wickets of bog-hopple hop from hope to hope,
weaving through serried stems
and sarry-high halberd handles.
where’s to seaward in all this Allness?
reaching a half-fathom deep,
against the past their bodies bulwark
against burial-as-such/against decomposition
tiny tides, a misnomer as though
anything names stickily, wind
and wind. like tumble-weeds, we turn
from lacustrine to desert
is brown ooze onomatopoegic? goo, goop,
glop, gloop, or glob or gobbet, semi-liquid
semi-solid; semaphore for “do not tread”
lest you be drowndéd
at the limn, these dado-decoration excoriations
in the form of sedge, rush, reed, stem
the bewildering begins with color—
the faintest suggestion of green
enough to acquiesce to true plant
tho half-hearted, half-raimented
floating bead edge a necklace of ‘how-so?’
cassandra foretells drainage, pissage, taxage.
pukwudgies festoon a frame
around any futurity, clover it
hymenterists—do you study lovemaking, the tangle of voices
penetrating glug-glug, squish-squash
with antiphonal punctuation? Have we not
filled, spilled into the space uncrowded by sound with
a most language-like gabble?
we’re unworshipped gods
in this miniature wilder.
yre multi-tendrilled and fay.
I’ll protect yr anonymity
by braiding curls with bedstraw
and stuffing yr mouth with lambent
in spite of the canticle
I’m undecided as to your yolk
my finger troubling yellow.
the fay play ventriloquial tricks
on my gorged ears, heavy with roots.
oftener and oftener, I lose direction
as it’s meant to be lost, drunk
weaving canter-footed
NOTE: The italicized phrases are borrowed from Winthrop Packard. Woodland Paths. Boston: Small, Maynard And Company. 1910, pages 201-210.
—
Julian Mithra hovers between genders and genres, border-mongering and -mongreling. Winner of the 2023 Alcove Chapbook Prize, Promiscuous Ruin (WTAW) twists through labyrinthine deer stalks in the imperiled wilderness of inhibited desire. An experimental archive, Unearthingly (KERNPUNKT, 2022) excavates forgotten spaces. In the Bay, they peregrinate from sniffing rocks to folding paper. Read recent work in Paperbark, Heavy Feather Review, Storm Cellar, and Permafrost.
