ISSUE V

YOU ASK ME IF I AM A MUSHROOM

I have seven grains of salt in between my toes when my fourth-grade boyfriend tells me I am a saprotroph, stuck feeding on what’s dead. There are days when he flosses his teeth with four-o'clocks as he asks me why I am always saying I am starving, yet never ingest, only secrete and absorb, but am somehow still alive. He reminds me of how

now, at night, I dream of living in a trash can. I want to be emptied by the lip of the culdesac and used up in microplastics when you find my body pretzel-twisted—still stuck, still growing—my hands ticking like clocks as I scavenge those shrouded sheets you pry off the clothesline. I am becoming a professional at giving my body what it knows it cannot keep. Even then, I am thankful it is still thundering in Michigan. 

And did you know that I can defrost things in fruit juice the way Saturn rots away its rings? For a second, I may be eclipsing. 

Under your reenactment of Cumming’s “Food for Thought” I am stuck wondering how even when my fourth-grade boyfriend splits my split ends at their hearts, my hair is still dead.

          So come, take my hands and melt me into that tree—I promise you are allowed to thrash at my mesh-spored skin, and, don’t worry, I won’t mourn the lives neither of us will live. 

In the morning, I come back to an empty house to see a singular, seed-soaked light leaking from the cellar. I spread it out in my mind, imagining it pulsating with your snow angels until I am swallowed up in your headlines. I forget why we’re digging. 

I only know that when I am hungry, I follow the light to search for that cellar so I can sneak in and eat myself.