When I say I lust for land I do not mean that I long to own it or even to top it. For me, lust is draw, indelible convergence. I want to converge so deeply with it that I am in fact indistinguishable from it: a land-miracle, a green that spins more green. I suppose it is most appropriate to say that I lust land as a way to invert losses of many types.

As lovers and makers of books, adoration and courtship by way of pages is good. However, it is not good enough to simply stop at that. The memories of trees as resonances in the blank pages that we hold in our rooms will haunt us if we don’t seek more of their source alongside them. We love pages; we are green’s ally. Can a human be a surrogate for alteration of a tree’s losses? Should we not throb with them, press our bodies into them until units of bark are embedded beneath our skin? We must enter the forest, advocate for green in places where there is no separation of us from it. Although page-based mirrors are enrichments, it is never enough to live solely to court the other sides and other lives of dead things (trees included). We will only die in the process.

All forms of life emerge from dark interims. Darkness is a known precursor to green. When live trees taught me this, there was a lot of bark pushed beneath the topmost layers of my skin. I moved from staying on Earth only by way of self-made bondages by pages herein, to coming up from Earth in rooted ways. A human can be a literal root of the Earth and a root is not time; a root is intimate relationship with.

This is what it is like, naturally in my body, when I am a living mother of many offspring-pages and have a mother in Earth with which to relate: a living mother who is not only blood lineage (which can also be a blood limit) but who is also unconditional lifeline. A suitable cosmic mother would have a fractal face: face that sucks on my very human face. My erection (which is located in my third eye) protrudes, ever reaching toward and by way of the bark of old-growth beasts. Embodiment of bark happens; my erection explodes, leaving me as a mammy fungal gown producing glowing jam on the perimeter.

An orgasm is a natural extreme. Weep into my eyes, mother, so I can see the sodden erections that trees keep beneath their bark. In the aspen forest I turn my face up to the sky. I let the rain fall into my eyes.

Piece originally posted at Berfrois.

j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j, simply, hopes to make the god/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning seasons of the moon.