The Garden by Rick London

A garden of black mud An expanse—and contraction of black slime that disorders your looking into it, the vagaries of that looking, so that it or you are segments, segmented And failing planes There is no original position—a garden of slick black roots of various lengths The longer ones you reach for with both hands—reaching into the failed planes of black mud—those are full with viscera With organs that resemble your own innards Around the black pouches that each hold a brain are several body-length roots, some with small black tentacles or secondary roots, but the pouches and their contents do not compel you What interest they may provoke quickly dissipates in your mind To extract the slick roots from this garden of black slime you must relax, inserting an arm deeply among them Hand closing when you come upon one When you feel the root also relax in your hand your tug may gently commence, when it tenses you must quit all pressure upon it or it will split or break and be lost forever Your attention cannot wander You mustn’t lose, regardless of dimension, any roots But there is more anxiety over the apparent absence of odor And all the dead quiet There are no blossoms here; none even too black to see

Rick London’s most recent publications are the poetry collection The Materialist (Doorjamb Press, 2008) and the poetry chapbook The Receptive (Doorjamb Press, 2014). He is co-translator (with Omnia Amin) of Now, As You Awaken, by Mahmoud Darwish (Sardines Press, 2007); Rain Inside, by Ibrahim Nasrallah (Curbstone Books, 2009); and The Novel, by Nawal El Saadawi (Interlink World Fiction, 2009). He lives in Oakland, CA.