there is nothing I want any more

By Tiffany Higgins

there is nothing I want any more
no object can fill this—no nothing 

while stars long dead at core
still somehow spin illuminations

across aches of space

out past alpha centauri
to alight on a flutter of skin

no there is nothing I want any more

while the coast redwood after fire
licked clean out at center 

still stands  

the black circle balances
recalls how to reach

down into the branching dark

hole in which is still held
the murmuring thunder

an exchange of rhizomes
conversation that lifts

200 feet up to farthest dry
bark most distant husk

that longs yet to fling
arms up

into meteors—

no there is nothing I want any more

I am ready to give
I am ready to give it— 

no thing could suck up meaning

as blank watercolor paper
draws color up into itself 

as veins that drain
far away from heart

permit blood once again
to flood them 

as if by trust

there is nothing I want any more
I am ready to give it 

I am ready to give
it away

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Tiffany Higgins is a poet, translator, and a journalist writing on the environment and Brazil. Her writing appears in Granta, Guernica, Poetry, Mongabay, and elsewhere. She was the 2020 Annie Clark Tanner Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, and will be a 2021 Fulbright scholar to Brazil’s Amazon.