The Bluestocking 2022-23

Victoria Hrvoic | Grade 12 What Am I? I am hunger.

I am deep and ravenous and eternal, and I know of nothing but consumption, the heady, cloying taste of unhinging your jaw and swallowing the world whole--this world, which reflects only my delirious desires. Dead leaves droop and bend, coming apart at their browning seams, curling like meat on a greasy barbecue. Plants weep, moaning and melting and sagging atop one another, their flesh giving way to the soft, rotten parts beneath, sinewy organs unspooling onto packed dirt, cracked with thirst and exhaustion. Burbles of ants travel in dark swathes of shadow, their chiaroscuro eclipsing dirt-crusted granola bars and shiny, spit-slick candy apples. Shriveled moss, limp as boiled fat, drips from trees and pools in places where the earth is wet and freshly turned and mold-spotted, obscuring the shriveled carcasses of raccoons or squirrels or rats beneath, their fur stretched thin over knobby bones, their stagnant blood pooling in their stomachs. I know these places well--these places untouched by the sun, these places wet and waterlogged and heavy with their own desire to be consumed, to be eaten, the soil exuding a heady perfume of rot, urging me, come here, luring the ringed web of my hy phae forward, beckoning me onward, desperately, like a lame dog, its tongue dangling from its drooling maw. My crown is dew-polished and shining, a star nestled in the folds of a shadow-soaked sky; my spores release in exhausted sighs, like lignin spilling from felled logs. My existence is defined by desire, my heavy body capable only of want. I am fungi, and I will never be satiated.

J