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The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

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October 17, 2023
Rotten Wood Covered With Moss, Ivan Shishkin, 1890

Alyssa Sinclair completed a bachelor's in art history and masters…

There is a spiral back to the center of myself. The woods are thick with ferns, blueberry bushes, sassafras, thorns, poison ivy. The dirt is never packed earth but is covered in pine needles, dead leaves and beds of moss emerging here and there, plush and hairy beneath bare feet. Rocks push through soft soil blooming with lichen. I tear open a wintergreen, the smallest, most low lying plant, and fall backwards to the center of time, to when I was a child in this place. Did you know that plant smells just like toothpaste and ferns are the plant version of feathers and lady slippers turn to fairies in the night? The smell of sassafras leaves reminds me of rhubarb and root beer floats. When I drank root beer, I knew all the boulders throughout these woods, had my own complicated secret life in these trees. The ocean opens vastly beneath the bluff, the horizon is a glowing line at the base of the opaque cloudwall. I dig my toes into the loamy dirt. The towering pines sway so much around me I wonder if they might be dead or dying now— This place that was once so huge to me reveals itself as possibly, probably, fragile after all. I have been living in a wasteland of concrete and traffic. No land to romance me. Tiredness comes over me like a heavy blanket. I would like to lie down on this moss and surrender to the tickle of ferns, my longest held memories rising from my center like a warm mist.
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Alyssa Sinclair completed a bachelor's in art history and masters in creative writing at the University of St. Andrews. Her poetry, essays and hybrid work have been published by Mutha Magazine, Blueline, HerStry, and Fiction Attic Press. She is the mother to three young girls, and currently lives in Dallas, Texas.

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