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Rehydrating Mushrooms


ISSUE:  Winter 2018

 

I’m thinking of how mushrooms will haunt a wet log like bulbous ghosts; 
of how a mushroom may be considered a travesty of a flower

in the way that a wolf may be a travesty of a grandmother. Personally, I don’t 
believe in ghosts, but it has been three months since a man was shot

in a street just next to where I live & now it seems the ghosts are everywhere: 
in clouds that stay around the fringes of the sky, in a blur in a photograph

when the camera jerked away, in a thumbprint smudge on my glasses lens. 
When I add water the mushrooms swirl like dull confetti. They begin to print

themselves onto the water, their flavor. A week without rain is enough 
to set my skin ticking, so when it comes—prefigured by the smell of it

& thunder playing at the edges of earshot—I go out to greet it 
in a tracing-paper-thin dress, no tights,

& it falls on my head like a bolt of gauze & in undisclosed locations 
bodies seep into the water table. It is the first Monday of June 2016.

 

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