Metal Tree

Heavy Metal by Alan

The dude dug the stuff so hard that he lived it, man. He was totally and completely in it, like full on. Sucked into the vortex, bro. Heavy metal kid. That’s what they called him. He lived right over there. There’s his yard. That’s the Pacer his parents got him. First car. There’s where he first split his head open. There’s where he lit fireworks off of Esty’s ass. And there. That’s the tree. It’s rad, bro. Never seen nothing like it before. His parents flipped when they woke up to it one morning. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, dude, only totally metal. The story is he totally climbed it, and people haven’t seen him since. He had his headphones on, someone said, and this weird psyched look on his face. In the zone. Feelin’ it. Taking off, man. He just took off. He lived the dream, dude. That shit was like a dream, man. Shit, I’d go, if I didn’t have work and shit. You know. Whatever. Fucker is probably hard to climb anyway.

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Colloidal Silver by Johanna

1. The liquid silver came in like the tide, slow enough to go unnoticed except for the shifting boundary of shore line or, in this case, forest line. 
2. The forest had been dying from the beetles and blue stain fungus long before the wave of silver splashed against its conifers. With no known cure, the people in the village below could only watch as each year more and more trees browned from beetles furrowing beneath the bark. 
3. The Pine Beetle used to be an important part of the bio-system, killing off dying trees to make room for new growth. With warmer winters, they had become a nuisance, sticking around longer than necessary, feeding off healthy trees. 
4. Even still, it was the instinct of the villagers to try to save the already dying forest from being completely coated in a film of silver. How would the plants and animals survive without nuts and berries, flowers and chlorophyll?
5. But how do you clean trees of liquid silver? The elders suggested baking soda which was good at cleaning most anything, but no matter how much they scrubbed the silver trees, the liquid only mutated, shifting beneath their brushes so that when they were not touching it, it returned to the space it previously filled.
6. The villagers, exasperated and hopeless, could not deny that there was something beautiful about the way the pink light reflected off mirrored bark at sunset and the swishing noise their boots made when they walked through it.
7. What could they do? They decided to start marketing their town as a tourist attraction. Come see Silver Forest. Be enchanted by Silver Forest. See yourself in Silver Forest.
8. But soon they noticed, just as fast as the silver came in, it began to ebb out until it had run down the mountainside, into the river and was gone before scientists even had a chance to speculate where it had come from.
9. It must have come from the mountains like a spring welling up from deep within the earth. Silver ore must have heated up within the core or while suspended over an underground lava flow. All interesting theories.
10. Weeks later, the villagers and scientists alike noticed something else. The blue stain fungus and the beetles had disappeared completely. The silver worked like an antiseptic and cured the trees. Even those dying recovered. 
11. It was a miracle. 

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Flash by Lyle

Such an ERECTION!                 Ahhh —
           
                                   skyward. Rise. Tear at the sky. Rend at the pornographic clouds until they are mere misty tatters that fall to the ground in sprinkles. Gouge at the moon like metal capillaries. Sparkle in the sky like...

Sparkle? Shine? Contract. Such a tumescence… petrified? putrified? Into... metal? And now has divided and split in multiplicity, the opposite vacuity of earthquakes. And I am buried in the ground. Now I see that the clouds are much, much higher than I supposed. The blood is all gone from my brain and I sink farther into the ground under the weight. Until there is nothing left of me. Nothing left of me. Me.

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Walden Revisited by Forrest

Should one take Nature too hard on the surface of things signalled, the grotesque he wrote of while frightened of babies, would it reflect back in synapses, in the varnish of entrails or embryonic fluids? I think it would grow instead from the “I” I have desposited here, in you; and now seeing yourself extend back into empty skies, part and particle, you understand what I could not while settling into my notes, waiting to write something you will never see me in—a house, for instance.