I want to reach so deep into the natural world flowers jut from my edges.

by Nich Malone

I’m sitting at a cafe and the woman next to me is telling someone a story about how she started bawling in line at the grocery store and when she reached the register the cashier asked her if she needed a hug. She did. 

Maybe the cashier did too but she didn’t specify, not even how long the line was or how many items she had or if  she had a basket or cart or anything. Afterward she walked to this cafe and started crying again, as if to void the hug entirely. 

It’s like when people say ‘nothing was ever meant to last’ even though styrofoam never fully decomposes but instead breaks into bits that are then consumed by wildlife. 

When we die do we become artifacts or have we always been? It’s actually pretty hard to remain still, if you look at your hand long enough you’ll notice you’re trembling, it’s like when you think about blinking and suddenly it all feels too intentional to be natural. 

Like how some worms can reform their entire bodies from just a tiny sliver of themselves and retain all their original body’s memories. Do you think since worms breathe through their skin, their circular and longitudinal tremblings feel bated, their previous forms nestled through the earth, slipping away 

while they’re still in it? Like if I pace my apartment over and over, a healthy lifestyle contains 312.5 to 375 paces a day. My steps form a sowing motion, a routine to be emptied from, another a beginning, middle and end to cradle all I might be missing, tears at the grocery store rumbling beneath my surface.

It’s like how moons can have moons and they’re called moonmoons. Even far away, our landscapes are contained like a fold within a fold, dust weighing on air like vessels to grow new surroundings, still-lives without any wish for an escape.