Mushrooms
By Willy Conley
They say that mushrooms and fungi are resilient organisms, highly resistant to stress. They have a fleshy resistance and can sprout overnight. They are practically everywhere yet easy to overlook. Merlin Sheldrake once wrote: “They are humble yet astonishingly versatile organisms, eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the earth’s atmosphere.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Willy Conley, a former biomedical photographer, has photos featured in the books Listening Through the Bone, The Deaf Heart, No Walls of Stone, and Deaf World. Other publications: American Photographer, Arkansas Review, Baltimore Sun, Carolina Quarterly, Big Muddy, Folio, and 34th Parallel. Conley is a retired professor of theatre arts at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. To learn more about his work, please visit: willyconley.com. @willeecee on Instagram. @willy_conley on Twitter.
Translated by Alex Niemi from Vincent Tholomé
I revel for three days in shaggy fur
I stink a beast and a bug
a cow tail whips my brow