Excerpts
Compost Your Heart to Green
Spring woman, Snakeberry Mama,
rise
from Granny’s bloodroots
and Witcher River mud.
April your body
in red azalea dreams.
Sew yourself wild
in silver-skinned onions.
Feed yourself wise
with sassafras and sage.
Sing light, Mama,
in the mother tongue of rain
as pine bark falls
in open love with you.
Grow old
in ghosts of chestnut shade
as Smoky Mountains peak
with bald triumphant age.
And you are ready
not to die.
Compost your heart to green.
Spring woman, Snakeberry Mama,
rise
again
from roots resisting all
that does not birth from dirt.
—Bark & Blossom (U.K), 2023
—Snakeberry Mamas, 2025
In a Hungry River Compost Pile
After the storm,
grounds of dark
fall, coffee grounds
seeping
through bark and buried
birch leaves,
through cardamom curls
of old orange skins,
wilted iceberg lettuce,
crushed comfrey
with fenders
and
the shell of my house,
a pottery wheel,
the promise to hold,
like a cup, broken.
Hungry,
the Appalachian river,
hungry, the grit
in the grounds
seeking
resurrection of dirt
from water
seeping, still
in the cinnamon-red roots
of madder and bloodwort,
planted in mud,
the grounds of my life
seeking
resurrection from water
seeking earth
worm-fat, wet and dirty.