The Blog

In the GrowPods colonizing outer space, scientists are observing new and exciting forms of symbiosis. In one, the Abyssinian mud elk has exchanged its antlers for the cashew tree, which sprouts directly from the mighty beast’s pate. Flourishing in the oxygen-rich environment, the branches produce nuts as fast as the golden flightless macaws can pluck and crack them. They drop the meat through the canopy to grateful one-armed sloths. These challenged arboreal browsers emerged from the jungles of Guyana at the end of the Million Year War, but no need to feel sorry for them. Our slow, smiling friends also get assistance from the translucent teardrop ant of the Lost Serengeti. This peculiar arthropod lives a solitary life in a small swath of fur just below the sloth’s eye, grooming fleas from our happy amputee with its retractable, needle-like proboscis.

Laid out in a stranger’s yard my brother’s
numbed himself again. Headlights pass,
white as pills on a porcelain sink. 

We’re losing light. His forearms prove how dull
a blade can be. Night coils around us
like smoke from a snuffed cigarette. 

Worry wears my mother’s voice.
Each breath of hers is a candle she cups
to keep lit & all her sentences start: I need— 

My brother’s eyes roll back. A screen door slams,
a dog circles its crate, a lamp switches off
in one house then another. 

I wait beside him knowing it’s best
not to count how long it’s been.
It’s not sadness I feel when I hear the wind 

disturb someone’s chimes, the backfire
of an old Ford. Like my brother
I have a history of doing what I want