In the lesbian garden, Antwerp
Sorting through mental images of you—
crouched over a pond
in the snow, smiling
at a slime mold on a
wet log,
stepping over a
brick wall
to find a singular
fern,
lifting dead leaves
away
from the surface of
a miniature bog,
tenderly parting the
tips of sphagnum moss
to better see
creatures hiding in rainwater—
in trying to interpret this data, I’m reminded
of a recent seminar by a botanical paleontologist
on a quest to find Fibonacci spirals
in ancient lycophyte fossils
from a bog near Inverness;
he plotted the points of leaf nodes
on a graph and traced the dots to find
rings, spirals, or an absence of pattern,
entropy. Making
meaning from images—
or, I’m visualizing the abstraction of you—
seeing metaphors for who I want you to be,
the confirmation bias of a crush.
maybe you never touched the moss,
those might have been my fingers, my
smile
in the snow by the pond in the winter garden.
Subconsciously fitting you into my pattern.
If you’re an atom, my inadequate sketch
of your orbitals can only approximate
the true motion of your electrons.
Can I thwart this
duality and hold both
the image and the concept? Once, examining
a drop of pond water under the microscope,
I found an elongate rod with microhairs,
animal or vegetable, I could not tell. I traced
the line seeking its terminus, allowing my fantasy
to bloom as I navigated the object: some minute
hydra, or a hairy beast with thousands of legs,
or the dried husk of an algal strand. I adjusted
the scope, zoomed out, and found a creature
beyond the limits of my imagination:
vernal pool fairy knob-lipped fairy shrimp.
There, can I keep them both? My dream
of a tiny pond monster, and the lyrical reality of science?
Can I have both versions of you: your flesh and mind,
and this elaborate painting I’ve dreamed of you?
The archive
Am I a bowerbird, arranging iridescent beetle elytra
around my nest to attract a mate?
A collector, combing through a rubbish heap
for shiny objects with historical value?
An archivist, transcribing the present
into journals and cataloging photographs
that will curl and fade in leather bound photo albums
on a dusty shelf they share with childhood diaries?
A hoarder of books and ephemera
that will thicken around me
until I am enclosed in a paper tomb?
Or a nest of mud and straw
like the tenements cliff swallows
build under bridges and eaves?
Frances Cannon is a writer,
editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington,
Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader
for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon
College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing
Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the
University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter
Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift
Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia
(Vagabond Press, 2016), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), Willow
and the Storm, (Green Writers Press, 2025), and Queer Flora, Fauna,
Funga (forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026). A new chapbook, Grotto,
is forthcoming with above/ground press.
