In the corn museum the docent shrugs
when I praise the strange blue cobs.
They weren’t good producers.
They were content to remain plants.
What did we give up when we abandoned
variants that were happy this way?
When the cactus evolved thorns,
retracting its leaves into daggers,
where did the sound of the wind go?
Does the cactus remember that flutter?
An artist and a scientist worked together
to record the cellular sound of the cactus,
its song in seed, genetics, body.
The sound is like poetry scraped over desert rocks.
When making a difficult decision,
imagine one part of yourself continuing
down the path you did not choose,
living her own life of hardship and joy.
Knowing she’s there may make your decision easier.
Go ahead, imagine another life of blue corn & cactus leaf.
Sara Eddy’s full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Fissures, was released by Kelsay Books in May 2024. She is also the author of two chapbooks (Tell the Bees, A3 Press, 2019, and Full Mouth, Finishing Line Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.