This week’s poem, Meg Stout’s “Foxfire,” finds the speaker encountering something wondrous: mushrooms that glow. I love this poem’s care with the fungi’s imagery and scientific names, how it sent me down an internet rabbit-hole of luminous mushroom images, and that it introduced me to a witchy word I never knew: eldritch, which means strange or ghostly. I especially love how this poem’s awed descriptions hold a quiet grief that also glows.
A resident of Durham, Stout recently earned an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in journals such as Mid-American Review, Barrow Street, Salt Hill and Baltimore Review.
Foxfire
By Meg Stout
Two weeks before
(what would have been)
your birthday
I’m researching bio-
luminescence:
page after page of fungi
gleaming green. Panellus pusillus,
Panellus stipticus (—string
of lights). A friend
mentions honey
mushrooms snapped
at the stalk. They look
like constellations,
he says. Armillaria
gallica. I walk
the woods at sunset
while light settles
among the leaves. Omphalotus
ringing orange around
a tree—(a blooming
gilled unease—)
saprobic habitation
of what’s gone old.
This eldritch light:
I cannot see (you) in it.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Foxfire,” copyright © 2021 by Meg Stout, appears by permission of the author.
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