
Asha Dore
We Break up in the Forest
C. Heyne & Sam Moe
2022 Collaboration Contest Runner-Up
with me, I won’t return to mushroom patches, no hole slick rain steps, just peat, algae blooms,
forest turned inside-out, wish I had a plan, but I’ve got your heart, a map-stamp to wrist-slap
without sorrow; I am not the thief here. Freedom is foliage with no direction, red-pink bird howls,
shaking a sack of old coins, your hands take without asking, callusses and cuts from conquer;
have you ever felt fresh aloe? I am harvesting with the dull knife, you arrive with knots, nets, a
mold-patch sunflower batch, all teeth and no sand; my shelterless lover, why do you think these
birds fly in circles? Above us, a swollen moon, a popped sky, a grandmother’s rain, I’m calling
for a seance. You know nothing of survival, but I am a wilderness. I’ve got a stomach full of shock
and regolith, I’m tired of chewing up your meals, I am not a mother to you, I’m desire on the
precipice of panic, I’m overseeing a belly-up deer and I’m ready to crawl inside, to be warm again;
I learned all the spells once in a kitchen closet, I was a witch picking at grout, now I have fresh
plants and my marriage to detritus. Come searching for everything I am not, gold bones, ready for
strange power, by the time we get to the forest’s edge I’m already covered in clay, and I still don’t
know what I’m trying to say to you; maybe I’m sorry, maybe I’m flying now
C. Heyne (any/all) is a genderqueer poet from Sunrise, Florida, and resides in Hoboken, NJ. C is the recipient of the William Morgan Poetry Award and has poems featured or forthcoming in Muse/A, DreamPOP, The Oakland Review, 3Elements Review, Boats Against The Current, and Wild Roof, amongst others. Their chapbook my room (and other wombs) is forthcoming (Bullshit Lit, 2023)
Sam Moe is the first-place winner of Invisible City’s Blurred Genres contest in 2022, and the 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first chapbook, Heart Weeds, is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, Grief Birds,” is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April 2023. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.