Kayla Heinze | Stop checking the score

I dropped my blue mug yesterday. And I am hearing that the last of the ice will melt soon. I fear we’ve lost the recipe. Those stupid pigeons I see every day. How do they manage iridescence against so much gray? The gas station sign below them. Its face that rises and falls. Neon ocean economy waves. I haven’t had the patience for puzzles in a long time. I think it started with a flat tire on Valentine’s Day—maybe this is all that the world will ever be—near the coast of Maine. A cloudy sunrise over the Atlantic.

I’ve been promised that vultures find use for even the dead. That there are billions of bacteria in my gut, and just as many stars, digesting the dark matter and passing it along. In that room of magic, I can hear the plants starting to talk back to me. You know what, some days you really piss me off. Maybe that’s it. The last straw that is also the first.

More good days than bad days says my great grandfather. More good years than bad.

Bring the Water

When I was twenty

I spent the summer working on a dairy farm

I didn’t know what else to do

I fed the calves

and they would suck on my fingers

before I slipped in the bottle

See, they hadn’t been born with a taste for rubber

but that was what we had

In the mornings I drove the back roads

My engine an alarm

cutting sharp through the sleeping fields

The workers are arriving

It’s time to wake up

Be somebody

All summer I lugged 5-gallon buckets

back and forth on the ATV

Wore knee high muck boots

and I was not qualified for any of it

West Coast Ivy League

Great Plains manual labor

A lot of miles in between

Asking myself where to pull over

I still have clothes that reek of cow shit

The same questions on my mind

You can spend years chasing profit or purpose

I’ve done it

I’ve also stood alone in the middle of miles of alfalfa

I’m not telling you what to choose

I’m just saying,

Someone has to bring the water

Fly fishing

Evoke osprey

Catch fish

How many ways

Does water flow?

Stop and look

Then go

Oceanward

Deathward

Lifeward

Onward

Big circle back

Home

Circle of eye

Bright iris

Fish come home

We go to fish

Evoke osprey

Come home

Tree of Life

Here a single leaf bulging with green and yet

so thin it’s almost transparent in the evening’s glaring

Rays running straight through its flesh as if

its existence were merely a suggestion

and I have to touch it to make sure

it’s real or maybe that I am

Where we meet, I feel the fractal bumps

Her branching veins like an ode

to the rising limbs of her mother and all

her sisters are hushing me with their soft

dance of crushing delight

A thousand wings and she can’t fly

Anywhere, but wouldn’t you want

To lie in the sun your whole life too?

Kayla Heinze (she/her) currently lives in Missoula, Montana, with ties to Minnesota and the Pacific Coast. A recent graduate holding a B.A. in philosophy, she now works in environmental communications, telling stories about the relationships between people and wildlife. To nurture her newborn poetry practice, she spends as much time outdoors as possible. You can follow her work at kaylaheinze.substack.com