Still Life with Birch and Creek, and: Bloomhead, and: Instances of Unremarkable Countryside Innocence

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• Still Life with Birch and Creek, and: Bloomhead, and: Instances of Unremarkable Countryside Innocence
• Ariana Benson (bio)

STILL LIFE WITH BIRCH AND CREEK

Walking through the swamp, bowingunder matted locks of birch, I long to be known

as the damp cardinal longs to knowhis brown counterpart

has heard his wailing.Though, since a trilled echo

is the only confirmation of thislistening, it's impossible

for all to know such reprieve, such desiredoused, at once. The shock

—red bird, the dozing rodents, all waitingto know they are wanted, which is to know

they exist. But everyone can't know thisat the same time. Where one

is touched, another must make dowith only their own soft

hand. Like the patient eveningbats, I believe I am owed

a gentleness, the kind that leavestrails in the night sky, like those

made by fingers run down the velourof fur—no material change, but skin

left darker, as if wet by touch. My darknessdemands to be held on the tongue, [End Page 5]

and so heard. The minnows,hearing algae foaming in their creek,

let their lips skim the drifting greenuntil it hisses relieved undoing. [End Page 6]

BLOOMHEAD

This year, there was no keepingthe aphids away. A shame, thoughI've long grown used to being

gnawed at—latticed—by even the sparestof jaws. The horizon, for her part,each day sooner and sooner, spits

up the sun. Call it yellow if you must—I've done my best to springwhat parts of me most need caress,

need touching. What wiltsis what needed to fall away,I tell myself, yawning, begging

the sky, against my best interest,for more sleep. I am only human,after all. I bow at the feet of lightas do all the living. All my weary kin. [End Page 7]

INSTANCES OF UNREMARKABLE COUNTRYSIDE INNOCENCE

Take, for example, the horse. Not the stallion, the satin-sheened result of a perfect recipe. Nor the wild mare,

romping in pampas grass, yellow yarrow underhoof. Justa stablehorse: plain, trusting anyone holding out a sweet palm. [End Page 8]

Ariana Benson

ARIANA BENSON is a Southern Black ecopoet. Their debut collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, Benson has also received the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and the Graybeal Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness.

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