Each stem bears only one flower
Monotropa = Greek for one turn
.
Over 2,000 Instagram posts to
Monotropa Uniflora—
skeletal, turning their necks down
.
or away
.
from terror
There’s just the going through—the holocaust
survivor says—discovered broken-backed
but alive among corpses—once
a dancer—
.
A night of dreams, the word
elocutions repeated
.
I walk behind you into Smithgall
Woods/ among mountain laurel
cupped blooms flushing
not our skins
but the skin of our skins
.
a voice in the dream
interrogatory: whom
did it change outside
the sphere of influence?
.
It being the woods?
It being how we came here?
It being the risks we took?
.
Not fungus, not reliant on sun, not with color
nor love for it,
not undulant, nor weak
.
interior, reliant
on nearby mushrooms
and trees –
.
Forced to dance for her bread
she shared it with the other rubbed-
away girls—eyes moons of
suggestion
.
It = all that we’ve used up
housed & bending corpse
heads to the ground
.
each mouths sensation sent
through nerve-like filaments
a radical mutualism
.
To stop was to be shot
on the Death March
Mauthausen to Gunskirchen
35 miles—
.
when
her spine broke—
the girls carried her
.
by November, you were gone
.
What disappears that we didn’t invoke
before?

Amy Pence is a full-time tutor in Atlanta where she’s taught poetry-writing at Emory University and in other workshop settings. Her books include Armor, Amour and [It] Incandescent from Ninebark Press, and the chapbook Your Posthumous Dress: Remnants from the Alexander McQueen Collection released by dancing girl press last winter. Find links to other work at www.amypence.com.