How Mushrooms Will Save the World
Mushrooms will save the world by growing out of a dead bird.
The mushroom’s roots will flare like the infinite hair of a girl lifted up by jackal wind.
The bird’s corpse will become a happiness barely held together by a house of dark blue feathers.
The filaments will break down categories like shoeless sleepwalkers passing through solid oak trees.
Before each filament a realm of glittering beetles and glistening dirt will split open.
The mushrooms’ roots will weave us a habit of singing silk.
This story says only that a house of blue feathers is not really a house,
nor is the beautiful skin of the living the only door to joy.
Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of Sanctuary, Vermont (Orison Books), which won the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Read more.
“How Mushrooms Will Save the World” was previously published in Poetry International.