wildscape. literary journal

Stinking
by Edie Popper

I like my fingers fragrant, stinking:
unclothing garlic by the clove,
 
slicked with oil, picking olives
from the jar. Thumbing leaves, the basil

mashed into my nails. I like to cook 
by hand: claw feta from the block,
 
measure rice in fistfuls
and the water by a knuckle-depth.
 
I web my palms with dough 
snow flour past my elbows

up to my pulse in yeast.
Lemon rolled beneath my wrist
 
tendered rind twisted 
for its fistfuls of pulpy sun. 
 
I spent all afternoon trying to write 
a poem about the ocean’s slowing pulse
 
and writing nothing at all. Feverish, 
the Atlantic circulation. Its unsteady,
 
thready beat. Words were gristle
in my teeth. For the poem, I studied 
 
the physics of currents, the weather 
they brew; how carbon in the air is held
 
as acid in the sea. How the ocean
is layered by temperature, salinity.
 
How our briny lung breathes
on upwells, downwells, global swells.
 
How the acid will prune the kelp,
melt the plankton from their shells 
 
then starve the krill, the bigger fish,
the turtles, eels, orcas, and then all
 
the deepsea weirdos we hardly knew
exist — the cookiecutter sharks, the
 
clear-blooded icefish, vampire squids
and the neon-bellied jellies.
 
Then the humpbacks, singing up and
down the coast. The heat will boast
 
its flotsam dead. But I couldn’t
make it poetry, so I cooked a stew
 
instead. Onion in oil, cumin seed. 
Spinach, lentils, beans. Spice and rice 
 
like pillow-fluff, or the roughage 
of clouds. Drove it over to a friend 
 
who was in bed for the week.
Came home, wrote this.
 
Tonight I didn’t write
about the sick sea because
 
we answer grief insisting on life:
determined to feed, deadheading
 
blooms and giving our plenty
to one another’s tongues
 
having learned from the rot where
mushrooms lift their hatted heads
 
from compost, clay, spores sifting
through decay for a dim, damp place
 
to lay their villages of squidgy roof-
tops, crops of moons. So we live
 
because of what lived and will live.
So we live because of all of it.


**Author’s note: the line “giving our plenty/to one another’s tongues” is inspired by a story and wisdom shared in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry.

about the author // Edie Popper