Nancy Naomi Carlson – Innisfree Poetry Journal

No Animals Were Harmed

to Write This Poem

1.
Not every truffle tree bears fruit
from its union of root and spore,
but the best bets are hazel and birch.
Love is always conditional.

2.
An arranged marriage.
Gestation can take more
than five years. What happens
underground stays underground
with no guarantee of success.
Black or white, it’s binary.

3.
It’s hard to harvest hazelnuts
from a truffle-yielding hazel sapling.
The same pH in the soil won’t work.
You have to choose.

4.
Intention is transcendent.

5.
It’s a finicky process.
Record heat, flooding and drought
drive up the price.
There’s always a breaking point.

6.
Nothing grows from old trees.

7.
I’ve never held a truffle to my nose,
inhaled its musk, pungent as a man’s—
same pheromone found in male pigs’ spit.
Is it really an aphrodisiac?

8.
Don’t rely on sows to sniff them out.
They can’t be trained to control their urges.
Can you blame them?

9.
Italian water dogs do the job
just fine, lured by milk bone treats,
though beware the snail bait
strategically strewn in forest dirt
to knock out the competition.

10.
Dead dogs tell no tales.

11.
No charges are pressed
for fear of payback by slashing
tires and exploding pickup trucks.

12.
Maybe evidence that humans and fungi
share more than a common forebear.

[It’s hard to trust what wants us dead]

It’s hard to trust what wants us dead,
like air, which can churn into cyclones.
Want may be too strong a word.

Still, I avoid tunneling in the ground
or turning my back on a smoldering fire.

Should we trust what wants us dead—

paths darkening after the bend;
mushrooms toppling holy empires?
Want may be too strong a word.

Even the water on which our lives depend
may pull us under from deep-end dives.
Trust me. Everything wants us dead:

antibodies and aliens spiraling in blood,
our bodies caught in the crossfire.
We strongly want for some word

to trust so we’ll never be double-crossed—
especially by our greatest desires.
Want can’t be too strong a word.
In the end we trust what wants us dead.

Nancy Naomi Carlson won the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Author of fifteen titles (ten translated), her poetry and translation books have been reviewed in The New York Times. A recipient of two NEA translation grants, she’s the Translations Editor for On the Seawall. Piano in the Dark (Seagull Books, 2023), a “Must-Read Editor’s Choice” from Poetry Daily, is her third full-length collection. Her translation of Djiboutian writer Abdourahman Waberi’s When We Only Have the Earth (University of Nebraska Press: African Poetry Book Series) arrives in March 2025.

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