“Mississppi Moves Through Me” appears in DUM DUM Zine Issue 6: Rest & Resist, now available online.
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Inspired by Emma Fick’s “Magnolia Life Cycle” and David George Haskell’s “The Songs of Trees”
I see in generations.
I flourished in the empire and the wreckage of slavery. I presided over Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Mississippi v. Bryant and Milam, Mason v. Biloxi, Brown v. Board, and Meredith v. Fair. I have felt the winds and rains of Katrina, watched our cities sink, and now I sense the ocean’s desire to swallow us whole. The blood of the Spanish and French and Native and Confederate all nourish my roots alike. I stood here before bees came to pollinate me, and I will continue to stand long after they are forced to extinction.
Your children are born and growing before I ever consider having my own, in my twentieth year. My blooms are the same size as their gumdrop faces. The spindly green fingers of my perianth curl tightly, like you gripping your pen, and lay bear, a whorl of bright white petals my only protection. My waxy leaves are evergreen, their scurfy underbelly chafed and flaking like your own skin, when the summer heat deprives you of moisture.
My fruits blush after fertilization, grateful for the tender kiss of bird or beetle. I am a mother, and I pay tribute to the yonic as my carpels slowly open and my cherry red children crown. I know as they fall that they are no longer mine; some destined to travel in the wind or on the backs of wild things to create their own worlds, and some fated to feed the lives of the squirrels and opossum below. I have no use for hovering or looking back.
I will drop these little wombs as they dry up, comforted in knowing I will make more. The dead flesh nourishes the ground I live in, and I give as it gives to me. Next year, when you go to the coast of Maine for a family vacation, I will think of my own cousins in Wiesbaden, Shanghai, and Lanquín. When you get back, there will be more shade for you to enjoy, more petals and husks for them to collect, and more centuries for me to see.
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Kathryn Lee Willgus is a recent New Orleans transplant and middle school English teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Russian and a Creative Writing Certificate in fiction from Sewanee: The University of the South in May 2016 and spent the 2016-2017 school year teaching English in Russia on a Fulbright U.S. Student Award. Kathryn’s work appears in Anti-Heroin Chic, Coldnoon, Moonglasses Magazine and others. Find her on Instagram @alpha_uterus and Twitter @___caligula.