by Kerfe Roig
The Anatomy of a Mushroom Cloud
in flight, in fear
their wings sound as one,
like hive minds, mycelium networks,
each an echo of every other, indistinguishable
while on their own, they are a pecking order
flinging seed, ravenous as
birds ten times their size, vicious
when others come too close—
sparrows shriek a very particular pitch
when a comrade tries to tear
wing from socket
and now a tangent has arrived, one
about mushrooms: at once, a collective,
a messenger system seeking aid for trees,
nature’s most well-spoken communicators,
and yet also: the clouds of destruction
that one nation paints over another’s skies,
written in the dna of all who come after
(if any come after the silence, after the
heat / blast / radiation)
a bad apple spoiling the bushel, a poison
written in mutated fallout—the word
fallout sounding too calm, too neat, too close
to mere unfortunate, to easy effects,
and so we wrap our wars up in costs,
as though there is no money, no number
of souls too high to pay for some unalienable—
well, who can even remember?
swarm intelligence serves a queen, serves survival,
but the cost is never a factor—a few die, so what?
sacrifice, the greater good, learn the limits
of what you are willing to dedicate to the cause—
shh, shh, don’t ask questions: The Cause, you know it—
what are you willing to give of body? of soul? yours? mine? ours?
take your line and double its length and now
we are approaching something like an allowance
worthy of freedom because, sweet one,
it’s us or them—we buy our comfort with their demise
insert the Their of the particular time in which this poem is being read
and if there is not one, please sing back the way you found such a utopia
Audrey T. Carroll is the author of What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024), The Gaia Hypothesis (Dark Onus Press, 2024), Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), and In My Next Queer Life, I Want to Be (kith books, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a Fiction Editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter / Instagram.
A resident of New York City, Kerfe Roig enjoys transforming words and images into something new. Her poetry and art have been featured online by Silver Birch Press, The song is…, Pure Haiku, Visual Verse, and The Ekphrastic Review and published in Ella@100, Incandescent Mind, the Raw Art Review , The Anthropocene Hymnal: Songs of a self-defining era and several nature inspired anthologies. Follow her explorations on her blogs, https://methodtwomadness.wordpress.com/ (which she does with her friend Nina), and https://kblog.blog/, and see more of her work on her website http://kerferoig.com/.