Shake Out a Blanket and
Watch What Worlds You Release
by Brianna Noll
The deer’s been overtaken
by the forest, her mossy
underbelly its own habitat
threatening to green the host’s
mottled pelt. This is not like
the carcass some wild thing
dragged into and abandoned
in my yard when I was a child,
though it, too, was teeming
with life. No, this is living
upon the living, lovely and
dangerous. It’s easy to forget
when you live in a city how
incessant nature’s sprawl.
We watch as a group of four
women drill a hole in concrete,
but we’re not thinking about
what lives underneath. Here
we think about work—not
the work of biology but labor,
which has its own sprawl.
As with anything alive,
the aging of labor is visible
yet somehow still lively.
If we sit back too long
the forest will creep
onto the freeway. Idleness
is green, so we must never
sit. It’s easy to be bewitched
by stoicism when every day
brings new means of feeling small.