Amateur MycologistsMariel Herbert
I. Primordium They tried and failed the old fashioned art of folding their dreams into clean sheets, compulsive threads. Turned their depressed light sensitive stems parasitic. Burnt matches. Ovate friends advised from orthodox toadstools. He learned to stalk her cycles, perennially confused that a broken veil meant go. Twisted deceivers. Then came the specialists with polyporous forms, collecting fluids and words. Inorganic contamination. One night he clicked 'buy' and waited for a miracle herb that never sprouted. She sought out healers. Witches in black forests. Hens of the woods. In the end they had moonlight and sporophores. Both pressed wood ears to the earth, let themselves compost for a time. They poured out blue wine, consumed oysters warm and cold. Brown and golden they fused together in a fairy ring the usual way: umbonate to umbilicate. Mating like lobsters. The starched couple slept on midnight ground primed by amethyst thunderbolts, dampened with desperation. Flawless substrate for fruiting. They needed, needed her to open up her angel wings and fly. Thus they shared with their magic mushroom child ignoble destroying rot. Amanita, good girls hide their gills beneath their caps. Beware bleeding toothed pigs hunting moon night truffles. Stay safe as a hedgehog in winter. II. Release Such puffball parents, to pom-pom false morals at their child's margins. This mycelial girl isn't a fawning chanterelle; not their mirror yeast, their sweet-bred unicorn. No, she's an earthstar. A rhizomorph. Blue runner. And so she grows. Grows up. Spreads out with a swish of those hyphal tips. When her parents try to find her old fruitbody, she's already packed up and gone underground. Filamentous. Her new found family's common and communal symbiotic and intimate: all love, infinite strings. |
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Mariel Herbert
Mariel writes speculative and short form poems, including haiku and senryu. She likes to meld the mythic with the absurd. Mariel used to live in the fog by the Pacific Ocean. Now she lives with several mosquitos. Her poetry has been published in many lovely places, including this year's Dwarf Stars anthology. You can find her online at marielherbert.wordpress.com.
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