On this world the trees bury their boughs and stretch roots toward the sky. They have leaves, yes, shapely membranes and veins that don’t feed on the light, don’t spin sugar from the kiss of faraway flames. Here the leaves unfurl under the soil, hungry for breakdown. Rot of the forest litter. The leaves have declined the job of sweetening the sap. They are here to darken and enrich the flow. The leaves here are without the need to be green, released from ancestral obligations. They thrive in the dark where no one sees, they color themselves to their own wild and inconsistent desires. I access a memory of what red and burnished gold once meant, a lingering of chemicals when life must withdraw to the heartwood. Here, no one asks any one leaf to conform for the sake of the crown, for the sake of the tree. But neither is there a conspiratorial rustle when the wind comes through. Upside down, upside down. I watch the local birds, tails too fashionable to be ballast, landing on thirsty roots. I learn what a forest can be when roots reach ever upward and the dew gathers at night on their tapering, tangled, upthrust persistence.
Shana Ross is a new transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. A Pushcart and Rhysling nominated author, her work has recently appeared in Cutbank Literary Journal, Laurel Review, Phantom Kangaroo, Barren Magazine and more. Her recent accolades include winning the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition, as well as a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly and a critic for Pencilhouse.org
photo by Wilhelm Gunkel (via unsplash)
Crow & Cross Keys 