BY LAUREL ANDERSON
Wolf: Villain’s Monologue
I am the belly that walks
moon paths at night, seeking
those who have lost hope.
I ride waves of nodding grasses
across prairies, pushing a tide
of fear ahead, easy in my power.
No one likes to think of appetite,
how it runs onto naked hilltops,
how its voice rises
note by strained note,
until it trembles the hollows,
stirs the waters of drowsy pools
and wakes furred sleepers, afraid
in each other’s clutch.
You seek the extermination of my kind, but
I follow at your heels, like my subdued
cousin, and give shape
to your secret darkness.
I am the vacancy of hunger,
I am the black mouth of desire,
and I track you
like the predator
I have always been.
Willow
There was a field deep in urban nowhere
with an old willow in the center.
My friend and I would sneak
through a gap in the chain-link fence
and sit for hours beneath the tree,
its trailing ropes of leaves enclosing us
in a domed chamber like a great, green bell.
Sunflecks speckled our laps as we wove
dandelion crowns with our small hands
and small alliances with our small tongues.
Now, I see two young girls, easy prey
in their pretend palace. I wonder when
I learned to feel alone and far from help
in the company of tree, flower, grass, sky.
#insectapocalypse: a thread
In a world where cognition is currency,
we are the underclass. Forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain
in miniature, just enough to keep the lights on.
Yet, we know beauty. Green glimmer-gloss of beetles,
glitterpane wings and faceted eyes, tiny eggs
afloat in jeweled froth stitched to grass.
We know sickness. We bring nightmares
of fever and rash, ache in the bone,
twist of the botfly beneath the taut skin.
We know family. In a palace of paper and wax
her half sisters hum as they circle the queen, feeding her,
bathing her, tending her brood in their hexagon cradles.
We know vengeance. The hornet that enters the hive
as a hunter is surrounded, restrained, and roasted alive
in the heat of one thousand vibrating wings.
We know love. We fly caresses of pollen
from flower to flower so apples will weigh down
branches in autumn and almonds will fill with sweet oil.
We care for the dead. When a creature with fur
or feathers lays itself down the last time, we unravel
the threads of the body and sing them back into atoms.
We were a multitude. Our abundance powered
the flitter of bats, thrum of the bullfrog,
skitter of lizards through mazes of stone.
We die now as dust in mouths of dry rivers.
We crisp in the noon of a day that melts tar.
We emerge too early and starve without blossoms.
We explode into splats on the windshield.
We ash on a million hot lightbulbs.
We die twitching and slow in pesticide fogs that twist through green blades of corn.
We know that you do not mourn us.
You will.
Laurel Anderson is a plant ecologist and poet. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River Heron Review, Pangyrus and Canary, and in the scientific journal BioScience. She teaches at Ohio Wesleyan University and lives with her family in central Ohio, USA.
Process Note: My poems usually start with a single line or image that appears in my head and I write from there to see what emerges. As a practicing scientist, my poems often include shadows of scientific knowledge and tend to intertwine the beauty and menace that exist side by side in the natural world. A common theme in my work is the question of how factual our human perceptions of other natural entities really are.