Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Sarah Lynn Hurd
—
I Don’t Know Anything
is what I say when I’m
rambling and suddenly
embarrassed because I
can tell by your grimace,
how the corners of your
lips turn down like softened
wax, soft and wet, drooping
of their own accord, and
I know I shouldn't keep
talking about the shared
root systems of aspen
trees, how every sapling
is really an exact
genetic replica
of each tree in the grove,
how each tree is really
just a piece of a much
larger organism,
one that colonizes
bare or burnt areas
with astounding speed, one
long finger of a root
working its way through charred
earth to shoot up a fresh
clone, and I shouldn’t ask
when one tree burns, do the
others feel it? Does a
new sapling remember
the flames? Does she know pain?
Does she? Does she? Anyway,
I wave my hand and say
I don’t know anything.
Remove this Little, Little Mark
Lean over your plate my mother always
told me so I did—at Amanda-who-
lived-down-the-street’s house when her father served
rare venison, gutted and skinned in the
woods of northern Michigan, blood running
down my nine-year-old chin onto the plate
long before I only ate soy-based beef.
Careful as I was, there somehow appeared
a tiny speck of red—a perfect dot
exactly like the one I’d seen in my
mom’s underwear the week before and when
I’d asked her what it was, she’d said nothing,
with the finality of a full stop.
So I’d said, okay, bent forward, and tried
to keep the blood over the plate, to wipe
clean my face before it dribbled out from
the corners of my lips, to cover my
mouth with my hand while I chewed, to eat the
meat, to eat the meat, to eat the meat, to
eat until quite suddenly, I didn’t.
Bio Copy here
