Poetry By basil payne

Scarification of touch

Now I feel like a list of every person

who’s touched me. Dark charcoal scars

on aspen offshoots with the letters and

loves and names. The ghost-white scars

on my thighs. It’s almost as if they were

carved for me. List of people who have

touched and touched, aspen scars proof

that they breathed the same air as trees.

Is it the same for me? / shake. / quake. /

I’m pasty pale, but I know they wanted.

Still don’t know what. The trees at least

are forced to bear names but mine hide

under clothes. There’s no point to quantifying

hurt anyways. Life felt easier when pain

meant an early freeze. Life felt real when I

could count each hurt, hold it in my hand,

the first green leaves to fall after frost.

Marcescence

Marcescence, the tree,

Sycamore Maple towering

Logan’s cemetery,

      who I watch. My breath,

         freezing midair.

I took too long to leave you.

Blind me

or don’t.

Cyclical shapes, your patterns

and resulting

mesmerization,

hallucinations in snow

brain colored, pink and gray,

I couldn’t fall,

not without you.

Marcescence, when the deciduous

      opt to be crisp

         like air in the cool.

      Captures water for spring, or

maybe helps with loneliness,

like the trees imagine

leaves as birds,

companions after they’ve flown

south.

I’m lonely,                              and I held on.

Fault of my own

         that I’m no tree,

      sin on my part

      that I want to hold

      when seasons change

      too fast for me

to notice.

I’m in the cemetery

      with Sycamore.

When will they drop?

  Leaves click

like rain freezing,

       momentarily hitting against itself

midfall.

Marcescence, the leaves.

Pseudotsuga menziesii

After Natasha Rao

Terrified by the thought that I am meant to survive.

By November, all the deciduous have left the year

behind (besides those observing marcescence).

Fallen leaves and the deer that eat them. Roly polies

turning thoughts into dirt. What do I have to offer?

A stretched out kind of yearning that catches sunlight

like green glass all year, needles that fall like shy rain

in a desert. I’ve watched the people I love fall from

themselves into dirt only to become nothing. My fall

becomes real in my mind. No matter the season, I can’t

help but open my coniferous mouth.