I dream of forests
A vast sycamore looms beyond the treeline.
Across a waterlogged meadow, I watch.
Waiting
I pick through plastic streamers and sun bleached balloons,
digging for shells and seaglass.
But nothing beautiful remains here.
Milky streams fracture the corrupted land,
running towards the trees.
My body feels the same tug.
What am I, but a body of water?
I dream of you in the forest, touching bark with gentle fingers
The forest asks why you have come here, but you remember nothing.
The trees breathe your exhale and call you to recall.
Your birth.
Your death.
the moments shutter into one another.
We’ve been here a thousand times.
The hours stretch around us.
Swaddled in heat, our edges fizz and become porous
We trail sweat and sap, gather sunlight in our palms.
Let my sensing thing intwine with yours.
We speak through our skin, turn and wrinkle in the beams.
Moles now intersperse with lichen and damp mosses,
seeds make vessels of us.
Our layers melt away and we disappear into the surrounding air.
Body, as fruit of a lifetime of entanglements.
But how the word ‘fruit’ holds decay like a promise.
Must abundance always end with collapse?
Or did our first flush burst from a rotten core?
Clouds crouch between mountains.
Lead lined and peering at me.
Cradle me in broken arms, October, then let me fall to shatter on wet concrete.
Let my voice become an echo between glass and chrome.
Melt my pieces into clay and mould me to the next thing and the next thing.
The orchard is awake, and dreams of me.
It feels the loam squish between my toes.
Softly, lay my body down in the furrows. I sink.
Let the spreading walnut tree feed on my lungs, the artichoke my heart.
Juicy and sweet, I give this all for you.
In return, you spirit me away underground.
Paradise is here amongst the roots and beneath the river bed.
The bare soles of my feet have always known you.
I dream of crumbling plains of obsidian and pumice.
Diverging crust has formed a rift here, and we descend.
Below, we find a calf sprawled on its side.
Dark liquid pools beneath it, viscous, dripping.
Though time has no place here, currents push and we must move.
The calf’s mournful eyes follow us.
Deeper,
we find a fire burning inside the hollowed trunk of a redwood.
I reach out to catch a flame,
but they ash my asking palm to nothing.
Deeper,
magma flows between sheets of flesh and tissue.
Bones split and chasms open,
between which flows the soon-to-be new.
We cannot run from new inventions of a body.
When I wake,
the dream flickers at the edge of my vision.
A shimmer between floorboards
A dandelion cracking pavement