Collage by Elliott Couts/OutWrite
This collage was originally published to represent Green (Nature) in our Spring 2023 print issue “Color.”
here
a wretched body becomes comfortable turmoil
untangles
from within a forsaken shell
The forest won’t judge flesh
blood and bone
a family of limbs
How beautiful
to create something
out of the pieces of oneself
A mollusk fate
where nearly the same self is to emerge
Here
we are untamed
growing like welcome weeds
digging our feet beneath soil
we will join the great redwoods pines
we are incomplete perhaps
but it is enough just to be
beings of our own making
I forgave
this body
long ago
for the fault of biology
bear witness
to this dismantling
a natural state of transition
watch as the season reorganizes
alters everything you know