You pull the turnip from the black,

almost frozen ground and show me

the roots, still unshrouding from

their wet tangle of soil. They startle,

 

these dense webs, they aren’t

tentacles or long spindly arms — the roots

feather forth, ghostly, like the white fans

of fish at the bottom of oceans. Ever since

 

your new job out on the oil fields,

Did my mother dream in phone

conversations? Land lines, fingers twirling

spiral cord connected to receiver.

Did my grandmother dream in hand

scrawled letters? Her cursive exuding formal

grace they don’t teach anymore.

Last night, I dreamt in videos, holding

a phone, swiping through something

like home movies. My younger sister

and I in Iceland (never been), our heads

on the floor of a cottage,

Jealous of the marsh

And what it could contain

I asked to join the Gauze Panther in Their house

I wanted to talk

I wanted help

To conduct a rite

To stop the green multiplying inside me

I did not love the marsh then

Felt something more elemental

As I secret-lapped the blood

Dripping from the eyes of the bronze statue

Risen from the marsh’s chest

The metal-tongue sting awakened me from dreams

With a strange liquid on my fingertips

The similarity of my pink tongue to the panther’s

To a brain peaking from skull split

Kept me writing in the night

The wind snaked into my tent

Letting in the alcoholic dark

I obscured exploring what abuts it

I needed a subject to anchor my verbs

To what could be seen

The Gauze Panther took me in deeper that night

Built extensions on the wall around us

Put duct tape over every open window

So we could spend all day watching

Documentaries about the Anthropocene

Inside I became a Trojan horse

A catalyst for my green disease

Primed to be taken tongue first

By the next smoke-haunted explorer

Hungry for a new life

The panther and I sat together in our hut and fatted up

One-hundred and sixty-seven finches joined us

For the centuries of our gab session

Their little bird lungs bubbled up like stars

And in the passing time

The big bang exploded around us

We drank beers and watched through the window

The bird bones dried in the sun

With them we made a xylophone

So we could speak with our feathered friends forever

I was scared we would run out of yellow yarn to coat our mallets

I was scared we would run out of sheet music to play at their wake

I was scared the austerity program would take me over from inside

But the panther’s pink tongue kept me present

The sound of tongue lapping water from turbid pond

Bounced off the hut’s wooden walls

Changing in pitch with every shift around a corner

I couldn’t place that sound inside of anything else

I couldn’t remember why I left my family

I dropped a clean plate with silver rims at dinner

And the summer split the domestic bliss

Into forty-million shards of enamel

The silence that came over us

Lasted the next forty-million years

---

Ryan Bollenbach is a writer and musician living in Houston,

Two tigers lurk the garden, paw doorknobs open.

I climb out a window amid the panic, fill the truck

with a laptop, towel, armful of homegrown

ghost peppers, picked amid the scramble.

Tigers, all sinew and stripe, spill out the window

after me, force me back inside the house.

I latch locks, shut panes, but they keep finding new doors,

more ways in to feed the loop of their hunt.

Apparently, this is my ideal self. He, who risks

being torn apart so that he may pick the fruits

he was really looking forward to eating.

The Gauze Panther watches

My nose and tongue

Taste-testing the humid air reflexively

Suddenly I want meat

I let the ants walk up my tongue

Like I might eat them

Bend my tongue muscles

To make a sacred bench in memorial

For the late golden toad they have eaten

The ants call my bluff

Sit on my bench

Play chess

Eat junk food

Wander through the cavern of my nose

To lay in the breeze of the ceiling fan

I’ve mounted on my uvula

To not shred them on my canines

Is the struggle against instinct

I didn’t realize I hungered for

Until I passed

Into the marsh’s sunroom

And held back my every sneeze

Later I saw a program playing silently

In the screen of a TV

Floating on a pond’s algae surface

It was the Gauze Panther in youth

Stalking through the rain

They stopped to swipe a human baby

From its crib by an open window

A fresh baked pie sat steaming on the sill

In that black and white animated dream

The panther brought teeth to neck

As silent as a final Earthly wish

For bustling glaciers

The panther stopped

When that bare throat cooed ma ma

As the panther debated

The shadow of a cross

Grew long overtop the babe’s brow

If a child was swiped

And there was no one there to see it

Would that panther still a horror be?