I thought a lot about trees while reading john compton’s latest chapbook. Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” was running through my head, but in the style of the soundtrack for Hereditary. Visions of arboreal shadows and sapling harbingers and brittle bark crumbling between blood filled my mind and ran like roots against my jaw.

i use these poems & plant
them inside me i push their rituals
through my pores & feel them
moving like centipedes between
layers of muscle and bone.

john’s book surrounds you in a forest of cylinder-esque works that ask you to reexamine your relationship to the skin of your body and the hair follicles of your history. One poem addressing the narrator’s grandmother ends on the line, “they fuck & / call it a manifestation of church.” Eventually the crucifixion bleeds through (“once you learn my tongue trusts / you you learn nothing will stop you”) to become its own god (tender petals / push lips into a vase. / decay, give me a gift.”). 

We’re back at trees and splintered branches again. Circles on tree stumps are either indicators of time or nooses left by hanged ghosts. In this book john grieves and riots and presses sap into open wounds; he writes of violence towards queers, a dying world, of being stuck in traffic and burying beloved pets. 

                              we lather walls 
until horizontal zebra stripes appear.
we ruin every good thing
hoping to stop death
before more of our children are killed.

There’s nothing quiet about this collection, and yet it isn’t raucous either. The voice is simply everywhere, no matter where you turn your head to look. Maybe the voice will follow you home, unseen until you hear a gaunt twig scratching prophecies into your windowpane at night.

i will seize your city,
plant words
in every inhabited region
& let a forest
with my gay poems
breed into a colossal library
no world has ever known.

Elena Sichrovsky (she/they) is a queer Austrian-Taiwanese writer currently living in the Netherlands. This year her work has been published in Ninth Letter, Barren Magazine, fifth wheel press, Mythaxis, and is forthcoming in Baffling Magazine, The Deadlands, and Strange Horizons. You can follow her on Twitter @ESichr or read her work on her website www.elenasichrovsky.com