Mycelial Meditations

Harryette Mullen. Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary.

Usually small detached pieces succeed each other without connection but these three aptly for small poems about fungi are thematically connected like strands of mycelium.

Paramedics check vital signs as
emergency-room doctors prepare for
the arrival of amateur mycologists.

Often they are immigrants, who've gathered,
cooked, and eaten toxic death-caps resembling
tasty wild mushrooms of their native land.

Within a small family of survivors
the cost of a grandparent's funeral
is divided between two credit cards.

And so for day 1675
15.07.2011