Heart Rot

by Candace Herron

All timber begins as sapwood, the tender bending of the sapling, young, eager, full of vigor and oh, so, pliable, made to strengthen itself against the wind, —push —pull —grow.

Over time, after years of transportation and transpiration, cambium holding steady the coursing sap of phloem from root to trunk to branch to leaf that which was living is subsequently subsumed; succumbing, becoming, heartwood, lignin hardened and rosin cured, capable of buttressing the weight of giants.

And yet, all it takes is a single wound to allow decay an entryway to this oldest and still tender core.

Heart rot.

Fungus, mother of conk and spore, opportunist extraordinaire, finds a crack in the arbor, and burrows herself home. Slowly. Months, years, and generations eat away the timbered marrow. Softly. The heartwood dissolves —digested —dispersed —disseminated into the earth, bringing tree to dirt once more.

“Heart Rot”

by Deron Eckert

Heart Rot - [1] "a fungal disease that causes the decay of wood at the center of the trunk and branches. Fungi enter the tree through wounds in the bark and decay the heartwood. The diseased heartwood softens, making trees structurally weaker and prone to breakage" (wikipedia). [2] “an intense grief that erodes the core of an otherwise healthy person before spoiling everything within close proximity to the person. The grief is typically delivered into the person following the death or destruction of a human, an animal, or a place that was a part of the person, causing many to consider this form of the condition an amputation. The condition can also develop from other types of loss, including, but not limited to, a love that has either withered on the vine or has never been given the opportunity to blossom. In the later stages of the developmental cycle of the person, an unrealized dream is often the culprit. While potentially fatal, the grief is treatable with time, compassion, and a recognition of the beauty that remains in the world, the pain, and the person. Those who progress beyond the initial, crippling stages of the condition exhibit pronounced scars they carry throughout the remainder of their lives, but these are marks of healing the person comes to accept and embrace as integral parts of the experience that is life” (a marked person).

Heartrot

-Devin Chambers

It started off slow, rain-wet, a small crack opened to words like elements. A resinous wound, ignored, ignoring the damage derelict to our cares. This wound has festered, untended, now memories lay wasted in my sighing bones. I can't remember before the skittering of many limbed emotions unspoken and spoken. My fingers broken, but reach, sheltering delicate families with fragile eggs. Mosses and ferns take spaces, home-making in the fragmented valleys of my roots. My ribs crumble from within, framing shelving conks in their selfish display. I do not remember what you did, that wounded so minutely and expansively horribly. I do not remember, before I became, refuge in every inch of my body.

Until Your Fever Breaks

(A letter to the Natural World as a lover)

By Jacq Guyton

April 14, 2056

Before sunrise

I got early this morning Before you had a chance to let up your light I went panning for fish eggs in the riverbed muck

I found nothing like that, but I did smell sulfur and remember there were once black snails suckling on the knuckles of these rocks. I knew you would remember them, your little children that sat like commas printed onto stone tablets

Who are these ruthless editors that are turning your golden-spined encyclopedia collection into captions: consonant-only words as small and fragmented as to get stuck in between my molars like popcorn? I wish I could meet them at the dive bar, as equals, and ask them about their childhood tree. The one who's boughs they hid behind when they wanted to be alone.

The industrial evolution of man does not save the gastropods or bivalves; poets and puppeteers won't be budgeted a plaque's worth in the collective memory How can you still care for a flower that opens at night when the moon's caving in?

You tell me to have hope. And I'm trying. I don't think I could bear the sight of a child's eyes glassing over as I try to tell them that a grasshopper's blood is green when you find it crushed by the wheel of a car It was an insect that hopped in the grass! I'd tell them, desperate and shrill I'd make shapes and motions with my hands to try and describe the insect's leaps exploding out of the sedge But deep in their eyes I see twin television sets, a million channels on a spinning reel of reality shows, genocide and flood warnings

How will your children know how to care for you, if they can't hold you the way I've held you? I know some things can be believed without being seen, but it's harder to care about those things

Last night I dreamt of a place without you I saw with omnipresent eyes your most heaven-pushing redwoods being dwarfed and swallowed whole by cities of corrugated pipe Sirens cutting through the air like the screaming pulse of god. No visible horizon that wasn't just across the street; a monarcha robota developed by techheads and trillionares spitting out world laws and regulations anew every morning, our moral center compassed by numbers

I dreamt of the elders trying to remember the exact years: When did the haunted shack become an airbnb? When was the last buffalo shot for the museum taxidermist?

Sitting in a circle opening dusty boxes with quivering, varicose-veined hands and pulling out shells, dried flowers, as widows would touch their dead lover's lock of hair once a year

I woke up and the tears blew out my eyes, and I felt I had lost you already, even as you lay with your dusky arms around me

Thinking of a life without you, even the blunt nose of a hatchet splitting my spine in two makes my heart pound. The hiss of lightning melting the soles of my shoes, a boulder crashing down the side of a cliff start to resemble our love sounds. Even now, as you lay in our bed still breathing, I keep little trinkets of yours on a shelf like you're already gone: rabbit skin stitched closed with button thread, barn owl feather, mugwort and camellias

As I look at you, the metal rod implanted deep between my hips feels a tug from another world Your living ghost is already guiding my bare, soft sleds through fir needles of grief as barn swallows gurgle through the songs they know you love best.

Remember when we swam in a creek together summers ago? The water was dyed a warm black by cedar bark melting upstream and naked, you ran your watery fingers through the cluster of seeds buried between my legs and named my chest the color of sunflowers Crawling up onto the hot sandbank, we were fish trying on our new legs again

You peeled off a bubble of petrified resin, glinting like crystallized gingerchews on the bark of a fir for me to suck on and put a crack in my tooth You sighed that already, there were no old growth trees to show the tenderfooted young ones how tall they could really be

It was then you wept - sugar instead of salt - and told me you were sick

Later that night as we sat on the porch, you whispered an ancient secret to me: that the moon is an orange inside of an apple peel Your lips curled up into a smile like a newborn fern and I knew that once you were gone, there would be no other for me

I can hear you stirring now I'll go make some hot tea and start planting those flowers in front of the house only you can make bloom I'll tuck this letter away and try not to wallow How could I stand to, when you're still trying to get well. I love you. All the way until your fever breaks.

Yours, J

Lover Nature

to be called to be called by something other than my name perhaps yours so you could view me the same or maybe you could call me by the pines prune my needles, carve your lines strip me bare to mark the way home but please don’t strike me down, a skillset that you’ve shown i fear my bark will peel, loose terror reign unknown and peer beneath the ringing of my longing years prick my eyes with hallow cries, erosion cut by tears you see, the hole you left inside enough room to feel the gap down your fingers, open mouthed, my rot slides like sap i wonder if you taste it, your love did this to me and if your heart should shudder, i wonder if you’ll see you ate my heart, i made my mark, your end began with ending me. i would like to call you by your name if that's ok any day without your lure is heartache’s true display i look for you within the pines, i’d level forests in your shrine set ablaze needles scattered, light the pathway home. set our spirits free to wander, writhe and reel and roam i swear i won’t strike you down, my heart i do this out of love this forest dark, cipher without you so tall above let the others fall to your feet they’re nothing without you and if i’m being forthright this may include me too i’d be lying if i said that i did not feel the gap laid waste to all surrounding space left nothing but a scrap you slide along my fingers as your skeleton collapsed as i hold you in my arms i wonder, we were ever made to last? my heart starts to shudder, i grasp with sticky thought you trickle down my entrails. i begin to rot

by Sydney White

Mausoleum of Giants

By Jonathan Cox

I stumble through the graveyard

Sun-bleached skeletons tower 10 stories overhead

Their desiccated bodies bursting with crimson shelf fungi

Still more bones lay scattered across the earth

Stacked haphazardly as if Appalachian giants had been playing Pick-Up-Sticks with the dead

Graverobber Megalodacne beetles, dressed in orange and black, skitter through the piles

The hemlocks are dead

Heartwood rotting and

My heart rots with them

Hemlock’s insulating blanket of evergreen needles becomes unwoven

Rubus, Aralia, Rhododendron, and Robinia bloom into a successional tug of war

Choking one another for a glimpse at the sun’s light

The soil parched; wrung out by deciduous transpiration

My heart rots

The adelgids took no prisoners

Evolutionarily programmed to feast on Tsuga sugars

But they can take no blame

We brought them here

Another ecological catastrophe wrought by our own hand

My heart rots

The hollers weep

Crumbling of their foundation ignites a trophic cascade of heart break

Salamanders seek new coves of refuge

Migratory birds rest on naked branches

Our hearts rot

The southern Appalachians will never look the same

But she is resilient

This isn’t the first invasion that’s plagued her hills and hollers

We’ll do what we can to ease her pain

As she metamorphoses into something new Something more beautiful than we can fathom

Appalachia’s heart rots

But is born anew

Darling Cora

by Phoenix S. Young

July

The night the words of Darlin’ Corey travelled from the fire of Cora Beth’s belly, gritty like a holler driveway, a balmy breeze offered the stanzas up into the heavens like a prophecy A campfire crackled in rhythm

Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow / Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground / Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow / We gonna lay darlin’ Corey down

August

Cora Beth picked a a dulcimer, bluebirds carved into the mahagony, in time of the steady rainfall, curve of the instrument snug to her knee

And while Cora Beth was asleep, the Troublesome Creek rose over its own banks, drowning out the sound of those bluebirds in their dreams

The rain took Hindman and Jackson and Neon and Whitesburg and didn’t leave anyone left for Cora Beth to sing for

Wake up, wake up, darlin’ Corey / What makes you sleep so sound? / The revenue officers are coming / They’re gonna tear your still house down

September

The papers said it was because of climate change

Cora Beth’s preacher said it was because God wanted to cleanse the earth of its sins.

All anyone knew was that the mountaintops were gone and you could see clear into the next holler over The creek took Kentucky’s roofs downstream too

The first time I saw darlin’ Corey / She was sittin’ on the banks of the sea / A 44 wrapped around her body / And a banjo on her knee

December

A winter storm came and blew out the heat in Cora Beth’s travel trailer at Jenny Wiley Their hands were too cold to the play the dulcimer even if they still had it

Cora Beth figured they done forgot about the folks at Jenny Wiley, and the neighbor told them “good luck with that” when they said they hadn’t got their FEMA money yet

Dig a hole in the meadow / Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground / Dig a hole, dig a hole in the meadow / We gonna lay darlin’ Corey down mountain casket

There you are, rare and hungry summer spent in the stone hermitage wounded with holes for eyes upon a lonely mountainside tears drink the face, you’re loose veined raw and leaking breath leaking grace leaking conviction swollen with bent pleasure a skin licked saprobe sheen the heartbreak of old growths is a pathogen, a reticent frown wormed through trunks like train-track tunnels and they are dying together in this grand cluster of sick visible, invasive pain mourning seeping from its core there’s a space to crawl inside. to fill the void left by a vacuous and gradual consumption

by Sam Busic

Purple

By Emily Goldston

Funny how I had to learn to love the color purple

You know, the actual color. The purple of humble violets and towering liatris, of a wild blackberry’s tangy burst on the tongue, of a bruisey mid-summer sunrise washing over dreams of old flames

My childhood best friend loved purple, but hers was the artificial kind, all NuGrape and Bubblicious

I was more Sunkist and peach rings No matter

Back when I was pumping my legs too fast and perspiring too many daydreams, most hues went unnoticed if they didn’t come in a package with the promise of a sugar rush

Later on, Ms. Walker taught me not to piss God off whenever I passed it in a field, so now I politely bow my head the way I was taught in the pew, but this time it feels more true

A friend calls this an awe moment

And maybe being privy to late July offerings from an Appalachian mountaintop where bees and swallowtails congregate in a cathedral of complementary colors that sway like they caught the Holy Ghost is just another definition of awe.

Or maybe it’s just my way of saying that I am pleased I am pleased

(when my heart was rotted, this is how I healed)

by Mikayla Erskine

do you remember when I swore myself to you? to your creatures your beauty it hurts me to no end the way my brothers and sisters treat you. it sends me into pits of depression as deep as your undersea canyons but you never fail to pull me up. as my feet touched dirt at the end of myself I heard you. whispered words that soothed promising a sleep different then the tormented limbo I had been inhabiting. as my feet touched dirt at the end of myself I felt your warmth creep into the places

I swore to lend my energy a moonstruck adolescent making promises of a magnitude unprecedented but I could never regret it. at my Darkest, you have always been my Light. how is it that I am still getting to know you and yetyou know me better than anyone else? you are and always will be my Calliope.

Apathy had stolen from me. my heart so weary so empty I didn’t think twice. I lowered my bones to your softness to rest my head on folded arms. I felt my ankles and thighs hips and shoulders connect to you and finally let my eyes fall closed.

‘Switchback’

Jordan Budnik

Heart Rot – [1] “a fungal disease that causes the decay of wood at the center of the trunk and branches. Fungi enter the tree through wounds in the bark and decay the heartwood. The diseased heartwood softens, making trees structurally weaker and prone to breakage.” (Wikipedia)

[2] “Empathy bored out of switchback souls, we sew the mountains’ mouths shut with pipelines and logging roads.

Black Vultures wheeling in haint blue skies over mountains stripped bare down to their veins.

Vireo darting through fragmented forests whose names we will not speak, pleading her rewinding birdsong: Stop. Go back. Stop. Go back!

The self-inflicted collapse of our own lungs. Burning rhododendron branches to keep warm.

Unapologetic apocalypses

Saturn may have eaten his children, but we’re devouring our Mother.

The Indifference of Rain

by Andy the Doorbum

Saying a prayer for the side of the road where the garbage and gorgeous lie draped in fine soot

One thousand years is not enough to forget it in plastic and tin where our strained breath was put

Will feathers and flesh belch out new ways to build it a place where this altar can relish and moan?

Where meanings, thrown out - landing in love, though wasted can offer up sorely missed prayers of their own?

I stood on the edge of a moment suspended my thoughts swirling galaxies - dread, boredom, hope

The trash can was full on a horizon limitless

All that I saw scarred the brow with what’s possible

All that I feared tangled shoulders to knots

All I shrugged off gnarled my knuckles to notice them

All that I dreamt of, where blood pools and clots

And then my gaze mirrored in a mountain stream’s rhetorical ambivalence

A passage from its thesis on such supple obduration

“Dare we flow to fill an ocean or dry slow til puddles cease the volume of the water in this world will not change in the least ”

(written by Andy the Doorbum - North Carolina)

Waterlines by Kathleen Copeland-Fish

You can see how fast my home is drowning, Just watch the waterline after each flood

You can see where my neighbors used to live, Just watch the disappearing islands of mud and grass

You can see my kinsmen’s grief as they decide to stay or go To stay is death by water To go is death by soul

You can hear the marshland’s wrath, it fizzes in the wind

You can hear the marshland’s sorrow in between the ripples

Bastions of the land, marshes are overwhelmed

Overwhelmed and begging

Just slow down and take a break, and they will do the rest Just give them room to breathe and they will continue providing That’s all the marshland’s ask for Time and space to exist

They do so much for us, asking little in return

You can see the people planting fragile hope, in each acre restored You can hear the people ask for forgiveness with each pound of trash removed You can feel the people make reparation for their short sightedness with each landscape protected

But underneath it all, you can hear the marshland whisper Thank you Welcome home

Wildfires

by Hannah Houser

“It’s starting to cool down”

I told you as we watched the Tennessee sky darken before the Autumn equinox, filled with gratitude for chilly evenings and the absence of blaring sun.

The forecast called for no rain but the air was thick gray

We sat outside sipping dark and stormies and toasting to a break from indoor isolation. Then someone on Twitter said the haze was the clouds from the California wildfires, having crept across the breadth of the country.

And my cheeks flamed over my brief respite, knowing it was someone else’s torture, worlds away