I began kneeling because something in me had gone dim.
Not argument—
not grief—
a smaller failure.
Like a root severed
without the tree noticing.
Behind the building
a strip of earth persists.
Weeds. Bottle caps.
Soil the color of steeped rust.
I place my hands there.
Heat answers.
Not symbol.
Temperature.
The ground inhales.
A widening—
subtle as damp spreading through cloth.
Beneath forests, they say,
fungus threads the roots together.
Sugar passing root to root.
Warnings traveling without sound.
A grammar without mouth.
I press my ear down.
Friction.
Root against stone.
Ant mandibles working.
A soft undoing.
Something always becoming edible.
We were promised spectacle—
fire walls,
cities swallowed whole.
Instead—
a swallow does not return.
The bees are fewer.
The summer tastes faintly metallic,
as if the sky has been filed down.
I name what remains.
Clover. Moss. Dock.
The names are small shelters.
When I water the leaves,
they release green—
sharp, immediate—
a scent like being forgiven
by something that never accused you.
Water enters.
No negotiation.
I lie down.
Spine to slope.
For a moment
I am not above.
Not outside.
The soil does not measure my use.
It does not ask for proof.
It holds the rot,
the roots,
the failed seeds,
my uneven breath—
without hierarchy.
Intimacy is not possession.
It is remaining
until the distinction blurs.
Ants carry their dead
in processions more disciplined than ours.
Fungus continues
its silent commerce of sugar and alarm.
Somewhere trees are warning one another
about beetles moving north.
North moving south.
Heat moving inward.
The sky does not forgive us.
Still—
beneath this thin layer of managed ground
the threads hold.
I press my palms down.
For a moment
I cannot tell
whether I am touching
or being touched.
The soil does not promise survival.
It does not promise redemption.
It offers entry.
And entry is enough
to make the silence porous.
Notes
“Understory” responds to ecological collapse not through spectacle but through intimacy at ground level. The poem turns toward soil, roots, fungus, and insects as sites of relational intelligence in an era of accelerating species loss. Rather than imagining transcendence, it explores proximity: what it means to kneel, to listen, and to participate in more-than-human networks that persist beneath visible decline.
The mycorrhizal exchange between roots becomes a model for non-extractive intimacy—connection without possession, warning without hierarchy. In a time when collapse is often narrated as catastrophic event, the poem attends to its granular manifestations: the absence of birds, the thinning of bees, the metallic taste of summer air. Intimacy here is not sentiment but sustained attention, and healing begins not with mastery but with remaining.
About the Author
Elena Rotzokou is a writer and scholar based in New York City. Her work explores lyric attention, ecological relation, mental health, and contemporary forms of estrangement. She is currently completing a PhD in English at Columbia University.
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