What is Nourishment for Any of Us?

by Jessica Pierce
 
We have a yard full of drifting dandelion
DNA because I read that pollinators
depend on them. Though, when I went to verify
this internet truth, I read that dandelions are more
like snack food instead of true sustenance.
So now I’m making a list of native plants
to buy that are larval hosts and
provide all of the amino acids
bees could possibly need: blueblossom,
ocean spray, Pacific ninebark,
serviceberry, red-flowering currant.
Down the hall, my children fight over legos;
I consider yelling that there are children
without toys and none of this matters if
the bees don’t make it!

              —         —         —

A single mallard preens on the tennis court.
My son leaps from the slide and my daughter spins
and spins and then they’re both running ahead
of me, and I wish I could understand
how time doesn’t exist for photons because
they are born at the speed of light. The instant
falling electrons cast them out is
the instant energy absorbs them.
Are we blinking out of and into
and out of existence right now? All
of us, the bees, the dandelions,
the blueblossoms, my children, the mallard
who may be here tomorrow or may be
in the dark belly of a fox?
There is light and there it’s not and I
don’t call to my children as they run
and they don’t look back, not
even for a split second.

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Jessica Pierce is a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominee. Her poems are in many magazines including Bellingham Review, JMWW, Tar River Poetry, Euphony, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Northwest Review. Nimrod International Journal selected her as a finalist for the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She was a finalist in the 2020 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from CALYX Journal, a finalist in New Ohio Review’s 2019 NORward Prize for Poetry, a finalist in the 2019 MVICW Poetry Contest, and the recipient of a 2019 MVICW Poet Fellowship. Her debut collection will be released in fall 2021 by First Matter Press.