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From: Vol.03 N.01 – How Humans Engage with Earth

Self-portrait as a case of stick insects (Phasmatodea)

by Linda France

As long as I stay invisible, I am everything

you don’t know.  A casual glance won’t unpick

 

my lock – this glass case of bramble stalks,

prickly, soaked.  I’m an illusionist, arrow

 

and cross-bow, plant or insect, a specialist

at playing dead.  Woody in winter, independent,

 

I strew my fatherless eggs disguised as seeds

on the leaves beneath me.  All my girls

 

are silk, small preparatory sketches.  Blind

to night and day, they twitch and skitter

 

slowly, practise disappearing.  I’ve lost

a leg, as if I were growing into my own

 

brittle pretence.  The longer you look,

the more you’ll see – this whole case transparent,

 

crawling with what you’re certain can’t be phantoms.

Published: January 2016
Linda France

lives in rural Northumberland, UK. Her eighth collection, Reading the Flowers, arising from a tour of some of the world’s Botanic Gardens, is due from Arc in Spring 2016.  She has also just completed a non-fiction book of her travels called Botanical Road. Linda is currently Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Leeds.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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