Heather Sellers, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA
My neighbor the composer, in his pink parka, walks down the
path, singing. He says if he can’t memorize the words easily, they
aren’t the right words.
I hike through the woods, knowing dog ticks and deer ticks no
longer take the winter off. My friend picked thirty ticks off her body
last night in the shower. Must have hit a nest, she said.
The forest is my nest. But my ankles itch. I use but do not believe in
my friend’s homemade concoctions, her orange bug spray that is
drinkable.
Taste the black birch bark—wintergreen. Chew chew.
In the clear cut, where Cornell is trying an experiment to get good
new trees to grow, the feeling is of a dead planet.
Run has 625 definitions, the neighbor tells me, and it’s only three
letters.
But usage, I want to tell him, isn’t the same as definition.
Heather Sellers is the author of The Practice of Creative Writing, a children’s book, three volumes of poetry, Georgia Under Water (fiction), and a memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, featured in O, the Oprah Magazine and an Obook-of-the month club pick. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, The Sun, and Best American Essay. The Present State of the Garden, a collection of poetry, is forthcoming from Lynx House Press. Field Notes from the Flood Zone is forthcoming from BOA Editions.