The exterminators wove their bags from the vodka strength of the noonday sun, killing the shadows straight off when they stuffed them in the bags. But Culver wove his bags from the strands of dawn, from when the first few beams trailed across the fields, not too bright, but just bright enough that they couldn’t slip through the stitches.

Hailey, startled, fell backwards on her rear. She was ten, and mushrooms had never deigned to talk to her before.

She wondered if she could transform into a bear, or an ant underground, something that could burrow into the depths of the soil or rock and stay there for months in the winter, unconcerned with the cold or with cages.

Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon. The black lights.

Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we knew they were coming and are down by the river. Pisses the chickens off to no end, of course.

Aloe waited in the mailbox, shivering in the February freeze along with his three foster siblings, Cactus, Snake Plant, and Jade.

The door opens like tree boughs reaching for /
the sun, and you’re sure /
you didn’t move, but the floor moves you inside /
like wind buoying a bird through its branches /

When will they regard the autonomy of a woman’s hard /
decision with the same religion of just looking up /
with the same faith and leaping to conclusions /
That they do to us?

In the autumn, we trek /
Into the Red Grove /
Where the little fox-fires grow /

Dawn pressed his lips to the horizon and Sky blushed like a schoolgirl. All pink and pastel, she twirled her birds up into the winds.

Panic Attack: WAKE UP THERE’S A BEAR

Me: what no there’s not

Panic Attack: BEARS EVERYWHERE

Every day, Niska climbed the rope ladder into the harbor of the sky to watch the cloud boats sail.

The constellation wrapping her torso—Tapez, the Winged Warrioress—flared crisp and bright through her clothes in the darkness of the late evening.

In that time between interesting things /
We Rests flourish /
During the whirling wheel /

Lir tapped a rhythm on her leg, reading her magazine on extraterrestrial plants. The plastic rose hanging from her mirror redirected the sunlight, creating a pink gleam on her cheek.

Poppy rambled along the highway, nodding to the bunches of Queen Anne’s lace on the road’s shoulder. They bobbed back to her, the legged flora goddess; she who had pert yellow lips and red limbs to fold up at night.

Elsie skipped over the bridge in the yard, the tiny thing constructed for rabbits and mice. She pinwheeled to a stop, then dashed back over it and told her mother about the ‘black fairies’ she’d found.

The cicadas sizzled in the summer afternoon, spiraling in an erratic murmuration through the yard, and Fen dropped her sidewalk chalk to cover her ears.

For our part, we love being discovered. Frieda matches us with the perfect reader, that one who holds us with interest and turns our pages with excitement. Sometimes, that person comes back to read us again, and again — for, of course, they can’t take us out of the café. 

The butterfairies and the ring-tailed dragons fled first. They buttoned up their fairy coats and looped scarves around their rings and traveled far, far into the North.