Nothing is consumed whole. Nothing.
We put the bread, the nuts, the sweet apple
into our mouths and chew. Standing at
the counter, I take care to chop the carrots
into equal sized pieces as the potatoes
so that it might all cook together. Be taken
along with a chopped onion for savor
and digested. The cottonwood tree
that leaned for so long finally falls. Impact
shatters the rotten trunk, the branches
scatter across the forest floor. Then moss
and beetle and rain get to work. After
a few years, after the hares have sheltered
beneath and dug among, the tree becomes
soil. Becomes mushroom that I gather
and add to the soup. It becomes impossible
to imagine any other end point. Some day
I will be alone. If there is singing, I will not
hear it. If someone is saying words about
my life, parsing out the good things I tried
to do, I will not attend. My atoms uncoupling.
My consumption, my alchemy, already under way.
—
Erin Coughlin Hollowell is a poet and writer who lives at the end of the road in Alaska. She is the author of Pause, Traveler (2013) and Every Atom (2018), both published by Boreal Books, and Corvus and Crater from Salmon Poetry (2023). She has been appointed a 2022-2025 Black Earth Institute Fellow. She is the executive director of Storyknife Writers Retreat and director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference.
