Solitude is profound. Or is it galvanizing? A tongue submerged in sweet-water pines for the taste of salt—or bitterness. Alone, I watch time like paint to slow it down; to catch a plant in the act of growing, the moment my dog slips to slumber. I wonder if I’m right, when I suspect sleep has taken her entirely. I would like to know, down to the very second. We all have that thing we want to do before we die. For many, jumping from a plane is enough to call it quits but I won’t go until I feel a smile-wrinkle, stay for the very first time. I just hope to befriend solitude by then; to connect with white-blue glacier under sun-lit moon, and admire the Indian Paintbrush—how it threads through rock and root, up jagged mountain peak, (where it finds a meadow to call “home”). Do you hear the trickling stream? A gentle sigh over sharp earth; not long before it is soft, not long before I am soft.

At a restaurant, it’s not uncommon to be served an entire chicken thigh with the poor little wing still attached. To remind you it was once a bird? I’d rather not think about that. I was cooking chicken parmesan the night I decided to go vegan— a stint that lasted all of two years, the longest I’ve gone without yogurt. There was a production line setup and everything: wood cutting board, steel meat-tenderizer, whipped egg-milk slurry in a wide-bottomed bowl, large plate of seasoned breadcrumbs, and an empty dish at the end for the chicken, once dressed. I remember my finger piercing the plastic wrapping—the cold, slick sliminess that followed when I took the fleshy breast and slapped it on the counter. (station one) I beat the meat so good, swinging the metal mallet through the air like performing a sweet ballet—the squishy bang of fangs on the rawness, keeping tempo ‘til soft. But dipping the mother chicken in pulverized embryo (station two) changed me, as I watched it drip from the chunk of bird I held suspended in the air. I’d made this meal a hundred times but never before considered egg as embryo, meat as mother— a play on words, forming a bond between two things, once separate. Like wings on a chicken thigh, my humanity, now attached; a common thread that tied me to chicken-hood where empathy hung, abundant— warm and ready to be worn like shirts left in the sun to dry. (station three) An epiphany. * Originally Published in Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Oct. 2023. https://tinyseedjournal.com/2023/10/04/the-tragedy-of-chicken-hood/

Listen, the largo strum of emanating rain leaves like small snares in the forest, as a storm ripens to allegro then booming lush fortissimo. How loud the small can be. Tucked in a gully, belly to my knees, I give-ear to the sky as it bellows, its caterwaul bobbing between rock walls and bending. Would you believe me if I told you, I saw sound that day? It was there and breathing and then it was gone.

I was nine when she started asking me to kill the dandelions. So young for hands to hold bloodshed. It was the first time I really thought about what it means to die. I remember my body draining of color and warmth; the feeling of partial transparency, as if frosted glass. In the bathroom mirror, I watched my mouth say ‘no’ six times, eight times, twenty-three. But I was war-bound with an already wounded word and it was the shrapnel of silence that lingered on my tongue as I knelt on the grass, ripping off their heads. It was an act of both murder and prayer, and the prayer must have worked because those little yellow heads grew back. But there I was again a week later, yanking entire bodies from the ground (“roots and all!”), then tying them up in thick black plastic to be left on the curb with the kitchen garbage. The evidence was gone by morning.

Because we can't rely soley on memory. The mind is clumsy, leaving a trail of loose change behind us as we walk. Little by little our pockets empty, slow enough we never notice.

Genial yellow clouds form under overcast sky hover above the green of grass and sway. A pollen foxtrot pulled from its anther by a passing shoe. A dance that lends a hand to the flowers. Its participants, re-homed to nearby poppy mallows, whose petals will close (per usual, each night) with no reason to reopen come morning. *Originally Published in Plants & Poetry Journal, Plant People, Anthology of Environmental Artists Vol III. https://www.plantsandpoetry.org/journals/plant-people-an-anthology-of-environmental-artists-vol-3