MAGNOLIA TREE

HANNAH EMILIUS

Grandmother bark, gnarled and gray until the rains which speckled you green, the coils of branches, your arms aching for the sun. The magnolia tree which held me in your shade as I made potions of your green pear leaves and fuzzy flower bulbs, as I smeared pulpy pink petals over my wrists and called their fragrance perfume. Dear magnolia, did you see my grandmother through her woodheaded husband and her doomed daughters, did you see the children on children and the grown ups on grown ups, is there some of their silence in your roots? Will the rot and the axes which took you finally take us all, raging and frothing to destruction? You were the cradle of my dawn days, your trunk separated into a stairway, your body that only let me climb so high. You suffered the occult symbols I carved into your skin, you sustained my ferocity, my knees scuffed in dirt and my back speckled with black bruises, you mothered me in quiet, through tempests, through branches cracking against the roof. You are gone. You are a thing which has died as no person should die, in a storm of silver metal and men with shredding teeth, made bodiless, sawdust, sticks. I snagged a twig through the massacre. You were my family as much as the rest of them. You contained the generations of us, and all I have left of you is a twig. There are no headstones for trees. We will hold no firework funeral, no solemn kitchen toasts. I am left with the roots of mourning and my earliest luxuries: crushed petals, virid magic, a set of woody stairs from which I would never, ever fall.

HANNAH EMILIUS is a writer and scholar from Philadelphia. Her research focuses include environmental humanities, narrative theory, and the Anthropocene. She earned her B.A. in Literature and Environmental Studies from Sarah Lawrence College and is intending to pursue a PhD in Literature and the Environment in due time.