[extreme environments]

Sara Eliza Johnson

The Crooked Forest

By the time I want to eat the strawberries, they are always clouded

with mold, malignant little hearts. I eat them anyway. I drink the

sour milk. I’m so hungry I can barely hear anyone calling my

name, though I know no one is. Love is the lie I tell myself to

survive. Every night now I dream of the crooked forest. I find an

ordinary deer, plunge my hand into its cavity and eat until I’m sick.

My spine bends back like all the trees there do, pointing in one

direction, towards something luminously dark, like a star dipped in

tar. Are they running toward it, or away? Inside the dream, I think,

Who cares what it is? In the morning I’m desperate to know. I can

still taste blood on my tongue, more beautiful than water, with its

arsenic, chromium, radionuclides. It makes me want a cigarette. It

makes me want to run into the moonless night, with its crystalline

wind of bees, and find it. I don’t know if you understand what I

mean. There’s only so much heartbreak a person can take before

their language becomes untranslatable.

Pastoral

I remember you pressed your finger to my tongue, which shook, as

if the anther of a field flower. How could I forget that taste of

pollen-dust, its hint of metal, like blood if it were not cursed, not

starless and half-dead like me? Only the broken open their mouths

this way. You know this better than anyone. And are there even

fields anymore? Are there flowers, with names like columbine and

oleander and larkspur? I used to love the night-blooming ones. I

used to know my own name. As a child I sang in a choir, and we

swayed together like the flowers of the field. In my memory of this

place, I was so tired. I rested my head on your stomach and you

buried your hand in my hair. How sad I must have seemed, how

sick with my own venom, swollen with a viscous fever, like milky

sap bubbling in a stem. I tried to hide my moan of desire, though I

hate the word desire, which has lost all meaning, as I have lost

everything. My tongue whimpered in your hand. You wrang its

blood into a pail. The sky above the field foamed black, like a

mouth full of poison, and descended in a flood.

Leslie Harrison