Emma Catherine Perry

Invasion of the Extremophiles

A child drapes a sheet over her head and now she's a ghost.

A child wants to do it herself and won't listen.

When the eye holes she cuts won't line up with her eyes

she won't let you fix it. She claws at the white space

where her face should be all night stubborn and ruining pictures.

It doesn't matter what you hope for your child. Not really.

We all got here through propagation is the edge of predicting

what flourishes. What fervent photosynthesis incidentally heart-shaped

kudzu leaves layer over the landscape that was

components unified by repetition of a single shape.

It doesn't matter how the kudzu made it this far north. It doesn't take long

for hungering vines to climb the telephone pole at the end of the street

for the body of the weed we brought with us and somehow sponsor

to drape itself over the wires and across the sky like a sheet on a clothesline.

Who knew how well kudzu would do. Who knows what we've tracked in on our shoes.

A child forgets to wipe her feet. A child only collapses

when she's run herself into the ground. A child assumes her progress

is the primary objective the vector of existence not to mention

consciousness and a child runs and runs until she tires and the microbes

clinging to the soles of her sneakers finally get where they're trying to go.

Kudzu travels further north. Ivy chokes as it goes and loosestrife

gambols gangrenous over the marsh. This happens. We have to assume

microscopic burrs in the caterpillar treads of the landing equipment.

Spores in the folds of the airlock. Whiff of Earth on the fickle fin

of solar wind arcs over Mars. Wherever we go we accompany.

We shepherd. We shield. We infect. We are mistaken when we believe

our own protagonism. I know I thought I was the ghost at the center

of everything held in place by my self. My gravity say-so. My mother

was playing the long game. My mother was letting me run it off. My mother

was patient. Life can hibernate in the fissures of drought rock. A silent collusion

of chloroplast and spore. Lichen can live a long time without water. Without air.

Lichen lies dormant until it finds a way to grow again. To expand from the edge

of itself. Maybe we are meant to be vector for lichen surviving between

molecules of feldspar and basalt slowly change color as the lichen spreads

like dust on a mantle flocks silhouettes of clocks and family

photographs change slightly becoming slightly harder to see

that we were never at the center of any story besides the ones we tell

ourselves. Our interest attaches to what is interesting but we forget

that the interest of children attaches only to what they know. And life goes on

without interest. Life went on before kudzu. Before my mother had me.

Who knows but it doesn't matter whether humans can survive on Mars.

Human history is a footnote in the Book of Lichen. This is a story for kudzu.

This is a poem with my mother in it. In a million billion years the lichen

will cover all the rocks in the solar system in a pattern of bide and flourish

until everything we've ever seen is the soft green ghost of itself.

Emily Oliver