BY MARTHA SILANO
After Apple Picking, Late Anthropocene
My puke green stool’s standing in the rain
near a tree about to be slashed by the jaws
of a bright orange monster. There’s a crate
I’ve filled and another crate my neighbor Taine
has filled, and we’re not leaving maybe two
or three, we’re not leaving one, and we’re not
done with apple picking. Taine’s gone to find
a ladder so we can reach the Red Delicious,
the Ginger Golds. Returning, she locates
the center branch – It’s grafted, and she’s right:
two varieties scarred into one—red and yellow fruits
sharing the same trunk, each with a history of its own—
one discovered in North Carolina after a hurricane
named Camille, the other hailing from a small town
named Peru. I text my friend Cambria: we’ve got 48 hours
to pick 500 apples: you know a place we can donate them?
Essence of progress is on the drizzly afternoon.
Intermittent downpours we don’t gripe about
as we recall last summer, soot and smoke,
red sun in midday, red moon nights. Face masks,
advisories to stay inside, keep our windows closed.
Essence of truffula trees and sneeds. Of the new normal,
rising seas. I’m supposed to be grading 22 papers
but instead I’m coring apples for sauce, the speckled
and worm holed. Cooking them down, placing them
in sterilized jars. My daughter’s in the kitchen
with her laptop, asking me to read her response
to her math teacher’s lecture where he told them
the global GDP will double in the next hundred years
if we stick with gas and oil. We debate whether
she should call him a pompous bully. She is learning
Latin for attacking the man, she’s googling synonyms
for a-hole, and I’m not done with apple picking,
peeling, coring, or cooking, because Juan
at City Fruit is coming by tomorrow with three crates
I’ll fill for him to take to food banks, public schools.
I’m tired, wishing I could drowse off, and I too can’t wipe
the strangeness from my eyes when T. Rex eats the roof,
metal teeth sinking into sheetrock and siding,
dragging up the viburnum, slicing the front
and back doors. I can’t watch as it lifts the apple tree
by the roots, its arms like a grandma bear-hugging
a grandchild. Ice? Oh yes, Mr. Frost! Not something
to study my face in, go all egocentric about, self-reflective
and all about me, but a tad more pressing. No rest
from the news of melting, no dreams without the dream
of icebergs calving. But magnified apples do disappear
when Juan shows up in his pickup, no russet clarity
but plenty of take the developer’s cash, leave the bank loan
from the hopeful Latinx family behind. Unlike you, Robert,
I didn’t want this to be the final harvest, would’ve picked
10,000 more, the bruised as good as the not.
After we’ve burned or drenched it all, after every river’s
un or over run, after we’re bulldozed under, mother Earth
will heave a great sigh, crack open a Bud. I’m not sure
if she prefers the Temper Pedic, the Memory Foam,
or the one that keeps you cool, but it will be a long,
humanless sleep.
Swampland
My mother said my birth was easy like a marsh. Like a marsh,
not a manicured lawn. My marsh birth went with me
to a small New Jersey town,
where she said I flourished like pickleweed, like saw grass
because my birth knew how to smile. My mother said
a marsh was a buffer, a good place
for sedges and reeds. I remember how frightened I was
when my father asked us to leave. I was anything
but fearless, a hummingbird in torpor.
When marshes are drained, dead zones appear. They’re good
my mother said, at taking in toxins. Marshes
should never be drained.
Someone called it a watery pasture. Someone said like a storm-
surge absorber, like a sponge. Back when I was a green-
winged teal, back when you were a swan.
Words like salsuginous
splash me, douse me, brine me
with a dizzying noseful. I fear
the Sound will not recover
from the spill—no more wading,
no more laps. Crows spar
between stanzas, I mean
Dumpsters. One wing contains
the certainty of desiccated grass,
the other the two allowable servings
of fish per week. That morning,
wiping soot from the sills, making sense
of the burn in my throat, school children
in N-95s. Words like sopping, soggy,
saline, soaked. There’s no body
of water big enough to bring this fever down.
Martha Silano’s most recent collection is Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The Cincinnati Review, Cimarron Review, Carolina Quarterly, Sugar House Review, Image, Sixth Finch, North American Review, and elsewhere. Martha teaches at Bellevue College and Hugo House in Seattle.
Process Note: I never know what’s going to lead me into the first lines of a poem, but in the case of these three poems it was three main things: wildfires, a sewage spill at our local swimming hole, and our neighbor’s house (and green space) being torn down and replaced with two ostentatious monstrosities.