Ann De Forest

Ann de Forest’s writing and her practice as a walking artist explore the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared most recently in Hippocampus, One Art, Quarter after Eight, Gyroscope Review and Royal Beauty, a collection of ekphrastic writing. Ann has documented stories of displacement for Al Bustan: Seeds of Culture, examined the bonds that develop between home health care providers and their patients in the book-length photo essay, Healing on the Homefront, and has walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia with three other artists, initiating an ongoing collaboration to open up new conversations about margins and edges, the power of slow creative practice, and art as collective witness. She is the editor of Ways of Walking (New Door Books, 2022).

Lichen

drawn to distress

I gloss across bark and boulder

meaning no malice

you misread me as like you

hastening decay

opportunistic by nature

I merely seek space

to reside as intimate guest

symbiote silvering surfaces

ever alien to the limbs I adorn

unlike any other living being

fronding, fruiting so delicately

you must touch me to know

my fringe bristles

I am tougher and sharper than I look

The Locust

This severed tree, top sheared off by a hurricane so long ago I can’t

recall its name stands tall as the surrounding houses, base hollowed,

wide enough for a child to enter and hide protected. Ivy scales

trunk’s corrugated bulge to leech what life remains, taunt of green

gloss draped over grey gnarl, veiling the wizened face that stares

unblinking through my kitchen window. Immense in its decay,

unrepentant in its ugliness, our neighbor’s honey locust sheds

bark in thick, ridged scabs. Trunk furs red dust into the soil, feeds

slick thrive of worms. Grey tails startle, twitch. Camouflaged, squirrels

leap, burrow deep, stowing nuts for winter’s scarcity. In spring sticks

sprout from ruined crown, stretch, leaf green, bloom white. Tree lives

while dying, dies while living. Even as embattled wood dissolves, roots

tentacle underground and rise spiked and treacherous in the soft mortar

between my patio’s solid bricks to pierce my palm and draw fresh blood.