WITH MOUTHS AND MUSHROOMS, THE EARTH WILL ACCEPT OUR APOLOGYWhen Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom.
--Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World
made of shock doctrine, made of root-chatter,
made of playgrounds blackened with corpses,
made of the anti-modern, of hell-wreck, made of symbiotic
destruction, of parasite and pericapitalism, made of slave trade,
of wretched, made of reek and reason, made of ex-flesh, of cells
stampeding through the lungs of miners, made of morals, of mortals,
of everything went with perfection, made of infants in horse stalls
or strapped in reddened rags, made of sour rice, of phlegm,
of warp and spore, made of forest floor dis-
enfranchised to dust, of sun-laden and empty space, made
of empty space, made of timber price, of sugarcane,
of nematode and elite sleaze, of seamstresses diving to concrete,
made of trash-bellied caribou, of suicide pact, of hands deep
in the throat of a comfort girl, made of entrails, of gromet,
of every chipper we can do it, made of sacred land, of funeral scream,
of holy water and flayed graves, made of stolen names, of commerce,
of conquistador, of near-death visions on the factory floor, made of
the unforgivable future, and the unforgivable past, i bloom,
bloodless, and ready to feed.
(Franny Choi)