Morels

You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers. A tree has fallen across the path you and your father carved out three years ago, back when he could lift the chainsaw without shaking. Today, he holds only a bucket and won’t let you carry it, though you know his left side is numb. The Laetiporus on the tree trunk is orange but unripe, and the puffballs you saw near the rusted, stripped Camry a hundred feet back are bloated with spores, too mature for the butter and garlic baptism you would have given them at supper. Summer and Fall battle over the maples’ chlorophyll, but the trees’ shadows do not change. Your father says this is the week for morels, so you must help him harvest before the mosquitoes die and the ticks vanish. Before the longlegs curl up dead and the hummingbirds depart and the wasps slumber in their paper nests and before he shakes too much to hold anything at all, even a bucket. He still hasn’t told you how to identify morels. You don’t know how you’ll find them when he’s gone.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

She Replants

The family tree is gnarled and warped. Witch’s bony
knuckles and fingers sprouting from a dark corner of the earth.
It hangs like a curse and blights the lonely apple that grows,
hiding. A thin branch reluctantly bows to its weight.

The disgruntled farmer marches toward, callused fingers
gripping an axe. A ruling by nature’s court would have
taken longer. As the bit kisses wood, neighboring foliage pockets
stray echoes—as if the tree never stood. For a moment,
even nature forgets its impartiality, wishing it good riddance.

Striking ground, leaves quake and abandon loyal dew drops,
while the tart apple tumbles away unceremoniously, catching bruises.
The apple finds final refuge not too far from the felled tree:
chopped wood hauled away after an inconclusive autopsy—
why that tree grew diseased and wicked, neither the apple nor the farmer
knows. Perhaps it was simply impartiality. The apple finally begins to rest
and somehow, it does not rot until the very end. Its secret is peace.
Though nature would never acknowledge it.

With graceful decay, the elements accept the sunken
apple’s sacrifice as offering. The cost to plant roots paid in full,
its seeds are blessed. They lay dormant, mourning.
At the turn of the season, they shed their coats of hesitation
and begin ascent. In old age, the deer, hawks, and ravens
finally bear witness to an anchored palace ornamented
in abundance with sweet rubies basking in the sunlight.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.