The End Times Forager’s Guide
2 Minutes Read Time
“Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”
—Genesis 9:3
It started in the yard.
One day the sourwood called out to me like a loaf of bread,
like mountain manna. The baby took from me and left me wanting:
Bark broken between teeth, I
wanted dirt heaped on my charity-shop
china. I wanted red clay cookies, clumped
like peanut butter, thick and claggy, I wanted something to slow me
down. Wanted sawdust from the lumber mill,
wanted a coal-slurry McFlurry, cold
and combustible down the hatch, then I wanted to eat
the match, strike the sulfur tip along my esophagus
and blow smoke rings, cautopyreiophagic.
I wanted forever-chemicals, dunked my glass into the creek,
then ate the polypropylene sign that reads: Catch and release fishing only,
drank
PFAS straight from the tap, scraped and licked nonstick pans
bought secondhand, Teflon confetti in my spaghetti,
pre-compromised. I wanted mica like peeled shrimp shells,
brittle and sharp, I wanted my small intestine to shine,
constellatory, bedazzled, rhinestoned, I wanted radioactive
lantern-glow guts. I wanted to go elemental,
wanted whole hills of cadmium, broken
thermometers tilted back like a shot of tequila, I wanted
to chase it with arsenic sink water, and I did.
I wanted rock and stone like a slice of lime,
and when I broke my tooth, cracked it clean in half
on a piece of staurolite, I wanted the tooth’s amalgam.
Wanted to tongue copper pennies against palate. To swallow the salt
of my own tears, I wanted a whole fucking salt mine, a white-bright,
glows-at-night, my own personal sun, I wanted comets
still flaming, wanted chemical reactions, and planets, and stardust, I
wanted the ashes
from the burned-out double-wide in a saltshaker, and the snakeskin,
Sweet ’N Sour scale, hanging
from the vinyl siding. When everyone is gone, who will deliver you? I
wanted gravestones,
I wanted biochemical reactions, I wanted bones and black lung, I wanted to eat the end of us all.
Read more from Issue 21.1.
