Nolan: My Story of Addiction

- Nolan

Coming Up Green

Here I will make a place for you,

Soothed by the pottage of last year’s dead.

Hush, sweet, you’ve nothing to fear

I love you best already

For all the harvests I nursed,

I forget in the crack of your paper skin

Your fetal bulb with stringy roots

And the smell of worms.

We’ll go down together,

The dark lasts only a little while

And you will know the sun.

I’ll stir your sap from the deep places

And coax you from the ground

Until you stretch and peek between my fingers

Born in the cradle of an old hand.

Let us sleep together in the rain,

Awaken early, seed shell-broken malice

That the crow will swallow with boggled eyes

And mechanical hand-to-mouth motion.

He won’t be back dear, no he won’t.

He flits off to hang himself from the weathervane

In rust and thunder.

We’ll eat them that ate us, you and I,

And toast to a wholesome compost

Of indole and cadaverine.

Ah, if you could see yourself!

So horrible first – a blister in the meat

Threading wet-tissue skin with cobwebbed hyphae.

Plugging the strata with your solvents.

Gluttonous tendril, I will not stomp you down

Or betray you to the gardeners

Who freeze the sun with their staring.

We will live and live again to taunt them,

Give birth barefoot in the mud

Claw the earth open with brown, half-moon nails

And green the sky with chlorophyll.

Yes, for the sake of your small, green stem

I forgive you.

I absolve you of your rank, wet, birth.

If a seedling can’t sprout from a corpse,

Then what good is anything at all?

I’ll cradle and rock you to sleep in the garden

Step on the beetles and beg for their pardon

And sing nursery rhymes ‘til the grubs in the garden

Burst in the heat of your wakening tree.

- By Jenna Burjoski

Beauty Runs Deep

- Eric VG