Hayden Saunier
Self-Portrait as Three Cubic Feet of Compost
That’s three feet by three feet by three feet and will require a small truck to move,
meaning I won’t have that light-and-airy feel of ash, nor will I lift and vanish like a cloud
ascending holy, holy, holy when cast to the winds. I’ll have heft. The brochure describes a
layering of woodchips, alfalfa, straw, and me in a careful blend of nitrogen and carbon
nestled inside a steel cylinder, then six weeks later: voila! topsoil. Upside: little carbon
footprint, no chemicals, no hot burn, because we’ve had enough of fires, haven’t we?
Downside: you can’t just leave me in a drawer or on a closet shelf or sell me in my
porcelain urn at a yard sale by mistake. You’ll have to shovel me, so I suggest you
simply dump me on the bigger compost heap and turn me for a season, then pay me out
in spring to flower beds, raspberries. Oh, to be threaded through with root, crisscrossed
by traceries of vole and worm and grub! And what frisson thrills a thousand diamond
points of frost and freeze may bring! By then, I’ll be completely us/it/them/and we.
We’ll germinate, get rinsed away, cling to a snowy egret’s awkward yellow feet, fly,
plummet, land, and settle back into the suck of rich black mud. We’ll collapse into
cool dark corridors. We’ll send up spiky stalks of pink-streaked lotus buds enclosing
hearts made strange with chartreuse fruit and golden fringe. There’ll be no end to us.
Hayden Saunier’s work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Prize and has been published or is forthcoming in Baltimore Review, diode, Pedestal, Plume, The Sun, and VQR. Her sixth collection, Wheel, is scheduled for publication in 2024.
Return to January 2024 Edition
That’s three feet by three feet by three feet and will require a small truck to move,
meaning I won’t have that light-and-airy feel of ash, nor will I lift and vanish like a cloud
ascending holy, holy, holy when cast to the winds. I’ll have heft. The brochure describes a
layering of woodchips, alfalfa, straw, and me in a careful blend of nitrogen and carbon
nestled inside a steel cylinder, then six weeks later: voila! topsoil. Upside: little carbon
footprint, no chemicals, no hot burn, because we’ve had enough of fires, haven’t we?
Downside: you can’t just leave me in a drawer or on a closet shelf or sell me in my
porcelain urn at a yard sale by mistake. You’ll have to shovel me, so I suggest you
simply dump me on the bigger compost heap and turn me for a season, then pay me out
in spring to flower beds, raspberries. Oh, to be threaded through with root, crisscrossed
by traceries of vole and worm and grub! And what frisson thrills a thousand diamond
points of frost and freeze may bring! By then, I’ll be completely us/it/them/and we.
We’ll germinate, get rinsed away, cling to a snowy egret’s awkward yellow feet, fly,
plummet, land, and settle back into the suck of rich black mud. We’ll collapse into
cool dark corridors. We’ll send up spiky stalks of pink-streaked lotus buds enclosing
hearts made strange with chartreuse fruit and golden fringe. There’ll be no end to us.
Hayden Saunier’s work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Pablo Neruda Prize and has been published or is forthcoming in Baltimore Review, diode, Pedestal, Plume, The Sun, and VQR. Her sixth collection, Wheel, is scheduled for publication in 2024.
Return to January 2024 Edition