Birdseed
M L Mutrux
You know,
there are those people
who are always together
There are those people
who are always apart
Between them is everyone
The roots and the petals of the
sunflower, your mother and you
never knowing how one came
from the other or
who bore who
You know,
every time you are born
the world turns upside down
Every birth is an emergency
and a break and an Event
and a severing
of the head from the body.
One day my child spilled
the birdseed bag
so birds came
and amaranth grew
and weak sunflowers
in a sunny patch ripped
so recently from the canopy
of the live oak tree
Limbs bore down from ice
were weakened by the
summer heat
and they dropped
massive trunks against the
earth and the tin roof
I was round and cold from
conserving grid heat
just so grass could grow
in the canyon of our old home,
forever under coyote moon,
with owl on wire and
red shouldered hawks above
It was the dying world
dyed brown, like dust
and black, like ash.
In Texas in the new desert we
would keep memories of fall
We would pace the springs not yet dry
but festered in low water
We watched the trees break
We ran out to thunder but it was only
the tree’s limbs turned twigs and shattered by
strange February ice and so
we did not know
they tore
In the new season there was an
ominous and cool spring
announcing that it was final
the monarch caterpillars clung to the
sidereal fennel, then died under one
last frost, and then the summer
death heat descended
So we fled and found only some
new death descending.
In this new eastern fall there is a
datura grove and milk thistle
woven with the coleus
Fernon Street and Eighth there are winter
melons overhanging the door
I stare and the gardener woman
turns to see me, I wave
she smiles and says something
indiscernible, I wave.
Even in new woods, you know,
with blackberry wrangled on the ground
and new leaf rustle and the
wind overhead
in this wood that was never ours
I find you, of course,
you are just beyond me
you are birthed with
lambs comb cooking in the
cast iron and
bourbon on the breath
sapling elm and
dead wood to push over to
watch roll down the mountain
I think maybe fucking in
that rhododendron thicket
was the end, I watched
Moss sprouting like chrysanthemum
on the new growth forest.
You know,
What you want you will take.
Why leave anything behind?
M L Mutrux is a queer and working class writer based in Philadelphia. They are originally from Saint Louis, Missouri. Their work has been published in short run collaborative zine format and with support from Red Salmon Arts, Casa de Resistencia Books. Find their work on Instagram @mlmutrux.