Mississippi

Savage, brutal, relentless, remorseless, snake-infested, tick-infested. Trees are so thick it’s a curtain of green. Willow oak, pin oak, redbud, sweetgum, gingko, pecan, maple, plum, dogwood, bodock, apple, fig, triple-trunk trash tree. Ah yes, bamboo, how could I forget you? Hack it, chop it, cut it, whack it, still it crops up elsewhere, grows so fast you can hear it creaking. And wisteria, honeysuckle, jasmine, ivy, that choke the trees and bushes and creep inside the walls. There’s much to love about this climate, if you can get over being human.

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Tidepools

Towels? Plates? A broom or lawn equipment? A shirt already sprayed with poison? No, I said, no, my house is full and I’m sleepy with sun, drifting and climbing around tidepools. Every flexing of my knees brings me closer to lichens and sea urchins, turban shells glistening orange, ebony, emerald bladders of seaweed, seawrack, small scuttlings, pink and amethyst crabs torn legless by shrieking seagulls. The dream of the store’s just that. What lasts? Hands in my hobo pockets, I’m wandering closer to worlds within worlds.

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Ann Fisher-Wirth’s fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, will appear from Wings Press in 2012. Her other books of poems are Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces.  She is coediting Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2012.  Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards. She has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden.  She teaches at the University of Mississippi and at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford, MS.