Two Poems by Shannon K. Winston

The Maidenhair Fern On Her Own Endangerment
          -Inspired by the Maidenhair Fern entry on the United Plant Savers website.

The maidenhair reads her endangerment score is 52.
She checks to see if her fingers are all there. Yes,

but there is less and less land for her in Appalachia. Feeling
useless, she closes her eyes. Half in shade,

darkness shallows her. She slips her fingers into loam
and whispers more. The maidenhair knows her

endangerment score is 52, but she ignores it. Best
to pretend she doesn’t know what she’s known

for a long time. Water drips off of her: she’s unwetted.
That is, she sheds water but never gets wet. Her magic

trick still leaves even her breathless. There’s no one around—
just a silky silence she could slip on like a dress.

The maidenhair can’t believe her endangerment score is 52.
She slinks around limestone, rubs her green-black

against the mouths of caves. The other ferns might call
this indulgence, giving up. Abdication is sexier so she likes

it better, but that’s not what she’s doing: she’s easing into
the past tense. How bad will the end be? 52,

a number she whispers to the tiny spores under her leaves.
She hopes they’re tough. She promises them a moist, soft landing.

*

Flip Flops

Forget the runway, I strut up and down
library aisles in the loudest flip flops I can find.

One might think big, thick wedges would do the trick,
but the thin drug store ones are best.

They suck my heel and let out the sweetest
Thack. Thack. Flip. Flop. That usually does it:

Emily Dickinson wakes from her slumber
and I ask her about the weather. No doubt, she thinks

it’s too hot. Proust is more verbose, so I shuffle past.
Thack, thack. In summer, my feet turn black from the dye.

I stare at my heels’ impression against the rubber.
In the library, I prefer works by people I’ve never heard of.

I flip through the pages of their books.
We all try to leave our mark.

*

Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Find her here: shannonkwinston.com.