Green

The villagers buried me deep.

Bedrock cradled me. Layers of soil and root, sand and burrow above.

Everything dark and wriggling. Heartbeats of rabbits and moles, chorus of ants and worms. The ocean, faint but insistent.

All the rivers inside me stilled. I became rot, green decay.

I became many. Beetles and flies laid their eggs on me, the only offspring I would ever birth.

The children crawled through me, eating what was once my flesh.

A tiny sliver remained. A dumb ember that would not be stamped out.

Time passed in dream, in nightmare.

Time unspooled in pools of green, in red cactus flowers blooming deep in the desert.

Your bones leaching into the sand. Bones drifting at the bottom of the ocean, singing.

The sea and the sky clawed at the earth; they brought my remains to the surface. The village was long gone, replaced by trees.

Hungry animals gnawed the marrow from my bones. They sowed me throughout the forest.

In every place a shard of me nestled, I regenerated.

Peace was not to be, not for me.

-

We woke to skies crowned with leaves.

Our memory smoke and darkness. Rustling leaves.

Thousands of emerald eyes shook in the wind.

We woke to seas of grass, to fields of black, green seething beneath. We woke buried in landfills, nestled in the roots of trees.

We were nothing but pain. We were empty and pain shaped us, agony reanimating us.

Our bodies heaps of dirt, of root and wriggling things.

Our bodies bark and thorn, moss and stem,

trash and snarls of green. Poppies burst like blisters from our fragile skins.

Decades passed.

We crawled. We staggered. We moved in green light: sun filtering through leaves, sky jade and boiling.

Green bloomed inside, gave us lungs.

Our skin became tough as rind, our teeth and claws sharp.

Now, a new feeling. Hollow.

In the distance, we hear the beating of blood, the churning rivers of blood we will release into the soil, feed to the green.

All the rivers of blood we will drink until we become human again.

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