Meredith Faulkner
A Chiropractor, an Arborist, or Maybe Just a Lumberjack and a Priest
I am a tree post-hurricane,
trunk half-straight with misaligned vertebrae,
dreaming of the days I spent scraping the sky,
not trapped in limbo, the mouth to hell.
(Wind flies overhead like a sad memory.)
Even if I grow, my reach
will only go towards low-
flying buzzards, not the open
sky I once called home.
I am Tantalus, a doomed hypotenuse.
I am a tree in forest of corpses
held up by stilts, all Quasimodos
with hot metal braces strapped to their backs
that I could not see until now,
humbled and resigned to peering up skirts.
Now I know what all trees know:
my roots are poisonous.
I was born bound by skin.
I can never straighten myself,
never be right until I lie like a cradle, a coffin.
I am a tree begging for a saw
now that I see that the music I thought
came from me was the wind
and birds using me. Even the clouds
have painted over where I once stood.
I wish I could laugh at this cosmic joke,
But I cannot breathe while my spine is stilled curved,
not until earth shivers when I hit the dirt.
My soul screams for a Chiropractor, an Arborist,
but I am crooked; death is all I know.
I am a tree born buried, living half-dead.
Schrödinger would wrap his theories around me like Christmas.
I could only germinate under six feet of dirt,
and despite the pain of scoliosis
I am not blind to myself anymore--
I see that I can never be straight until I am broken, supine.
trunk half-straight with misaligned vertebrae,
dreaming of the days I spent scraping the sky,
not trapped in limbo, the mouth to hell.
(Wind flies overhead like a sad memory.)
Even if I grow, my reach
will only go towards low-
flying buzzards, not the open
sky I once called home.
I am Tantalus, a doomed hypotenuse.
I am a tree in forest of corpses
held up by stilts, all Quasimodos
with hot metal braces strapped to their backs
that I could not see until now,
humbled and resigned to peering up skirts.
Now I know what all trees know:
my roots are poisonous.
I was born bound by skin.
I can never straighten myself,
never be right until I lie like a cradle, a coffin.
I am a tree begging for a saw
now that I see that the music I thought
came from me was the wind
and birds using me. Even the clouds
have painted over where I once stood.
I wish I could laugh at this cosmic joke,
But I cannot breathe while my spine is stilled curved,
not until earth shivers when I hit the dirt.
My soul screams for a Chiropractor, an Arborist,
but I am crooked; death is all I know.
I am a tree born buried, living half-dead.
Schrödinger would wrap his theories around me like Christmas.
I could only germinate under six feet of dirt,
and despite the pain of scoliosis
I am not blind to myself anymore--
I see that I can never be straight until I am broken, supine.
Biography
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Meredith Faulkner lives in North Carolina with her husband and cat. Her work has appeared in tenderness lit, MICRO // MACRO, and Nightingale and Sparrow. She tweets @faulknerwrites1.
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