Get Free

The essentials are heated blankets
and 25 milligram edibles because I
am so few of the things I’d like to be—
fungus, great blue heron, frost
on the windshield a fruitful field
of glass—and forgetting is the most
critical element of all, because
it’s hard to come by, because
the past scribbles all over
the world, like I’ll see a tree
where some idiot has scratched
their initials, and their lover’s too,
encircled in a lopsided heart
all scarred and sappy, that’s
what the world looks like to me, lately
all I notice is impact not intention
like the idiot probably loved
their lover so much they couldn’t
help the overflow but I don’t care
because the tree is bleeding
and I’ve got the blanket up at 7
which is well past the temperature
of a healthy human body but I don’t care
about my health the way I care
about the ecosystem or my parents
which are much grander and more
respectable cares to have
and taken to the extreme some days
my continuous animal upkeep—water, again,
really?–-seems the most exquisite
selfishness imaginable
in an apparatus which radiates
harm outward from all points
of contact but really all I want
is to befriend a tree like really
know each other down to our roots
but I can’t because of idiocy
and interspecies language barriers
so I settle for weed in my blood
so I might be one-one-hundredth botanical
which is an insufficient percentage
to keep me from spiraling off
the twin precipice of futurepast—
but there are free things, I know,
free lunches, free benches, the frost
is free, and the fungus too—
in the fractal and the forest
there is freedom, and so somewhere
in me there must be freedom too,
in my corneas or radii or tibias
or any other part of me I recognize
only by diagram but there are things
about me and everything that can’t be
written but look at me! still trying

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Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Portland, Oregon. In their writing, they hope to explore human-nature relation and deconstruct binaries that cast humankind in opposition to the natural world. Their work appears in publications such as Adroit Journal, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Cincinnati Review. They can be found on X/Bluesky/Instagram @esmepromise.