BUTTONBUSH

by Petra Kuppers & Orchid Tierney

button:

beauties. bush sweet blobs     
and switches. coronas            
belt from bold white 
  
knuckles. nicked names          
like bobbin cushions               
twisted cords wool reels

cotton spindles                       
cosmos in a trinket                 
box. braided from dark

duck leaves and arson           
         toolkits on river
                 banks. bucks buck for

knot nutlets a kind of             
tax account for fruit
ribbons and rivets                  

common rations for
cartoon deer and cruel                      
animal felons 

meander:

  search the cues and cures
decoctions of bark, peel, hark
water boil strain

wash for oculorum dolore
lid lash pink brain fenced
rove the country

anti-inflammation and rheumatism
border control
acute astringent

lever flushed skin
febris remedium
thermoregulatory set-point

cortex dentium pain release:
bone-like cavity flare ascent
here is your order. Set.

Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil (Wayne State University Press, February 2024). She teaches at the University of Michigan, is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and is an Emeritus Fellow of the Black Earth Institute.

Orchid Tierney (she/her) is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the author of a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System, 2019) and the chapbook looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023). She is a senior editor at the Kenyon Review.