grey jelly shopping bags.
Heroes which scramble to its salt-drenched summit
must face an undying knight.
But that may just be fancy.
I’ve fallen in an oleaginous stew,
and I don’t know what to do.

The wise men of Shambala, Tibet,
must ascend one more peak of decomposing vegetables,
I’m told.
Ploughed over surplus crops, slightly blemished designer fruit,
rough homespun produce not allowed to float the market,
offered by pilgrims from a fleet of trucks with
Walmart logos on them.
But this is someone else’s problem.
But this is someone else’s nightmare, not my struggle.
I’ve fallen in the rubble of a fatberg bubble
and I can’t get up.

I’ve cleared the pipes of Shanghai and of London.
Scraped the running porcelain of Singapore.
I’ve marvelled at the marble under Paris
and seen my face in copper in Peru.
But somewhere on that journey, things have darkened.
The world’s gut has fowled with slabs of floating fat,
and all that was beautiful in these cisterns of hollowed heaven,
of the long intestines loomed under Sydney,
all ordered and shiny and all new,
are stretch-marked with colour now, in apoplexy blue
and while the world is hurtling towards a heart attack,
I’ve dropped my hose somewhere hereabouts.
I’ve fallen in a fatberg, and I can’t get out.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

this is not cinema

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Morgan Nunan

they found micro-plastics
in all of our food and in the deepest caverns
of the ocean and I don’t know how it got there
but it can’t be good

the ibis are eating nacho cheese Doritos®
on concrete perches by your local petrol station skip
and if you haven’t seen them yet just watch the trailer online with a narration
that ends: coming soon to a 7/11 near you

listen to the greedy honks & maniacal chews
of the much maligned ibis: newfound figurehead for our urban ecology
(sacred bird = sacred meme)

and by the way — Doritos® invented in Disneyland® (coincidence?)
more and more I feel we are living in a cartoon (the eyebrows
are the giveaway)
with the oh so many comic book movies
that make Scorsese cry: this is not cinema
from lower Manhattan balconies or on late night talk show television
or at card games in back rooms somewhere in Little Italy
(and now I am thinking: Doritos® Pizza?)

Doritos® Doritos® Doritos®….‘little gold’ in Spanish
(a poor and ungrammatical translation)

and the ibis lived in wetlands before the micro-plastics and invasive carp species
and I don’t mean to labour the point but goldfish
are a little carp species, which, adopting the Spanish,
we might call: Doritos® of the sea

(coincidence?)

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

I wish human destruction was like…

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Megan Wildhood

the exuberantly rotting nurse logs
all along the trail of the last hike
I took my antsy rescue dogs
on before the season closed.

I left my little girls with their fevers
at their father’s. I packed for what I knew.
I skirt a face-down river, flail as the marionettier
of my pack, dread that I wasn’t born

a hundred years ago, farther from
the end of the world. I listen for the names
of things. The cold sizzles. Branches, bowed
as if laden with snow, weaken with their own

growing weight. How do I teach my girls about snow,
which dark isn’t scary, what to do with wishes and love,
that the real fairy tale is when no one needs saving.
I excel at walks on the beach. We are in a woods.

We are in a woods because humans
aren’t working. Human relationships aren’t working.
I needed to be loved by someone who has failed;
that’s not (yet) birds, gales, soil.

I hit dirt with my knees; my dogs look
crazy at me. Cups of earth in my hands,
dirt on my dogs’ tongues. I hold their faces,
kiss them sorry, sorry. I’m so sorry.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Botanic Park

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Heather Taylor-Johnson
My son asks what colour is the sky and I say blue – just look at it, what a beautiful blue – and we stop and stare into the sky, see different things like the future (him) and the past (me).

He says ‘black’ for a universe of reasons including atmosphere, prisms and an astronaut who’s been there and knows it all.

I tell him black doesn’t suit Adelaide’s peachy veins in the bloodshot eyes of a lazy summer’s sunset, even with the pump and grind of black tyres, black roads and the burnt black crumbs waiting for me on our oven’s wire racks.

Black magpies cawk about their many white patches and I fear for my unborn grandchildren who will one day ask what colour is the sky and I’ll say just look at it, that rusty rust-colour!

We’re on a blanket and I’ve brought a picnic, we’re by the river – can you smell that river? – a sixty-year-old rock legend is about to sing, we’re a lucky country, the grass smell, the river stink, the waft of a joint; somewhere a child is eating Shapes.

Soon the sun will set, its sinking felt first on the crowns of our heads. My son will ask What time will we go home? and I will say When it is dark and the sky is glittered with light because that’s what it looks like in the black of night.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Dark Crystals

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Chris Holdaway
“Fighting a fire that cannot be seen.”
Louis MacNiece

Rural news

Begin a new life with the pledge never
To fly again. Knee-deep in the debts
Of heavy machinery—reign of irrigation
—the only choice left to tour the velvet
Leaf’s black grass until your yoga retreat
On a climate denying farm comes to focus
On maximising carcase value. I’m using
My heartbeat to count a breathing
Exercise that has the effect of slowing
My heartrate—as if it were cool
Irony to breathe myself out of existence
Just like everyone else. Even tailwinds
Feel ahead of me. Dragging culvert
Pipe like a cross I see antibiotics
In the eyes of livestock and bank vaults
In bottles of milk—monoculture former
Weapons manufacturer trademarks
The science of pouring money on forest
Fires. Phoenix or bust. My new boots
Advertised as last rites wading into
Quantum cereal fields both antistate and
State subsidised—the Perseids as my
Herbicide for sheer abundance of gilded
Plants more dead than alive.

 
Industrial formations

We’ve taken metaphors to heart stream
-ing assets wedded to soul-searching
The statusquo. Everyone is a nature story
In lucrative environments even the moon
Bestowed upon us by healthy competition.
If only mindfulness meant remembering
Survival of the fittest was never Blitzkrieg
And not to get all instructional video in a
Poem but we owe the modern alpha male
Meme to a 1947 study of eight caged wolves
And when you observe functional packs
In the wild you see none of those dynamics
That are great tools for class warfare.
Causality was backwards: cooperation isn’t
A byproduct of harsh environments it’s
The engine—yet some razor-thin plateaus
Hold the ideal temperature range for loners.
Evolution is no arms race—what’re rockets
To penicillin for the clinically president—
What’s market for trying to escape your
Footprints. Look inwards and glimpse that
Early model capital and the spirit level of
Excess in your very own chemistry they say
—foreign investment like losing your house
Is just a state of mind. My goal is to never see
Another lawn again in the state wasteland
As privatised stress. The difference between
A peak and a valley is the brink of extinction.

 
Gravel highways

Here comes the wellness juggernaut boom
-ing intentions on sage water—gold cobalt
Sapphires quartz all part of the same old
Story. When did the rose of time get so
Complex from windup clocks to universally
Coordinated zones and confronting our
Death cult. The road only gets built when
There’s something they want to get out
—crystal concrete for the crystal coloniser
—bricks of angeline and labradorite mortar
Heaping these stones into my salt pyramids.
There is no budget even for child labour
Backs strained against the darkness polished
Dust in the weave of lungs like forgotten
Clothes. I suppose most people would take
Cheap healing power over clean fusion energy
And I want to mine lithium for FMRI machines
In hospitals just not laptop batteries. Number
One priority is to be surrounded by crystals
So why not try mineral uranium as an anti-
depressant: if it would mean the last sale ever
The final astrological lawsuit for there is no
Healing power in middlemen. Grass glitters
Like sharp knives through cracked earth as sun
-light bends out of sight through earth’s prism.

 
Loose wall

Drowning in powdered milk swept up
On the tide of facial recognition—
Rose quartz on wooden shelves ringing
Like an overture the bells of erosion.
Drill once for industry and twice for
Evolution’s random walk falling down
For you for the forever’th time.
Questions at all costs where forward is
Westward the very idea of “flaw” my
Closest allegory—a broad spectrum
Prophylactic doing thinking feeling.
It’s important to walk home in the cold
From the funeral even if you have other
Options. Headphones on your commute
Are the enemy and evolution is a terrible
Metaphor for technology. For all its supposed
Networking evolution doesn’t spend billions
Provoking love and care of social surveillance
Nets. Imagine one day analysing the surname
Manager just as you would Fletcher. Getting
Comfortable with guilt as it usually means
I have something I shouldn’t—so much so
Innocence feels like lack. More quality time
—handmade—where no loop is inevitable.
Opting out of natural selection. Walking
Away from even the idea of opting out.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Borisov

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Magdalena Ball

An object
travelling fifteen miles a second
in close collision course
trajectory

I thought of the earth
receiving the blow
in her solar plexus
radiating nerves and ganglia

two million hectares
rivers, forests, floodplains
exploded instantly into winter
such terrible alchemy

the crisscross of lines
across distended hips
tears to amber.

I could be there
first in the queue
taking the hit for our planet

sensing the shiver as the rock enters
a new species in deadly motion
riding shockwaves: exogenesis.

There are other scars below the crust
keloids of industry
we’re an industrious race
always working, metabolizing, metastasising.

Proof runs along the fault line
in warning shades of phosphorous green.
tailings, diggings, burning, tunnelling

liquid reserves in aqua blue
iridescent blooms and red tides
the trace of radionuclides

carbon spheres changing the signal
in sedimentary rock layer

arriving faster than the speed of sound
undoing all our fine damage
at the point of impact.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Storied Storage

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Bill Howell

“We can’t afford everyday life anymore, and I’m voting
on that.” (Street interview, Bob Woodward, Fear)

1
You wake up, stare through the smog, spot the bicycles
jamming the high-rise balconies: whatever you choose
to cheer you up. After this, nothing will be over the top.
Bikes will save us during extended power failures once
we figure out how to get them to the ground. But weather
on balconies doesn’t hoist or heist mathematical seasons
or mechanical reasons, so good luck on your way to
the street. Even if it’s under water.

2
You can say anything now: it depends on how floored
we are by your story. E.g.: The probability of a woman
becoming pregnant from a single randomly-timed act
is about 3%. Credibility is in the details you include
in the description of each lonely instance, and this relies
hugely on what we find most or least memorable:
“Nothing mattered. Then it blew over.”

3
Disparities between plot & narrative hang on causality.
If we could train SUVs to swim upstream like semen
and perhaps park themselves away from current affairs,
the transitive drama of everyday life might provoke them
to carry us away from consequences instead of forever
having to cloak everything in grief & mystery because
our best excuses are getting a little rusty.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Scandal Bag

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Beth Merindah
The scandal bag spilled its belly on the foreshore
filling the sand with foam, bile, grabba, and
a plastic film that suffocated
tamarind seeds studded with sugar.

It was a black jellyfish swimming in streams of squid ink,
propelled forward in a constant propulsion
of passive energy recapture,
chased by cords of fibrin and
streams of semen
ejaculated across a cloudy night sky.

It was gelatinous,
inflated by global warming,
a hydrostatic skeleton holding up
canals filled with cilia,
filaments flexing,
lobes, lappets, Viagra,
a manubrium fucking
mouth sucking
anus with umbrella shaped bells, balls,
tentacles with stinging cells and testicles.

Swimming with other scandal bags,
vast blooms in warm waters,
vessels, tangled ghost nets
clogging ship engines.

The scandal bag was without a respiratory,
circulatory
or central nervous system.
It was without color television, air-conditioning,
wifi or superannuation.

It was an all-seeing ocellus,
splitting itself in half, and half, and half again
in infinite fission,
until the sea was full of its proteins, collagen,
petroleum, ammonia, anxiety,
and depression.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Death of an Astronaut

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Benjamin Dodds 
Where lies Enos (Hebrew for Man)?

                        Not mouldering beside
            the deboned body-glove of
            HAM’s formless flesh

            underneath a New 
            Mexico museum’s 
            carpark flagpole

                        nor laid out 
            in the airforce 
            pathology lab’s 
            specimen drawers

            that house the same’s beetle-
            scrubbed bones.

When half-hearted dissectors
            were done with Enos
            first chimpanzee 
            to gain true orbit

             (third 
            hominid 
            after two 
            cosmonauts)

            their flayed pilot 
            bloomed 
            in flame
                        not on thrilling 
            re-entry but in a 
            medical incinerator.

Nothing of him remains.
                        No brass plaque 
            or ash-scattered 
            park claims 
            space for Enos
                         (Hebrew for Man).

Chimpanzee HAM was the first primate to cross the threshold of space during a sub-orbital NASA launch in 1961.
Enos followed in the same year, becoming the first chimp to achieve Earth-orbit.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

The cave, like the world

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Kristen Lang

The stone and the air enfold each other.
Their borders blur. The stone
sways the muscle of the air. The air
bleeds the silence of the stone. We breathe.
But the cave’s long exhale carries over us.
We walk. And each turn entangles us, twisting us
through catacombs of rippled ground.
Our skulls powder into a ceiling
darker than ourselves, dripping its fluid stain
into an artwork of protrusions, rust
and white and amber, the slow
rhythms reeling us into its hold.
We become

cave dwellers – the quiet
enters our hands and we give,
through the caverns of our bones,
the full length of our shadows.
The exchange cleans us.
How pervious we are. Imagine
sunlight and a blue dome.
Imagine the night, the stars’
perpetual fall, their precipice.

We have come to the cave, stepping out
of our other world, to pour the moment
of ourselves into the stone that is air
and the air that is stone. And when we return,
we climb into the day with the cave
in our bodies, the dark and the light like
birds sweeping inside us, one
past another. The sky’s arc pushes into us,
seeps into our pulse. And we give…
through the stretch of our tiny
lives, we give the noise in us,
all our force, all our tongues.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

At A Summer Festival This Year

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Miguel Garcia

for Keyla Salvador, Stephen Romero & Trevor Irby

I.

There was a bee
& it landed clumsily over
a field of poppy & yellow seep monkey.

There’s a gold rush here,
it believed—

The rustle of golden yarrow & yellow stonecrop
local to Santa Clara County
only emboldened it
to dig through the pollen
& collect plenty its segmented hands can.

The waning afternoon sun meant
the canopies & tents
are about to be taken down soon
& garlands of garlic are to be kept
inside car boots & family vans.

Another summer festival
about to pass but we haven’t seen
the last of summer yet:
the bee still has pollen in its hands.

A field of poppy & yellow seep monkey
glinted gold in an afternoon sun.

II.

We smelled garlic,
it clung like pollen in our shirts,
& left our breaths sticking to chewing gum.

A child would think vampire hunters
came to this haunt—

But there were mostly chefs, perhaps a child
crying from being bitten by
a gnat or a bee
dazed, confused landing on
a clove of garlic, sizzling on a frying pan.

Man with a whisker wore a garlic hat,
garlic ice cream slipped
between his fingers while a broken
up clove smiled at visitors snapping
photos from phones that smelled.

Another ordinary family trip,
another day for the patches of
checkerbloom & honey suckle
to stand out amidst the yellow,

& for our car to stand out during traffic,
the smell of garlic rising up as heat.

III.

There was a girl
with golden yarrow & yellow
stonecrop laurel rustling on her hair.

She smelled garlic right before she
smelled the gunpowder—

Pacific winds caught a sneeze from the pollen
the bee dropped from its sac.
It got startled from
the spray of bullets flying
around canopies, cars, & garlands of garlic.

A boy that day imagined playing
the role of vampire hunter,
but his rifle fell on innocence,
not on vampires: a girl with a golden
yarrow & yellow stonecrop laurel

was one of them, her ice cream
melted amidst the afternoon heat.
Cars going home that day smelled
garlic, but one left an empty seat.

There was a bee & it gathered pollen right
before, it gathered the gunpowder.

Posted in 95: EARTH | Tagged

Crow

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Lucy Alexander
I hail the wind. Before I transformed from a daughter – we were always of the egg. Bluer than the lake, a few shades lighter. I hail the wind, but I will not follow its instruction. With my feathers I winnow the direction, I sift it for my intentions. It cannot take me, the way I take flight from gravity. Burned I was. Burned more than Magpie who kept her voice. Burned I was. Burned more than Currawong who calls evening into being and plots all night with the fire still in her eye. The sky stuck in my eye. In my haste to flee fire I took skywards and the spell fell through the crackling air. It took my girl-dom. It took my long possum hair. Now I am feathered. Now I am as coal, with my feathers glistening blue from the sky’s last kiss as I transformed. I call to my mother, forgive my jealous heart. I call to my father, make me whole again. But to you, to you I say: feed me your children. For with this transformation, gone is my shame. I will eat their hearts and sing my short votive song to their deaths. I have always hailed the wind, the one that took the fire up and threw me into its midst. It has scattered me, shattered me, made me what I am.
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OCTOPUS

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Kim Westwood

Every moment of mortal smallness has a thread loosened in the fabric where a button was;
some days I glimpse infinity through that worsted eye, and some
a yawing flank about to bombs away a world of baggage

News of the latest killings has me stranded on the bath edge, cribbed by dread;
of course to my companion the dog this translates as a hiccup in the usual flow of habits,
so he is paws and haunches sphinx-like on the mat, head cocked in confusion

My hands leave off their frenzied wringing, landed in my lap they seem sluggish and strange—
octopus hands, veined and drying in their frail translucence
as if netted by a long line then pitched into the ribby stomach of a boat

Which I suppose a fish catcher might say is a small thing in the bigger scheme,
as with the dingo’s dreadful creature agony in the leg trap three long days before it will be shot,
or another country’s bears in cages, catheterized for bile

Surely no relation to our planetary feuds and neighbour wars and family estrangements,
those casual cruelties between two people who purport to love, but cart an accumulation of despair
to the café table, not speaking across the salt?

When smallness sends me, an atheist, inside the wishbones of someone else’s church,
I beg forgiveness for my part in a chimera that remakes itself each generation
with aliases

Humanity’s bannered cavalcade: digging the road ahead with indissoluble fervour,
breaking the spirits of dissenters with bulldozers,
electrodes

While I’m there I say how bad I feel about the lunchtime soup—
all those tiny beings crushed in it—
and the gastronomic cruelty that boils lobsters alive

What if the cavalcade slowed its madness through the woods, the fields, the city square, and allowed a
question? About the bones, for instance, in the wheel tracks, about the mysterious foot without its shoe
on the dusty verge

Say such tank-like certainty met with shimmering doubt—a slick of impossible water to notice the sky
in—and shaped a new thought,
like, how does it feel to be an octopus?

The one whose ink is draining on a boat somewhere,
plucked from its muscular passage through kelp-shrouded waters,
no longer suckered in the crevices of its plankton world

Or say our human vanguard came upon the sand-bitten dingo in its final day, and someone
held that wretched metal-anchored sack of fly-blown skin as its cells unlatched and sinews loosed
from bone?

Beside the bath two ears are radared to my wet incomprehensible signals,
all that bowing and yawning now persuasion to a plan—
my companion makes me smile

He’s sure I’ll clamber sometime from the dark subduct geology of grief’s terrain,
knows I’ll risk infinity or a bombing behind his flag-tailed lead
to step outside and walk the dog.

*
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Night-blooming Cereus

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Natalie D-Napoleon

After the Sally Mann photograph “Night-blooming Cereus, 1988”

Family: Cactaceae
Genus: Hylocereus undatus
Water: Regularly until flowering commences

Passed down from mother to daughter, friend to friend
this blood moon eclipse reflects in the waxy shadow
of my tea cup, an oxidized lunar sky. Milky clouds drift
across its surface revealing to peoples, ancient & present,
the moon moves beyond the edge; she is a great sphere, returning
the Earth’s light back to us each evening as an act of love.

The shadows of youth slide across the moon, clinging
to the bark of a tree, the siding of a house, the nearest bare wall,
the flat chests of boys and girls and those in-
between with roots that breathe the globules of wet air.
Once flowering each bud remains luminescent for one
night before withering into a dancer’s full-length skirt.
Spent blooms hug the neck of childhood,
a wounded swan seeking solace from the sins of men.
In the deep South, the night-blooming
cereus may flower all summer long.
Water sparingly once blooms appear.
Origin unknown.

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Thirteen ways of looking at an astronaut

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Guenter Sahr

(after Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)

I.
Among the panoply of stars
The only moving thing
Was the mind of the astronaut.

II.
I was of three minds
As at first sight of a space-station
Crewed by two astronauts.

III.
The astronaut tumbled slowly in the void beyond Earth.
She was the foreground to a cosmic pantomime.

IV.
Below, the lands and the seas and the clouds
Are one.
The lands and the seas and the clouds and the astronaut
Are one.

V.
I do not know which to prefer,
The volumetrics of the Tuscan column,
Or the voluptuousness of the dirigible,
The astronaut’s igniting propulsion unit
Or just after.

VI.
The Earth filled the impenetrable visor
With its sea-shepherd blue.
The reflection of the astronaut
Crossed it, to and fro.
The ache
Traced in the reflection’s antumbra
An unfathomable cause.

VII.
O ignorant and rapacious men destroying forests
In the Amazon, smudging archipelagos in Asia.
Why do you imagine golden locusts shall fill your coffers?
Do you not see the astronaut
On bended knees observing your desecrations.

VIII.
I know the beauty of symmetry in equations
And lucidity in columns of algorithms;
But I know, also,
That the astronaut is involved
In what I know.

IX.
When the Earth vectored out of sight
The astronaut became the pale
Marking the latest frontier.

X.
At the sight of the astronaut
Brightling in the feint blue light,
Even the epics of Homer
Would recede to nursery tales.

XI.
The astronaut slowly cartwheeled over continents
In her space-shroud.
Once, a fear pierced her,
In that she mistook
A malfunction in the voice communications
For a loss of pressure.

XII.
The light of the world is moving.
The astronaut must be vectoring in space.

XIII.
It was darkness all day and every day.
It was silent
And it was going to remain silent.
The astronaut suspended
In the royal-jelly of space.

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Orange Wabi-Sabi

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Lou Verga

for Emily

i found an orange. it sprouted one morning, round, formed, out of my left index finger. when i plucked it the leaves were yawning. for weeks i racked my brain. weeks, and i didn’t know what to make of this orange that hovered on the edge of my sleep, refused to leave the furry gaps between my teeth then snuck up my nostrils to the bottom of my spleen

that wasn’t half of it. more of them started to pop up; on an uneven trestle table, befriending a gallon of wine in a neighbour’s garden, slapping the centre of a palm, brushing with impossible poise the ice-flecked grass. in glass jars and savers jackets with snapped twigs in the pockets, in kisses and lips that quiver like strings, sealed and singing, living in skin

the orange just kept it pretty simple. sitting on my dresser it amplified the silence,
counting the days in its crinkles. one arvo though i was getting sad, standing on the platform with my faded woolworths bag. when i came home everything was covered in dusk. i went straight to the orange and it was bashed up, rough, punctured with two holes

inside one ran a maze of its own contorted rind. the other was decorated with webs of dust and black mould. but it just sat there, still, so unapologetically orange and tranquil. and that’s how it was when a cloud encroached the room, when music scratched in the walls and poems passed out on the floor. the weeks congealed and oranges continued to loom

on some loose cobblestones, half-submerged in a thin puddle that glittered and ran the length of a lonely alley. amongst billows of mist that collapsed into their middles then opened outwards, rising, entwining over the tired night sea. when the dash lights were dead on a dark empty street, with the old lady on the bus who took a month to get from the door to her seat and years of unbroken drizzle gathering in roof gutters

one night i walked in and saw just the soft carcass of the orange and a few drops of juice oozing down the dresser’s side. as i stared at the scene, a voice moved with my jaw:
the orange is sometimes questioning the orange, giving it your full attention, watching it blossom and thaw. the orange is remembering there’s no it or you, just one, and waking up to give it new. even though you sometimes feel old and i remembered the gardener who planted an orange tree in the earth of my soul

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Hands in the Earth

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Dylan Brennan

a drab puzzle for these scrambling mothers amongst shredded remnants of plastic bags 

shallow landfill, semi desert half-light the pieces of their sons mixed with others 

contrasting rates of decomposition pozole hominy in a thick mud soup  

rain on groundwater bringing to surface a scattered phalanx of human hand bones 

(some of the little pieces are children’s) up against a gated community 

the blue pools unrippled by commotion not too far from here a woman’s young neck

blown open with a dead toad placed inside the medium is always the message 

what’s the best to be hoped for at this stage to be cleaned to original whiteness 

misidentified to ease someone’s grief returned to earth in a marigold dusk 

or just deposit at the foot of this desert mistletoe fertile red no pain

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Amazon up in smoke

Posted on February 1, 2020 by Christian Garduno

Do thoughts + prayers work for the burning of the planet’s lungs?
lol asking for Bolsonaro (can we blame video games for this, too)
See, we let them have the Olympics once & this is how they repay us? Geeze.
Would a wall of strong Russian steel slats perhaps help contain this issue?
How about blaming at least 85% of this on Jewish Democrats?
I, for one, do not believe anything is actually burning in Brazil at all–
It’s so annoying how people compare this to Notre Dame; ND was technically someone’s
property, not just random unkept “nature”, that’s why it got rebuilt so fast.

Well, I mean, did the Brazilians properly rake their forest floors? Highly doubt it.
Are the favelas still intact? Okay, cool, just checking.
Do NOT use this relatively “tiny, completely natural forest fire” to stump about junk “science”
and “global warming yadda yadda” because it sounds like Al Gore is making millions off of this
in his private jet- makes me sick. Democrats are so disgusting (and violent).
It’s prolly happening because Amazon doesn’t pay any taxes. Sad!

If it’s so “catastrophic”, how come no people are dying? OMG get over it already lol
Remember when Barack Obama personally started those heinous Amazonian rain forest fires
that permanently + irreversibly scarred our Planet’s lungs forever? Now he wants your guns!!!
I heard it’s the lugenpresse starting all the fires everywhere and I wouldn’t put it past them

How come the aboriginals aren’t doing anything to put out these fires? Are they in on it or
something? Hmm, sounds fishy, I’m just gonna say it.
It’s not in the King James Version so I don’t think it’s gonna be a big deal at all ha ha y’all
always exaggerating smh calm down
There is a silver lining in all these smoke clouds, though, guys:
AMAZON FIRE HD ON SALE $121.99 with free shipping ok
I’m out of ideas
I’m out of oxygen

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