I’m sorry I want to say
and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle
and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles
what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north
this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch
sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees
this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green
sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean
and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb
my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet
how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath
I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees
for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin
by Lucy Walker
from Pank Magazine
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I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”
Here’s a test for infants: Show them a glass of water on a desk. Hide it behind a wooden board. Now move the board toward the glass. If the board keeps going past the glass, as if it weren’t there, are they surprised? Many 6-month-olds are, and by a year, almost all children have an intuitive notion of an object’s permanence, learned through observation. Now some artificial intelligence models do too.
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