Jan. 3, 2022
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Mad Flora and Fauna Catalog [Excerpt]
By Stephanie Heit
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Mad Flora and Fauna Catalog [Excerpt]
By Stephanie Heit
Hyena
is the manic animal. Famished fanged with a haunted look. Nocturnal prowl on the edges of other worlds. Cursorial like my mind. Race to kill with the teeth. Rip prey to pieces. Steal. Drive. Run. Cuts on my arm to release the pressure. Red of inside meets outside. You look like a ghost my mother said in the hospital after I’d had my stomach lavaged. Hyena. A spirit. Looks sideways. Part dog part cat part unnameable. Not trustworthy. Laughing at myself.
Turtle
is the depression animal. Or rather this was the animal I aligned with when I was finding my way forward or who knows in what direction, some compass dislocated from a ship long splattered in the ocean. A wreck of suicidal ideation and concrete planning I never thought I’d find my way away from alive. This is turtle. The slow movement. Middle ground. Ability to pull into a home a shell or my own skin. A limbic striated reach toward the beach that gave me shore and light. Steady. No acrobatic feats. Simply alive. Pull and extend. A bit of push, but not too much, because I’m tired.
Kudzu
is the chronic plant. It strangles out the foliage: soul crushers! And thrives. And multiplies. Spreads like neurotransmitter fuck ups that run patterns into the brain. Kudzu takes over until no one remembers what the landscape looked like, and there is no viable way back but to alter aesthetics. Call this transplanted heart and gills beautiful or at least enough. Figure out how to eat the leaves and make a cookbook where poison tastes good.
Turtle was previously published in Wordgathering.
Stephanie Heit. Photo credit: Tamara Wade
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, a shock/psych system survivor, bipolar, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the forthcoming hybrid memoir poem, Psych Murders (Wayne State University Press, 2022), and The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017). https://stephanieheitpoetry.wordpress.com/
Image Description: Headshot of a white woman smiling, wearing a purple wrap, with brown wavy hair in a bob. She is on (perhaps in, feet dangling) the Huron River with background muted green of tree leaves, and dappled light before dusk.