by Kai Coggin
I don’t want all of your tiny secrets, little almost-invisibles —
the pulsing world vibrates
with all this human destruction and there you are
in your small wonder
aching to shape yourself
into the vastness,
molecules
and mitochondria
multiplying
into vibrant colonies of life,
mycelium speaking in mush-rooms in a language
we cannot hear,
and just recently a thousand baby
preying mantises hatched
in my blooming red
anthurium, small murderers
wandering
in green blurs, so tiny
hiding under leaves
in clandestine clusters,
and the small jumping spider
friendly in the corner, the silk-spun
cocoon of hundreds of her babies,
thick galleries of fiery ants
tunneling underfoot,
and little black frog egg globes
interconnected
and brimming in our pool,
and the hummingbirds
in all of their humming
vibrating the universe in their
wings, all of the unseen,
I don’t want all of your tiny
secrets, little almost-invisibles —
I want you to be safe and free,
I want to offer you shelter
in my large largeness,
a human being
that just leaves you to be,
there, singing
in your unheard frequencies,
living your minuscule miraculous
lives that have nothing to do with us,
your breeding and breathing,
your building and feeding,
flying and fucking,
your existential beauty is yours,
whether we humans name it or not,
your vastness is more grand
in its design than anything our
feeble human minds
can even mouth
with our heavy tongues.
Keep your secrets, almost invisible ones.
Live and flourish
beyond us.
Kai Coggin (she/her) is the author of four poetry collections, most recently MINING FOR STARDUST (FlowerSong Press 2021) and INCANDESCENT (Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). She is a queer woman of color who thinks Black Lives Matter, a teaching artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, and the host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country — Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award and named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated four times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016 and 2018. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB,
Entropy, SWWIM, Split This Rock, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Press, West Trestle Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review. She lives with her wife and their two adorable dogs in the valley of a small mountain in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.
