Two Excerpts from “In The Baffled Trees”
by Lex Orgera
In the Baffled Trees
With thirty
years of top-
soil left,
our names
were kettle-
bell & drug habit.
We tilled,
we tilled,
we hunted,
we tilled, until
there was
nothing
but air. We were
air & its last
singing.
The only way out
was through
the soil.
I am the soil,
we said,
but no one
heard us.
We no longer
spoke
a language
that touched
bottom, a dirt,
an earth, a diadem
of microbiome.
Worm haven.
The excrement
of worms
sustained us
for thousands
of years & yet,
the yet
has come
unmuddied.
I’m the soil.
Itself, I am you.
A handful
of dust, is what.
In the Baffled Trees
The dream-guide says
a worm
could grow up
to be a kitten,
which eventually grows
into a neon cat.
Look, maybe
it never gets that bad,
maybe the changes
are more subtle—
the weather
is only a metaphor
for our deepest
longing
to reconnect
with the ocean
floor, our hearts
reconsidering
the worth of an inch-
worm. I’m only
wondering
about best last chances.
The shoulder wants
to be reunited
with the torso,
the soft underbelly
of a blind mole
with the deep earth.
How many eagles
per capita live
in landfills? How many
ecosystems of rot
hide from daily view?
Lex Orgera is a poet, essayist, book editor, and studying clinical herbalist in North Carolina. She’s the author of two poetry collections, How Like Foreign Objects and Dust Jacket and a memoir-in-fragments, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms. Her most poems can be found in places like Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Diode, Fonograf Editions, Green Mountains Review, Hotel Amerika, Interim, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Third Coast, and elsewhere. The poems in this series are an eco-apocalyptic walking tour from the not-too-distant-future collective all titled "In the Baffled Trees." More at lexorgera.com.