Every autumn celebrates this city with leaves until there’s no room
to walk in the street. The pregnancy of late summer punctures the earth
into a delivery of vegetables, ripened with each turn
of the sun. They are gifts, sent up from those who live below.
I think the dead must be proud of us who still play this game of life.
Flowers—consolations for our many hurts, they are laughter felt through the dirt.

They tell me too much seriousness will make me sterile & drive the dirt
away from me—who hides in this white apartment’s palest room,
never touching the ground. The athletic ball of our world, endures endlessly, making life
in rotations of sweat & season. So much spinning makes me forget that this earth
is a dancing floor where the many partners of rock, animal, & plant so often fall below
the human foot. But they are quicker steppers & know the rhythm of their turn

better than we people of the five finger. We are so gifted with choice that we turn
the world over to the dominion of our tools & tinkering. Penetrating the dirt
for all the secrets of oil, gas, & mineral that can be rooted out from below.
It is a beautiful thing to be born & have room
made for you to walk this surface world. All across the earth,
there are babies bursting from their cabbage crowns, quaking open their parcel of life.

Death is pepper & salt for seasoning & remembering the scythe curves like the bright life
of the chili pepper’s bowed bite. When Halloween rolls over the calendar’s wheel, it turns
pumpkins in vine fields into round doors where the liminal spirit of the undead earth
swings on the hinge & walks out into our domestic everyday, dragging dirt
from its harvest grave. Thousands of jack-o’-lanterns enter the kitchens & carving rooms
of little America’s many homes, bringing up the laughing dead from down below.

Do these meek rituals, costumed in sugar & commercial ghosts, still take the soul below
our surfacing dwelling? In autumn the world plunges underground to preserve its life.
In & down, the soul curls like the bee’s larva, small & milky in its honeyed room.
Soon the skulled man of winter will rise amid our circle dance & take his turn
to lead our sway. Barren of wheat, the bowl of our hips, grinds nothing but dirt
until the spring rises in a festival of bread, thrown upwards from the sleeping earth.

When I was a child, my cheek would smear against the ground below to listen for the turn
of bean sprouts & tulip bulbs & cicadas, clawing their life out from under a shell of dirt.
We live down into that basement room, becoming fruit, flowers, other children of earth.

Zia Pollis is a writer and illustrator from Chamisal, New Mexico. She is an MDiv student at Harvard Divinity School and assistant director of the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality.