By Hesse Phillips
Whatever lesser god made us, I think,
made just one other creature—mushrooms—
and so returned to sleep. For we too grow up
from the layered, laddered dead. We too always know
which part of the forest is burning.
Over vast distances, mushrooms speak;
their language is plasma pumped through the arteries
of the world. We speak in whispers, coded
gestures; in flowers, flags, scarves. Our signals,
also, are often silent. Mushrooms
brood poison, and we, poetry. Slow
to domesticate, wind-sown, scat-grown, our lives,
soft as lips, have left small evidence
in the fossil record: voids where once we were strewn,
decaying. Negative as footprints is our past;
our proliferation, as inevitable as rain;
our preservation, miraculous and precious,
being among the oldest of living things, the
furthest reaching, the deepest rooted, the
stew-pot wherein death is cooked down into
a fertile soup. We makers of earth. We
who have been here since the beginning.
Hesse Phillips is a queer nonbinary writer living in Spain but originally from Pennsylvania. Their poetry and prose have appeared in The Bridport Review, the époque press é-zine, Embark Literary Journal, Roi Fainéant Press, Pangyrus, and others. They are a graduate of Grub Street Boston‘s Novel Incubator Program and were a 2022 winner of the Irish Writers Centre‘s Novel Fair. Their winning novel, LIGHTBORNE, will be published by Atlantic Books in 2024. You can find them on Twitter @HessePhillips and on Instagram at @Hesse.Phillips.
