CREATIVE NONFICTION

ALINA ZOLLFRANK
​

A COUPLE OF THINGS


I write poetry these days. Essays exhaust me, and running my overtime mouth causes my loved ones to run off.

I write ecstatic poetry about the beauty of this and the spirit of that, the ingenuity of this and how the brightest light beamed me up into the caress of something bigger and made me feel welcome, well, and whole. I fail.

I write critique wrapped in poetry about the plunders on this planet, of how we took and keep taking and keep breaking it all. How rivers run dry, trees go up in flames, and sinkholes appear out of nowhere. How human garbage gobbles up oceans and waterfowl. Open plains and forests, too. I fail.

I write philosophical poetry, how our wants outpace our needs and our gets outpace our deserves. How our rapid, ungodly creation – technology – widens the divide between bland and spotted, between x and y, between these and them, until – too busy blaming each other - we can’t see a crisp picture of who is actually pulling the strings. I fail.

I write woeful poetry about wars past, present, future. How rivers run red and bones dry in ditches. How one day toddlers wait for a meal that never comes, and another day for their parent to come home, and how that one doesn’t show up either. How power corrupts and truth becomes murky, and more corruption begets such-much power and more murk, more murk. I fail.

I tried to write about the light I saw on my walk today when, for a fraction of a human life, the midday sun - or was it the moon? -  yanked a cloud in front of its shame face, and the cloud’s edges incendiated like my gut does when people start wars and camouflage them as something else. When labels obfuscate. When men hide behind dusty statutes, statues, bloated laws to avoid dealing with turmoil, terror, with plain wrong. Blinded, I failed and kept stepping along the path.

A couple things, though, from that path:

A wren overhead hopped from naked, blistered branch to branch and stared me down with the entirety of its might. Then it sang.  

I encountered a group of crows. That’s called a murder. The term has been debated, and berated, in ballads and tales to exhaustion, but the murderers on this planet really don’t have wings, do they? 

The population of crows I witnessed – really, enough to fill all the aisles in a regular Walmart - perched in two tree tops along my path. Hundreds of them, huddled, in only two trees. They held a Socratic seminar and assessed me from lofty perches, their voices rising, falling, contemplating whether humans deserved to still walk by muddy ponds and whether ponds still existed and if so, during what season, and whether seasons were still a thing to be taken for granted, and whether anything, including my imminent step, could be taken for granted and actually was happening in this time and place, or whether it was just an illusion imposed by the intricacies of the great universe that our massive sugar- and protein-consuming brains have not managed to subdue like all the other miracles we were handed, celestially gift-wrapped, when we emerged on this orb. 

A few more steps, and a young man with wind-tousled, sparse hair jogged by with a reddish herding mutt, tail a stub, keen eyes. The dog, it stopped dead on the gravel trail when it noticed me, and none of the coaxing and whistling, foot stomping, “come-oneing” or leash-snapping from the owner encouraged it to take another step. It stood its ground a few feet from me on this forlorn path, paws dug in, chest braced. This, this was a moment. The crows had stopped their debacle. The wren had probably gone into hiding, and I was locked eye to eye with something that thousands of years ago had been a wolf. It knew me, this one, saw through me, and when I held out my hand, it tucked the crown of its head under my wild palm and growled, or grunted, I couldn’t tell which. The hair on its neck bristled; the fuzz on the back of my neck stood up as the sound reverberated in my chest, from my sternum to my ribs and spine and back again. The owner shook his head and said, I don’t know what that’s all about.

None of us do, I said. None of us. And I smiled at him and the creature that wasn’t his, did a one-eighty, and pounded my tired feet home with the power of my tired heart and tired lungs to let my tired fingers write a thing that’s not a poem and that may fail, like all else. But I just had to put a couple things down here.
​Alina Zollfrank from (former) East Germany dreams trilingually and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize and recently appeared in Orchards Poetry Journal, Heimat Review, SAND, Reckon Review, and others. Her essay "Mein Apfelbaum" will be featured in the Garden anthology by Wild Librarian Press, and her poem "Forces" in the Ecobloomspaces print anthology by Iron Oak Editions. Alina is a grateful recipient of the 2024 Washington Artist Trust Grant and committed disability advocate. More at: https://bsky.app/profile/zollizen.bsky.social and
https://zollizen.medium.com/