Beerwah

 

I begin my negotiation with the mountain

but she stuffs my mouth with clouds and ti-tree

blossom drenched in last night’s pour—

 

I am back in the cradle, suckling again,

swaddled in humidity like a muslin wrap,

left to cry myself to sleep and drink from my own plump fist—

 

Mountain/mother I am grown now—

 

She unclothes me, unfastens paperbark layers,

shakes crumb and beetles scurry from hidden pockets,

measures me against my shadow,

demands I wash before I eat—

 

Mountain/mother!

 

If my fibres swell with much more soak

I will split, splinter,

I will fall and drown in tepid, salt-dark slime—

 

Earth/mother, is this what it is to come home?

 

 

 

To the pied cormorant washed up on a Coorong beach,

not bones but flesh

fully feathered—holding,

holding that last breath as though

still underwater, outstretched,

eyes sealed, still reaching for the depths:

 

I dreamed I held a snake in my bare hands perhaps

not a snake but your neck, writhing, oil-slick, twisting,

diving, your wings pinned against your body, between

my arm and my chest, held with the strength of water, deep

water, the current, the surf-swell.

 

I dreamed your felt-sense of underwater:

beak then eye then skull,

sinew, vertebrae and undigested fish

spines, a barbed hook, crustacean

shell and plastic net—holding that breath.

The soaking of barbed feathers.

The spiralling up and out and into the air

to spread your wings for the sun and breeze to dry.

 

 

 

Periodic Cicadas also Carry Disease

            On Massospora cicadia and Magicicada sp

 

Even though they emerge from earth, angelic,

white and yet to harden, they carry

fungus that will eat them from the bottom up

and enough nitrogen to nurture a glut. Eat

or be eaten. An abdominal cavity made hollow

for sound and sex might fill with chalk and spores

while psilocin, psychedelic poison, numbs the bugs to absence.

These cicadas dance and sing and make love

and will never lay eggs, instead hosting a mycosis

that can never live without chitin, without these shared wings.

 

Human, you and I assume ourselves

most complex. That we, with our messy chromosomes

and messy love, are the pinnacle of evolution.

That only we pass on contagion, ecstasy, hunger, oblivion.

In fact, here are cicadas, making hungry, oblivious love

and a fungus with a genome so large it codes for insomnia, autumn, burial.

Sequence this—and you, poet-with-four-letters: weep.

Your own chromosomes so tightly wound, so sheltered from intrusion—

I would rather be a cicada, with its long dark sleep

and its multiplicity of forms: its lineage of maple sap and late frost,

its abandoned shell and leadlight wings, the dissemination of spores

and the fall.

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Kathryn Reese is a poet, a writer of flash fiction and a medical scientist working in microbiology. Her poetry can be found in eco-poetic destinations such as Paperbark and Kelp Journal. Her flash fiction The Principal and the Sea, was published in Glassworks.

 

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