Bent Twigs
Kathryn Kulpa
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The news might have come in the daily paper, but who read papers anymore?
Maybe there was an announcement on the radio. A bullhorn buzz: THIS HAS BEEN A
TEST OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM. HAD THIS BEEN AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY, YOU WOULD ALL BE DEAD NOW. But who paid attention to announcements? Who listened to radio? Who watched TV?
Media was still produced, and we still consumed it. A curated feed. Not a nation of viewers, gathered around one screen, mesmerized, to watch a moon landing or the death of JFK, hands meeting as they hunched over a pan of Jiffy Pop.
Media evolved. We evolved too, each in our own bubble.
Was it because we were lazy? That was what some people said. Survivors from an analog world of dial phones and typewriters. We didn’t listen to what they said. They were echoes of an earlier era, signals that bounced and jammed, pinging off the edges of our understanding like pinballs in an old arcade game.
As the twig is bent, the tree will grow, someone said, and somehow we all heard it. Or maybe we all said it. All of us twigs, bending, rooting. Searching for a way to connect. For roots that reached deep, twined together, formed networks.
Not cable. Not wire. Something newer, and much older.
Those kids! They don’t even leave the house anymore, the old folks said. Won’t move their ass. Just sit there like rocks, waiting for everything to be delivered.
They were close, but didn’t know it. We weren’t rocks. We put forth roots. We grew. We grew beyond houses, beyond roads. We overgrew cars and cell towers, superstores and shipping containers. We grew green and wild and tall. We bloomed. We blossomed. We sent out spores. We pollinated. We connected, an ocean of green.
Fires couldn’t shrink us. Tanks couldn’t topple us. We stand, oak and birch, chestnut and pine, maple and cherry, giant sequoia and flowering dogwood. We stand, a cool canopy where birds nest.
We didn’t save the world. We became the world.
Sometimes we tell ourselves stories about other beings we might once have been. About a choked, burning planet we might have lived on. We are aspen, and we quake. We are willow, and we weep. But we are elm, and we are slippery. We shake our branches, slip off those old tales of doom.
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Kathryn Kulpa lives where Massachusetts meets Rhode Island and writes where poetry meets prose. She is the author of For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press) and A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press). Kathryn’s work has been chosen for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and the Wigleaf longlist and appears in BULL, Centaur, Flash Frog, HAD, and Moon City Review. Find her at @writesofkathryn.bsky.social and kathrynkulpa.com.
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