Excerpt from the interspecies internet,
author unknown, circa 2036*
My sky is a hole from which the bucket drops.
Like all heretics, I am put to work processing stones.
The task adds weight to our silence.
Here in the half-light; a boulder rounds
in my palm. I recall experiments investigating
the psychic excellence of the machine;
how bees interpret shapes they’ve seen
in the dark. I remember nights laid beside you,
though your face resists specifics. In the language
of bats, you are an echolocation; a cactus blooming
beneath the desert moon. I recite my memory
to mycelia. These are the flowering
bodies of my resistance. I am the wind
in an intermission of trees; a blackbird
streaming its song to the abandoned
tune of an evolving thought pattern.
I am the sound cage of a cicada’s friction.
[drought interference]
Sentience runs beyond the sentence
and my sentence is silence; an odyssey
of worms. Listen for the melismatic wave
that carries us
[ends]
Originally from Kent, Dave Simmons now lives on the Kapiti Coast in Aotearoa New Zealand with his wife and their two cats and two Kaimanawa horses. He writes poetry in moments grabbed between his job as an editor and hours spent in paddocks come rain or shine. Dave counts a range of poets as providing inspiration, including Ted Hughes, Robert Creeley, John Glenday and Alice Oswald. He is currently working on his first collection.
Note: *In 2033, an algorithm for interspecies communication was developed by a team of researchers from The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. All researchers and their associates were imprisoned or sentenced to death as “heretics and collaborators”.