Tell me in the forest there are mushrooms and typewriters.
Tell me mushrooms taste good and typewriters never rust.
Tell me how typewriters spawn like fireflies at lunar eclipse, how they
settle down like ash among mushrooms and moss.
Tell me you’ll show me.
Tell me there’s a temple where girls go to cut themselves — and once
a century the bloodflower blooms.
Tell me you picked it.
Tell me you ran through the forest.
Tell me what chased you.
Tell me you climbed.
Tell me you slept in wet branches.
Tell me you woke in the night, looked down in the moonlight, saw
a wild man watching birds peck the keys deliberately.
Tell me there’s no way home.
Tell me you drank from the flower, went deeper and deeper.
Tell me spiders spin wires.
Tell me birds know the future.
Tell me you’ve forgotten how we met and why we’re here.
Tell me the spiders are listening.
Tell me all about chameleons and tigers, stomach–brooding frogs
and giant moths, and microbats that roost safely in
carnivorous plants.
Tell me to listen to insects, to strange cries, to the far away whoops
of gibbons.
Tell me someone’s been feeding the typewriters paper.
Tell me that in one thousand years the papermakers will be
priestesses, and all the temples will be libraries.
Tell me what slumbers in mist.
Tell me how spiders eat birds when they fly down to type, how every
page that is finished is spattered in the sound of the struggle.
Tell me everyone gets eaten eventually.
Tell me when I embrace you, hesitantly, when my feet cleave into
hooves.
Tell me when quills sprout thick from your scalp, when my neck
lengthens, and your soft–breasted pelt.
Tell me you’ll wait for my snout before touching my face.
Tell me you’re a woman.
Tell me I look good in stripes.
Tell me my clothes must’ve got lost sometime.
Tell me these stones are the ruins of libraries.
Tell me no one knows what all the words mean anymore — maybe
they used to.
Tell me I found you in the branches.
Tell me what branches are.
Tell me everything’s okay.
Tell me the world is a forest.
Tell me in the forest there are spiders and birds, mushrooms
and typewriters, that spiders taste good, and typewriters
never rust.
Tell me the typewriters are hungry.
Tell me we have to find paper.
Tell me you’ll sleep on my back.
Tell me we’ll never stop changing.
Tell me I’m just making this up.
