How does one say
what if
without reproach?
—Claudia Rankine
Remember how sweet the new firs smelled? Their soft spring pompoms pliant and cool like wet paintbrushes; children pressed them to their lips.
Under striping shadows of bark beetle snags (stick arms jutting naked from sloughed trunks) sing! Not of insect tracings and bole char, but of new firs
hidden in the cone, needles scenting the private infinity of their seeds: all
is visible to imagination.
No one has to have seen a better world to know there is one. What if —
the lens that sets heat licking, crackling, searing, popping,
splitting cones open so seeds will sprout, reproach
to the desolate wastes: death, and whatever in me wishes
that love should not hurt.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 1.
Sarah Ben Olson is an artist and writer in Spokane, Washington.
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