Being Human, by Julene Waffle

Being Human

after Tehuantepec, Oaxa, photography by Graciela Iturbide (Mexico) 1985 (Click here to view.)

We are the fish of     the world.
We eat and     are eaten.
Cranes pick       our teeth
and leave the strings         of our naked jaws 
to gnaw     the grass 
until they become     the earth.

We pick raspberries from uncut     canes
and share     bare roots for planting.
We eat the sweet flesh        and piths 
of those empty-bellied     bodies.

We are full-bellied roses frost-burnt,         drooping 
and tight blooms coiled     pink and white, 
pulsing       into winter.  
We are rusty        wombs     swimming, 
umbilicus     singing, 

We are sedum,     tight-packed pink in summer,
Nautilus, coriolis-spiral under     first snow, 
thawing     under last, lifting through the         melt.

We are the crane again     plucking fish like flushed berries,
the sky--blue, black,         blushing--
the trees lifting     in mist,
roads crawling     away, dollhouses full 
of furniture but empty     of children,
ozone after rain, company     waiting, 
a fiddler's broken         string,
and all the earth         is a singing companion.

Julene Waffle

Julene Waffle, a graduate of Hartwick College and Binghamton University, is a teacher in a rural NYS public school, an entrepreneur, a nature lover, a wife, a mother of three boys, two dogs, three cats, and, of course, she is a writer. She finds great pleasure in juggling all these things and managing to seem like she has it all together.. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, NCTE’s English Journal, La Presa, The Non-Conformist, The Ekphrastic Review, and Mslexia, among others. She was also published in the anthologies Civilization in Crisis, American Writers Review 2021, and Seeing Things (2020), and her chapbook So I Will Remember was published in 2020.  Learn more at www.wafflepoetry.com.