After Melanie Martilla’s The Art of Floating, 2024

 

The living are also

a kind of graveyard,

denoting there were ancestors

where they now walk.

 

The living creatures, though,

also live inside of full-grown trees:

inside of the hollows, 

between the roots,

on the sturdy nested boughs.

 

A replanted forest

murders them all,

homeless, unfed,

every stump written in

concentric circles that stop 

on the same circle.

A tombstone date

sculpted in the round.

 

And that same circle

is a birthday for all the replanted;

a lonely, sterile, birth among

the unlivable, unliving nonsense

of all-at-once economies of scale.