Violets press against my back working
together to hold me flat an inch above the true
ground. Here stand one million
dandelions, one million suns. I can’t matter
much at all because there are one million
things that matter more. Here I can take a slingshot & fire
and it will hit nothing I’ll ever know and I realize I will not feel
its reverberations or the strangulating hug
from the echo of words I speak which means
that my fingers will stop drumming on my mind. So I feel
around up there and take it out, I place my brain in a
sieve, brain matter falling
through the mesh at the hands of
fourteen honeybees that will never feed
from the same sun twice, the grating of the crank
lost in the thrum of their wings and what falls
through is carried along belts in the air, held in pockets
of wind like the seeds of a combusted dandelion, traveling
between universes to find blades of grass
to land upon and slide down to then melt into the earth
where i am divided further, i become
a part of the brother
of the worm I stepped on yesterday and the snail
that had been knocked from a tree by blades of rain
now slides across me, thirty-seven of me
at once, i am sucked into the milky straws of thousands
of suns and we spin in orbit with ant legs and blueberry seeds—
before I was held in one place by something
of my imagination, tied together by gravity that felt
impossibly heavy until I removed & dissected
my mind and made my brain matter
not much at all.
Poem by Frances McPheely
I am studying poetry and creative nonfiction at Goucher College in Baltimore. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and ever since leaving the city themes of nature often sneak their way into my poems.