(Published by Epoch Press)

Sometimes, when I drive, the earth pulls my hands on the wheel and I drift to the left, gently dragging me back to where I left a severed stump.

With violence I hacked away at the bottom half at my life, breaching sacred rings in the effort to grow with an ax, a saw, a fucking spoon, anything I could reach.

I whittled me down in the middle until I could tip over, topple over at a soft crack.

Disrooted, unrooted, I derooted myself. I severed myself from the snakes of my past, ready for the serpents to follow me, to rise up against my future. I was ready with my knife.

They must have lost track of me as I went south, then north, then south again. I zigzagged along the coast, my tires wearing a trench out of route 95. I drove on, sinking. Digging below the asphalt to the earth where webs reaching upwards had been severed by the highway.

I flew over the ocean to evade the snakes. Once, twice, then back. Now the Atlantic is below me again, rising with every glance down. I mustn’t crash the plane.

The ocean is so close, and I am so thirsty. The vast blue is tempting, and I want to push my form down into the sea, land on soft sand and live off of fresh clams, drinking in a new water. But wood floats.

I’m swept back and forth at the whims of the tides, floating between two islands connected by a network of violin strings that hum in tune to someone else. I pluck each one, hoping for a note I recognize, but the murmurs are dissonant.

Reaching out my tired fingers bend a string in the key of H and I can hum along. The vibrations shift me east. I find a major chord with my right hand and the force lands me on a known shore. Diminished, to my rotting stump. It is where I left it.

I am wide, too wide to have come from this splintered sapling, but I look down. Our edges match. The break is a tear, unhemmed against rough time, softened by saltwater.

And so I dig. Crushing dirt beneath short fingernails, my hands are blackened with earth. Against them shines the silver veins beneath the broken sapling. Not snakes, but slivers of treasure untarnished to time. Not weight, but wealth.

My body is encompassed as I push through dirt, through rocks, and hit water. I pursue the gleam back to my new land, which has become my old land. And now further, go further, until I must resurface for air.

Slick and muddy I follow each path until breath fails me. The silver glints in the light with every renewed pulse. Western excavations lead back to the ocean and I arrive, inevitably, at islands. But I can follow the fistfuls of dirt back to the stump. The sapling. My torn edge.

I leave it there, my tree, and go back to where I left the engine idling. But I can close my eyes and trace the route back to the monument of a severed past. Heat rises from newly smelted silver. The only tarnish on the sapling is where I left my blood.

Sometimes, when I walk, I let myself drift, just a bit to the left, until I am righted again by the pulse of the silver veins in the earth supporting my feet.