Natural History Lessons

A single taste  of the precious jam on my tongue  in Winter  and I am here again. Sunglow green leaves, triads of midnight purple treasure, mingle with the scarlet unripe. Chalky lavender stems, studded with pale, mirthless thorns. A delicious smell, beyond words, cuts straight to the limbic. Lovingly lost here — the rhythm of fingers plucking, the pleasing patter in the pail. The brambly black raspberry patches around my parent’s house are a magical machine that folds  layers of time back onto themselves, over and over, like berries swirled into sweet batter. All at once: I am a feral, bare-legged child, running wild with my sister, sweet tang in my mouth, a proud map of scratches on our legs announcing our fierce and united denial  of pants. I am a young woman, my sister,  pregnant and persistent as ever, her belly a great round berry. We plucked for hours, entranced, I almost forgot my class and was late, Later, she napped. I am middle-aged, deliciously ...

My familiar and I  walked through  the sooty evening of January 1st, 2023. The rain pouring down on us, muddy sidewalks flooded, storm drains gurgling a treacherous goblin song. Earlier that day,  I overheard an old women say to her young granddaughter —  “better rain than snow.” This is the kind of thing Average Folk say in the Netherworld. Their chipper,  quivering denials die quickly, rust and shatter,  in the permanent  Late Evening. Souls like mine  blaze brighter and faster here, more vengeful and passionate against the gray.   In the night, I scream for Snow. I prostrate myself before the Granddaughter and plead for her To Remember Snow and Burn like me against the Rain.  

I sat in the dark studying bones. They contain billions of little channels you know —   canaliculi. Handing treats to countless   little princess-witches and spidermen, the spidey sense in the back of my skull   tingled a touch too late.   A dark shadow   in the shape of a man   was striding across the lawn. The primal fear triggered —   an unpleasant adaptation   to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn in hopes that we would not be forced. Tearing of tissues the first concern but more concerning — the future burden of bearing unwanted births, endless pleading mouths . But as the form drew closer,   I swear I saw colors swirl around him as the dimensions of the universe   Frameshifted in the dark. And it was warmth and comfort and friend —     my husband returned!   That night,   I dreamt of poisonous ex-lovers holding me close in giant warm arms yet still distant somehow. Walking in the gray gloaming of the morning, a golden...

  You used to be all green segments  neatly arranged  in a perfect little row. Nubbins for legs,  little orange Velcro hooks for toes.   With such machinery  and such control, you’d inch along — all day and all night.   Beneath your bronze helmet, serrated mandibles, clacking chitinously, mindlessly macerating all leafy matter in your path. Frass burning out your ass —  a nonstop energy extractor, a tireless wormy expander and contractor. Gross, Orderly, and Acceptable — You stuck to the contract. Kept the pact.   Until, one day you blacked out. Woke up in a bag,  a disorderly warm soup,  a dizzy swirl. You felt viscerally (even without viscera) that to be suddenly  Wormless and Formless was wholly unacceptable.   How does the formless find form?   In your terror, you tried force, you tried will, you tried plans and panic. Alas no, you stayed soupy and droopy.   Then one day, just when you thought  you were ...

Perfectly perch the Occipital on Condyle. Insert Head of Femur into Ilium, plus or minus 0.3 degrees. Mind the Acromial Angle . . . just so . . .   and you yet may sleep. Yet, no matter how hard you tend to the osseous matter, those offal innards are still so soft. And it is awful that those inners are, at some point, to be presented back to you. And while it was forecasted  with 100% probability, plus or minus zero standard deviations, that you would suddenly be gifted with a flayed bit of your own fillet — draped sadly over the tine of a fancy fork or accidentally attached by a dirty old bandaid to a glossy bit of junk mail  (a sudden startled “Ugh” when the pile got turned over for some damn random reason) —  the point is that you are are still surprised.   Because after the 164 th  time, you might expect tedium  in the mustering muttering myocardium. Yet, here you are again, shocked at the awful awe-full offal — that soft tissue that oozes out, no ...

Inkblot shadows  paint the shoreline. It seems I am here  for a Rorschach test. Rusty hues  are belied by winter's kiss in the air as I skim along the surface  of the cold watery  womb of the hills. To be fair,  this lake turns  everyone into a poet. Gun and Death worshipping men  come out here to fish  from their chubby camo kayaks, fall into a trance, and find themselves  using their tactical knives  to inscribe haikus  on the lids  of their tackle boxes. The lake  is a silent tomb today. A curled brown leaf  floats motionless upon its perfect twin. A dead honeybee  lies completely still cradled gently  in a net  of oxygen kissing hydrogen. Sweet seductive  leafrot and deertang  waft off of shore.  Where, stark gray treeforms beckon — Sirens,  with triple twisting legs  and rocks lodged permanently  in their curvaceous crotches, sing. Their rooty toe tips  sip t...