Member Poem

After the fall

Leaving the mutant yuccas behind,

the smoke of their cooking fires at my back,

I moved westward, following the pull of the nodules in my skull.

Crossing the dry bed of the Mississippi I encountered

Thalli of a strange catalysis;

Phosphorescent cacti ride the hard west wind,

a spiny legacy of the mutagen wars.

It was somewhere east of the Rockies,

in the New Desert:

Black sand and white heat:

that I found the source of my summoning.

Your enterolithic lips writhe epithets from

A stony likeness, metaviral infection of a host juniper,

Transformed into your reincarnated face.

Gargantuan and fissured,

How well I remember the ruination of its fleshy progenitor;

ravaged by the phage that has recreated it here:

in the blackened desert.

Now you subsist on aeronautical cacti, luring them in like

some terrestrial angler fish,

and inhaling them, spines and all.

Somehow, without movement, you beckon me to approach.

It would be so easy;

I know I'd follow the cacti up your permineralized proboscis ,

and for a while I'd ease your endless pain.

But I can't die that way, burning out the pseudoneurons in

your xylemic brain.

My skull would be lethal to your chimeric heart

Or is death your desire?

For myself I cannot let go just yet.

I don't have that kind of courage.

Tell me, if you can,

Did you dream viral dreams, before you

colonized this arborescent corpus?

Are there others, farther west, that bear the imprint of your

body and your thoughts?

How much is you and how much the other,

terrifying and uncommunicative?

Why don't you speak?

Your curses follow me as I continue towards the mountains.

Already I can feel the pull of another you,

and I hope, yes I do

(and I fear it too)

that one of you will be compatible with my still-human existence.

End