Lisa Kelly

‘Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save The World’

-       Paul Stamets

I’m in love with the old-growth forest.
The screen has frozen on the TED Talk,
the static caption, a guru’s gift.

I watch the spinning wheel icon,
the endless O, like a dog chasing its tail,
or a ferret in a ring, then run out of similes. 

Dusty (I caught her name before stasis)
holds a green basket with a red stripe
and is looking down at the forest floor. 

Maybe I’ll watch the wheel spin forever,
the moss-covered trunks, the meditative Dusty
whose beautiful dark hair hangs loosely. 

She looks like she is going on a picnic
in the old-growth forest. I know mycelium
are beneath her feet feeding those huge firs.

 The mycologist might be a magician who has
vanished. In 100 years, who will wake and say,
I’m in love with the old-growth forest.

Lisa Kelly's first collection A Map Towards Fluency was published by Carcanet in 2019. Her latest pamphlet is From the IKEA Back Catalogue, published by New Walk Editions, and she is co-editing an anthology of poetry and short fiction, What Meets the Eye by Deaf and Hard of Hearing writers for Arachne Press.