The Mycelium Undercommon
BY ROSE ZINNIA
The Mycelium Undercommon
After George Ella Lyons
I’m from the black red chestnut oak
bitternut pignut hagbark
black red sugar silver
maple walnut paw
paw paw paw paw
White oak, white oak
I am from occupied land
where the Miami and Delaware
and Potawatomi and Shawnee
are past present and future stewards
I am from an occupied land
which whiteness pretends it can own
I am from land which cannot be owned
From the wolves that howled these hills
Their exhalations like specters metastasizing
in morning’s black limitless open
I am from the sheerly possible, from the
always morphing and shifting and flowing
from the impossible made from nowhere
from between in betweens betweenness
I am from the feet
that steeped this loamy clay long
before it was settled w chains
and concrete and electric
that stuttered across wires
w shoelaces dangling
worn down Chucks
From y’all
because it expands gender
and yins and you you you
Always you
From the tabbys that maunder
6th street sidewalks sideways
mewing for hands
From the alleys and backroads
and every queer liminal zone
that allows new earths come rise
From the hands I’ve nearly held
every time I’ve bought figs
From the sky, goddamn the ineffable sky
From the lungs that gave back to the cedars
and the bluff that flows with creeks clear
as stars exploding and the river dog
who presses their cheek into yrs tenderly
on a day you wanted to die
From bodies that return to soil
riding underground rivers and sinkholes
back home
From the river otters whittling sassafras
with their seething chompers
smiling as they slither downstream
From future old growth forests
teeming w ancient molecules
From the same water
in which the wooly mammoth
also bathed
That sustained us both
our bodies our lungs our eyes
slick with wetness like car tires
spinning and the great blue herons
singing w the river in twilight
and the sandhill cranes
and the praying mantises
unfurling from nests
like self-standing calculators
I am from the leaves
that fell into the crick
that bloom bright just before they die
not a firework but a bleeding
an offering to the soil
which is everything
From the red elm roots holding hands
in the mycelium undercommon
despite being stumped
To the mushroom
spores in the night air
glowing like fairies
I am from them and they from I
The coyote running through the cemetery
in broad daylight making eye contact
w me over their shoulder before
jumping down into the street
like off a cliff
And the sycamore leaves which
I almost just called hands
which you placed over my eyes
which helped me see the Earth better
From the futures we create in this Now
I am from the nonlinear we of time
I am from not myself
I am made from this Earth
I am from this Earth
I am this Earth