atavistic ovenbird The seeds in this small paper packet are alive. I can feel them crawling over each other and gnawing at the wrapper that contains them. In the backyard I tear the package open and thousands upon thousands of terrestrial isopods pour from the opening, falling into the grass where they skitter away. Every sound is amplified. I hear their ancient bodies moving, remnants of the Cretaceous period, the clack of each carapace echoing. I hear the crunch of a million mouths masticating. I hear the typewriter tapping of their segmented legs carrying them over the mulch. I hear what grass sounds like when it bends and the music of meltwater making rivers in the soil. When the woodlice disperse I am left sitting in the scraggly turf of my winter wet yard, soggy stems of dandelions poking up from the mud, sagging towards decay. I am joined by a silent stranger who sits cross-legged and still beside me. I find I can hear his heart. Not the staccato beating of its ventricles but its overarching tenor, which resolves into a voice that speaks in my mind: “I know you,” I hear, distinct as a whisper in my ear. “I know you.” I lock eyes with the boy beside me, not yet a man but wavering on the brink. I, too, am younger than my years, suddenly contained in the body that was mine at sixteen. I can hear roots reaching through the soil beneath me. I can hear the sound two souls make when they recognize each other—the high, sweet carillon call of windchimes, the soft static of a record that has reached the end, the metronome pulse of blood moving in the carotid artery. I can hear the creak of our pupils opening wide, taking each other in, a gaze more intimate than any physical encounter. He reaches out a hand and I extend my own, stretching across space and time, rewinding evolution until all my senses sharpen and my body runs on pure instinct. Our fingers touch and my mind scatters, running on fourteen paired legs across the loamy earth. I can hear the cellular structure of fallen leaves breaking down. I can hear the squelch of searching stems pushing through the moss. I have no thoughts but one: “I know you.” 260117 what's it to you? who go blather from