Nature – Why Pears

Beneath

My mind soars over a landscape outside and within, my body a topographical map of freckles and stretch marks stretching toward purpose that can only be found nestled in the quiet of sleeping autumn leaves of stubborn fungi grasping to the remnants of warm summer days bracing for the cold that will pluck them from…

Among the Morning Shadows

I wish I could exist among the morning shadows, nestled in a bed of moss guarded by mushrooms where life doesn’t keep unspooling like the slack of an anchor thrown into the ocean.

Elapsed

Elapsed you only really think of this word in terms of time, in terms of what is behind us and what is in front of us, but the word oozes a sense of disaster of calamity folding in on itself over and over and over again, it pulls you apart like taffy because you are…

The Labyrinth

Most days my mind feels like the inside of a pumpkin— tangled, stringy, goopy, I wish I could just carve myself from the inside out, scraping out every last anxious ruminating cyclical thought, but anxiety is the Minotaur and the labyrinth that imprisons it, it is the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh Hydra head when…

Fishing for Light

If I were to as Pablo Neruda wrote, sit on the rim of my own well of darkness, fishing for light, I might see monarch butterflies emerging from a winged skull on a 1700’s gravestone, or the girth of a 200-year-old European beech tree snaking its way up the well to greet me, or maybe…

You Are

You are the smell of a hundred years of pine trees whose needles lay muddled by the feet of hikers on an early summer’s morning. You are the grace of a lily pad floating atop a corner of the lake with her roots in place to prevent her from drifting away. You are the resilience…

Everlasting

I am everlasting, even after this body dies its nutrients will rise giving life back to the soil, to the cracks where wild flowers grow— this I know. I am uncertain of the future in a lot of ways but this was the life and the body I was given so as long as I …

Bees

Have you ever tried to shake out laundry drying on a line of any bees that might have made your jeans a temporary home? That is what it feels like trying to empty out my head before bed— just trying to free these bees before they sting me in my sleep.

Stump

They cut her down today— first, they started with her tallest branches just a few cuts to sprinkle the earth with hundreds of years worth of her Next, they began sawing at her midsection bulbous and covered in lichen her body etched with the histories of teenage love Finally, they snipped her — sliced her…

By the Roots

I wanted to run my fingers through your long hair reaching like wisps of branches toward the sky grip you tight by the roots and remind you who controls the wind that rustles your leaves who controls the rain to relieve your thirst and who controls the sun to warm your soul.