earthworms tender_square your mind misplaced that you dreamt of them, until your feet were walking sidewalks further from home at dawn. you passed an empty schoolyard with chiseled stone above the doors reading “girls” and “boys” and you remembered, their hermaphroditic bodies swirling into your consciousness. in the vision, they were dark, insignificant ropes. you thought them snakes, then excrement, and meant to look up what kind of animal would string such shit. but then you got distracted in the dream, what with returning bonfire supplies to the house and holding two phones. (you know multitasking never works and yet you continue to juggle.) you tried to text your love goodnight with your left hand and it was difficult to link coherent words together; and as you wrote the message, you mistakenly sent out a photo of your computer with a spider to an expired group thread without explanation. back outside, you studied the pile by the porch in wonder: they were pink, throbbing earthworms. and one was uncoiling from another, leaving a massive, blind lumbricid soaking whatever the earth had to offer through its skin. 220603 ... tender_square correction: "and as you wrote the message, you mistakenly sent out a photo of your computer with a spider to an expired group thread from the phone you held in your right hand, without explanation." 220603 ... past oftentimes invisible underfoot, their slow migrations shift the quality of the soil subtly away from what was here before. their place in folk knowledge betrays their potential destructiveness, as they hitched a ride unawares across the seas with those early settlers whose rules of thumb are as embedded in the language as the worms in the ground. the crawlers worm into everything, giving the metaphor meaning, slowly changing the chemistry as they dig their silent tunnels to the north and to the west, drawing nutrients further away from the sun and the grasping roots of saplings. what changes such small things can bring if given time and space. 220603 ... kerry when she was four or five she was playing in the backyard and noticed for the first time a large stone tortoise. it lived in her mother's garden but she didn't usually spend time in the garden. she tried to pick up the tortoise but it was too heavy so she could only lift one side. when she peeked underneath she saw earthworms wriggling around like fingers. later, worms would make her scream, but at the time she thought they were cute. she got a bucket and filled the bucket with rich dark earth from the garden, and she lifted the edge of the tortoise again and plucked two worms from the darkness, and put them in her bucket. they wriggled down into the dirt and disappeared. she called them her pets. she knew worms liked moisture so she gave them water from an unlabeled plastic jug that she found in a corner of the patio, by a mop that was drying. she was very diligent about keeping the soil damp and she was sad that she never saw the worms, that they stayed hiding down in the bucket. one day her mother saw her watering her pet worms and she put her hands to her face and said "what are you doing pouring bleach into that bucket?!" 220603 what's it to you? who go blather from