This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2023 Spring Print Edition.
Illustration by Ishaan Barrett
After Charles Wright and Kierkegaard somehow
I don’t feel normal about My Mushrooms,
still wait for them to softly, like mist,
hate, to sow sudden radio silence
out of tired styrofoam into my sitting and been sitting;
still there are instances of humidity that send
all of me racing, still the cottages pray for air not rain,
fearing the big flabby ones that crop up.
And because it’s an old trick, you know by mushrooms
I mean them, the folks I sprang up from like
ears on bark.
The auricularia heimuer we call “wood ears”.
So I am the fungus, poem grows from inaptitude,
and from the tree’s deadest joints spawns now
a treasonous ear.
Or I say and mean mushrooms—
un-parse-able the wisps
of I-am-attached-to-them-by-rot;
of the-forest’s-dream-of-hogs-turns
my-sporely-piety-into-courtly-love.
In fact paralyzed, as though they will always be with me,
though the problem is that they won’t,
and I cannot believe both at once, become both at once,
bitter and a future orphan.
Is there any telling if they are happy
to be here, while they are?
I don’t know—I am so busy listening.
The dream turned my sporely affection
into courtly love, sending me after
my fearsome mushrooms, the knight
pursuing the absurd autumn aroma of unsettled dirt.
Mia Xing (she/her) is a senior at Columbia College from Canada and China. Her recent discoveries include osmanthus incense and brown butter in baking. She hopes to practice law and give back to her communities.