myxogastria ovenbird In the kitchen, in a dark, cool cupboard, in a ceramic bowl with a fitted plastic lid, innumerable lives have sprung from accidental agar. What slick soup was left on the glazed surface, what bacterial remnants? I wonder if god felt this way when his childhood games summoned microbes from sediment. Behold! An entire colony of plasmodial slime mould, gathered for a conference or concert or graduation (who can tell?), each hair-like stalk topped with a black eye smaller than a period, staring up at me, surprised to be discovered and exposed to the light. Why are you here? I demand, lamenting my own failure to properly sterilize the surfaces from which my family eats. There is no answer. I suppose because slime moulds can’t be expected to solve the mysteries of the universe. They can no more explain their existence than I can explain mine. Why am I here? Me, a blight on the earth that happens to have harnessed the power of speech. Maybe I’m just an off-shoot of someone’s spilled milk, the progeny of bread left too long on the counter. Into the sink goes the slime mould. Into the dishwasher goes the bowl, which was their whole world. I circle the drain of my own unlikely existence. Let me pull the lid back over myself. I don’t yet want to be found. 260616 what's it to you? who go blather from