Three Poems - Sam Schild

Condylura cristata


tentaclad experts inforaging, ex and in haling bubbles, collected odorant molecules, aquatic olfactory sensations. feeling with 25000 Eimer’s organs, sensing what can and not be eaten. tentacle fingering this is, this isn’t in 250 milliseconds sifting to face from nose finger finders. whithers for some in finding in the dark and mud but not these proboscides with electrosensories, being the water level as rivers pass always still are. searching clouds and what isn’t with noseyes eat or be ate in sediment mounds. these universal infinites will confound, as tortuous passing winds and choosing what’s edible is necessary, still the mud, silt, and loam choke eyes away and alls left is tactilic messages. feeling leeches with sucking fingers 22 fingers bringing bubbles and snails musk to senses we don’t know. in seconds insects ripped from murky to meeting 44 teeth without touching preyer’s hands they become it and. we all eventually crawl blindly, hungry being, s

 
Folivora*


hola mi sym bio mass is I’ve minimalized being as inverted forest gathers rain with roots through the sky eats leaves from yagrumo hembra mostly and twigs. specialized multiple slow acting compartmental stomach systems process with symbiosis like this still safely jungle being hanging head to the closest ground bacteria surrounds symbiosis around in stomach leaf breakers. hair grown away from extremities easy blanketing for below 30 degrees . non-parasitic cyanobacteria, blue-green algael camouflage, lea fed fur living mites, ticks, beetles, and moths with the same tree this system la tizes with largers as leaving un ves de la semana para ir al baño y bury leaves en la misma cosa, always nourishing what nourished with that which nourished excreted, back in flourishing, not climbing but further. this, like everything, is balance, ed, or will blee, ed. sustaining this symbiosis in thick backwards fur and stomach while also perpetuating cyclical life being a piece through which living glows. yagrumo leaf blows away fluttering down there. it lands on three and two clawed footprints and loosened earth, circular seemingly, where megatherium once walked from pliocene to pleistocene, until bipedemic they shrank greatly, shaking, fled to circulate con las árboles.

*This suborder consists of two extant families of arboreal sloths, Bradypodidae, three-toed sloths, and Megalonychidae, two-toed sloths, along with four extinct families of ground sloths. Bradypus torquatus, a three-toed sloth species, is currently listed as Endangered by the IUCN.


Oreophrynella*


beginning forest sinking, streams diverging, being in the lees, dig riverings, really. los sapos su vida peligro en el Tepui, rising from rain, for rest, or is the forest falling? están ocultando. like objects moving laterally across a window scene like magma can jump tiny only rising from trees each piece evolving free. who is moving? here? there? they? with varying levels of tuberclateness and ventral coloration, time snippets on islands of old minutes from when tepuis were a sandstone plateau eaten by streams to many stones on which living grows with intimate knowledge of alone. surrounded in torches, riverfed torches, handled by tourists sporadically burning torches of forest, washing kitchen spills and keeping mucus. smaller than they invertebrate eaters, small separations become chasms and diverging branches of miniature proportion. back modified for jumping limbs on sandstone islands degenerate to at best millimetering centimeter bodies up rock. blend with the mineral plot above tropical tops, black and grey rubbley skin keep to cracks, fissures, and shadow spots. each the shore of mineralistic lifeblood shifting from small and black with four limbs adapted for crawl climbing to small black heating lumps touristas can’t handle. neither can this. can’t swim, can dance, can’t hop, can walk, clinging vertically to black pebbley faces, earthly complexioned section of genus. singing to be unseen silence, geologic structures outlined in violence, need a tissue? compliments of this

*Each species of Bush Toad is listed as Vulnerable or Data Deficient by the IUCN due to their limited ranges; each species is endemic to one or two tepuis (mesas).
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Sam Schild is a poet and social activist who currently lives in Philadelphia. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in EOAGH, Upstairs At Duroc, Unlikely 2.0, BlazeVOX, Otoliths, Alice Blue, There, Pinstripe Fedora, Anything Anymore Anywhere, Moria, Raft and Poets for Living Waters. He is an MFA candidate at Temple University in Philadelphia.