if a plant dreams - ZIXIANG ZHANG

February 14, 2025

If A Plant Dreams

the ground
into being, what does that say about farming?
a pilosus in the seam,
hearing john’s words on the radio
machine potentiating
world war iii, thinking miles to set ablaze. 
tacit
is their need for light.
i am     
perch on first waking,
bladder ridding the sapless grain; water 
tipping
out of bed,
to find the anointed pressure point. 

the first disappointment
in genesis is
the immaculate conception of a granny smith:
that the axis bifurcates 
& center
of mass surrenders
bark, to be always heart. 
blue veins shedding dendritic
discharge
underneath the atlantic, silver lilies
brought to blush
on the face
draining the existence of red— the winds
can’t breathe into being, the potassium 
aplenty.
flowers grow tall
& halt the crown that thomas dreams of 
engorging.
gamma rays dislodge the train. 
it is winter 
400 million years away, iapetus
prior to photoshop. seabiscuits 
avoiding molasses,
tricuspid tongues
from the stable licking the moonlit antorbit.  

if a thought,
to be human, spends
bilateral symmetry
in the attic, or
if a plant dreams,         
a plant              dreams a planter.

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Zixiang Zhang (he/him/his) has poems published or forthcoming in Hanging Loose, Cathexis Northwest, Consilience, Pedestal, The Nature of Our Times, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality, and others. He holds an undergraduate degree in geology from Stanford University and master’s degrees from UC Berkeley and the American Museum of Natural History. Once, he published research on brachiopod evolution in the journal Paleobiology. Now, he teaches Earth Science at a small high school in NYC and enjoys growing succulents, erging, sunbathing, and sundry. He may be active @zzverse.