Pamela Wax: “Training for My Next Life”
TRAINING FOR MY NEXT LIFE
in memory of Chip
I squat in the woods to shoot false morels,
deathcaps, destroying angels, even the fly
agaric—that red-topped fairy-tale toadstool
with little white dots—all deadly, bewitching
as hell from above and head-on. I know
bracket fungi, turkey tails cascading
from tree trunks, and coral mushrooms, spindly
arms clung to dead wood, photogenic now
after late summer rain, such colors and shapes.
Yesterday at shiva, my husband mimed
Chip lying flat on a downtown sidewalk
to photograph a bird from that angle.
So today I didn’t squat. I sprawled, a mud
angel, to commune from below, like spores.
Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have won awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. She has been published in literary journals including Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Chautauqua, The MacGuffin, Nimrod, Solstice, Mudfish, Connecticut River Review, Slippery Elm, and Rust & Moth, among others.