Night of the Mosquito
A lonely body, a porous battleground, endures endless blood-sucking assaults on its…
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From ULR
Issue 11 – Appetite
Visual Narrative: Everything Grows Out of Everything Else
West Coast rain kisses skin; the textured forest breathes. Madrone elders shed cloaks, revealing vibrant layers. Sunlight, a soft touch, feeds hungry
Visual Narrative · Usawa Literary Review
Everything grows out of everything else.
The numinous moss nestles in crevices of muscular manzanita trees,
their sinewy limbs leaning to sunlight with such taut elegance that its easy to imagine them as Yakshis, tree spirits just waiting for me to complete my foray into their sacred groves
so that they can link their angular elbows and go back to long legged leaping like arboreal olympians vaulting towards heaven.
Winter on the west Coast of North America is the realm of rain. Water wraps its liquid balm around me as I walk in the forest. A shawl that knows no borders.
Madrone trees are the magical mysterious revered elders of this forest. It’s also increasingly rare to find them. In a forest of thousands of oaks you might chance upon one or two.
According to a legend of the indigenous Salish coast people, “the tree’s webbed roots hold the splintered earth together. If it should disappear,” the myth warns, “the planet would fly apart and be utterly destroyed.”
Salish Coast People
The Salish recount the story of the Great Flood when the whispering waters turned louder and threatened to swallow the earth in their mouth.
They describe how the Madrone provided an anchor for their canoes to hold steady and not drift away. To this day, they don’t use the Madrone tree as firewood.
Madrone bark changes color to reflect the entire gamut of skin tones, from pale white to jet black and every shade in between.
The evergreen madrones are constantly shedding their skin, the older, darker wrinkly bark peels off to reveal youthful bright smooth layers, a feat rendered even more enviable by the unique ability of this new bark to generate chlorophyll.
I move through the forest thinking about osmosis and hunger, the hunger of the madrone unabashedly dropping its skin to feed; it feels like an erotic act, like lovers joyously stripping naked to feast on each other’s bodies.
The other party to this act, sunlight, arrives unclothed and lays a soft buttery finger on my starving lips.
Everything grows out of everything else.
Sophia Naz
Sophia Naz is a bilingual poet, essayist, author, editor and translator. he has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry. Her work features in numerous literary journals, including Poetry International Rotterdam, The Adirondack Review, The Wire, Chicago Quarterly Review, Blaze Vox, Scroll, The Daily O, Cafe Dissensus, Guftugu, Pratik, Gallerie International, Coldnoon, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Madras Courier, etc. Her Urdu/Hindi poetry appears in the anthology Raushniyan(2018). Her poetry collections are Peripheries (2015) Pointillism (2017) and Date Palms (2017). Naz is a regular contributor to Dawn, Poetry Editor and columnist at The Sunflower Collective, editor of the journal City, as well as the founder of rekhti.org, a site dedicated to contemporary Urdu poetry by women. Shehnaz, a biography on her mother's life is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2019. www.trancelucence.net.