my office one thousand feet in the sky
my cube of nothing one thousand
feet in the sky with the potted orchid
in the corner that blooms violently
pink twice a year, budget blossoms
because HR says: studies show
the presence of plants is soothing
to clients and hey, I like them too,
I’m not complaining, just drinking
coffee metallic-black every faded morning
waiting for the pigeons that shit
daily on my windowsill, come flurrying
in gray and green and black and white
and I can’t tell them apart, any more
than they can distinguish me
from every other gravity-defying ape
in this forest of glass–
and on some long overtime evenings I wonder:
this interchangeability: deliberate?
this soft insistent signaling:
the eggshell walls, fluorescence,
the calculated asymmetry
the caffeine on tap the mirrored
mountain or seashore or rolling gold
quick-shifting plain of the screensaver
these murmurs get me forgetting
if I was ever given a name–
the air conditioning’s scent is called
Mountain Evergreen and it smells like nothing
that has ever existed, but on mornings
when I come into the office early
its spice unlatches a truth, of a sort:
I was here before the falling-apart. I swear,
I remember how the starlings on the telephone wires
dotted out the notes to some atonal song
and there were fish then, great clouds of them
drifting green-silver through the dark
of the lake and one summer I walked barefoot
in the grassy ditch along a gravel road
until my heels bled grasshoppers flinging
themselves against my ankles heat shimmering
off the earth like fish swimming
through the air red-tailed hawks
watching silent from the fence-posts–
these are the things I remember now,
when I think back to before they mattered–
there were fruits in the forest then,
salmonberries, pink-blooming plums,
the domed red heads of mushrooms pushing
through the leaf litter and sometimes,
on the luckiest of nights, I’d stand in the air,
just out in the clean evening air,
and watch the starlings vortex upwards
in a single inhale.
Originally published in Radon Journal.
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant studying creative writing in Portland, Oregon. In their work, they are interested in exploring human-nature relation and deconstructing binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Adroit Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, JMWW, and Gone Lawn. They are a prose reader for VERDANT, a mediocre guitarist, an awe-inspiring procrastinator, and a truly terrible swimmer. They can be found on X/Instagram @esmepromise.