Posted by Elizabeth Bush-Peel

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The novel begins with crickets. Becky Chambers’s 2021 solarpunk novel, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, follows Dex, a tea monk who longs to hear the mostly extinct cricket, on a pilgrimage through the wilderness of a post-industrial society in the very far future, or the very far away. Outside

the walls of their City, Dex crosses paths with Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot on a quest to find “what humans need.” Humankind, after all, is no longer reliant on robotic labor: Two centuries before, robots developed consciousness and left their factories for the forest (Chambers 6). The journey that follows is not only a meeting of human and synthetic minds, but a “rewilding” of human purpose for Dex, which drives them toward the text’s central invocation: to “find the strength to do both” (Chambers 10).

Chambers’s rich descriptions of comfortable objects—hot food, crisp sheets, a calming cup of tea—reinforce the novella’s frequent categorization as a “cozy” text (Harris 2025). Yet this emphasis on comfort adds to the eremitic rigor of the book by illustrating Dex’s devotion to Allalae, the God of Small Comforts, and is embedded in Dex’s function as “three parts therapist, one part confessor, and two parts bartender” (Ladd 2021). Criticism has inadequately considered the text’s urgency around negotiating human purpose as part of Dex’s monastic role. Instead, it attempts to historicize the text’s discussion of the relationship between technologized human comfort and the harsh realities of the wilderness within an industrial context that can feel anachronistic to monastic work (Arianne 2025). Yet by staging a conversation between a robot and a human with a vested interest in committed purpose, Chambers offers fruitful speculations on the relationship between function and purpose.

The companions’ dialogue revises human flourishing as a rewilding process, led by a commitment to fluidities between technology and nature. This rewilding is reconstitutive, suggesting reconciliations between humans, our technology, and the natural world through messy, sometimes injurious balance. Critically, this process is modelled through programmed and nonhuman actors, whose nonhuman priorities are also centered. In this discussion I will first consider Dex’s “rewilding” as an ecosystemic process resulting from engagement with the external world, rather than monastic contemplation. Mosscap’s role in this rewilding will then be considered as a model of neither a nostalgic and impractical virtue ethics nor a rationalist optimization but a more ecosystemic, and perhaps more plausible, way of being. 

In Ways of Being (2022), James Bridle describes intelligence—broadly defined here as the ability of a creature to take in information, process it, and apply it to behaviors or perceptions—as one of many “ways of being”: “it is an interface to [the material world]; it makes the world manifest” (Bridle 52). He furthermore suggests that “all intelligence is ecological,” only knowable from some sort of inter- or intra-action (Bridle 57). Bridle asks:

What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean—to us and for us—to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earth which our technology has sundered, and sundered us from? (Bridle 11)

Bridle’s discussion of these alternative ways of being, from mycelia to moss, emphasizes the possible misapplication of anthropocentric characteristics in our relationship to technology. It is worthwhile to integrate ecological methods into analyses of literary portrayals of alternative ways of being, not least because the collision between extrapolative futures and the somewhat less optimistic present can help us decipher how we might respond to what is coming before it gets here. After all, SF has its characteristic prescience; consider the depiction of rocket-propelled space travel in Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World (1657). A Psalm for the Wild-Built exists in dialogue with a longer tradition of “rewilding” through admission of technology into ecologies in SF. 

The positioning of technology as a route to rewilding is not specific to solarpunk, nor did it originate with the genre. Solarpunk is almost hallucinogenic in its optimism, although it has in some cases started to become more realistic. There is an infectious quality, and perhaps an unsettling idealism, in a genre that allows the reader to imagine a world in which we need not place our bets on coal or plutonium but instead on the clean comfort of sunlight. Yet similar, less idealized technological mediators and models can be found in the ecosystemically-minded generation ship of Kim Stanley Robinson’s famously pessimistic Aurora (2015), or even in the tenuously symbiotic relationship between Le Guin’s technologized Cities and Archives of Wakwaha in Always Coming Home (1985). Mosscap’s modeling of an alternative way of being is characteristic of these ecological thinkers, especially in the robot’s emphasis on decay, disposal, and disassembly. Yet A Psalm for the Wild-Built does represent the central impulse of solarpunk, which Konstantinou describes as a more imperative “ought” rather than a “could be.” This reflects an increased attention to SF’s particular responsibility in its interlocutory relationship with tech, as described by Yeliz Figen Döker and Zoya Yasmine in the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence last year. Mosscap dramatises a rewilded disposition toward nature for Dex and for the reader, but it also emphasizes the importance of this rewilding for future productive and responsible engagements between people, our tech, and the natural world. By reading these texts together, we can consider what we might learn from our own technologies, in developing our own ways of being in our ecosystem.

Dex’s travel is initially reminiscent of an offline millennial van-lifer setting off in a vintage campervan to find the coastal eddies of Point Reyes, but their quest for meaning immediately implicates the external world, not just the internal, through its environmental implications around balance and fluidity:

Oh, there were plenty of bugs–butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. (Chambers 6)

Dex’s emphasis on “ancestors” identifies their dissatisfaction as a historical issue, with adaptation to the orderly structure of the City, itself a “healthy place, a thriving place” accompanied by the disappearance of singing in its resident creatures (Chambers 6). A straightforward reading of these “happy little synanthropes” suggests a subtly sinister dimension to the City, in spite of the apparent health of its ecosystem. Yet the tension of this moment lies in the siloing “border walls”—reminiscent of Le Guin’s Wall of Anarres in The Dispossessed—upon whose conservationist function the continued function of the City and the “chaotic fields” are predicated. 

This tension is underscored by Dex’s choice of the term “synanthropes,” which emphasizes the balance between closeness and otherness: While the butterflies, spiders, and beetles are neighbors, they are not kin. The echoing call of this chirping, singing wilderness foregrounds the contrasting eerie silence of the City’s bugs. The emphasis on song in this moment evokes an oral tradition in the natural world and in doing so rewilds personal and historical expression from human actors into the broader ecosystem. The text, and ecological thinkers like Bridle, do not suggest that through this rewilding humans are discovered to be fundamentally less complex than we believe, but that our environment is capable of greater complexity than we anticipate.

The development Dex undergoes in the “chaotic fields” and the dense forest beyond is initially unsatisfying; the text ends on a wobble. Dex is unable to resolve the felt necessity of their calling with the sinking feeling that their work is unsatisfying, and ultimately decides to put aside their work in order to continue accompanying Mosscap on its quest. Readings of Dex’s surprising nonanswer to the question of human purpose have varied from an optimistic nihilism in the face of purposelessness to an alternative resolution to the works/faith line. Yet the text’s refusal is its resolution; after a harrowing journey through the wilderness, a sudden revelation of very human purpose would undercut Dex’s reassimilation into the often incomprehensible ecosystem they are now a part of. Much of the text emphasizes the distinction between healthy environments that are navigable by humans (as in the City with its “happy little synanthropes”) and the total wilderness: “[a cave] was craggy and dark, uncomfortably angled. A stagnant smell emanated from nowhere in particular… A fragile rib cage of something extremely dead lay without ceremony on the floor, a few tufts of limp fur scattered around, unwanted by whatever had crunched the bones clean” (Chambers 117). 

This emphasis on discomfort in Dex’s wilderness, which is “uncomfortably angled” and “without ceremony,” unsettles the almost excessive emphasis on comfort, ritual, and definition that pervades the novella. The text suggests that it is important, even in a utopian future where we have become reconciled to our environment, for there to be an unsettling “nowhere in particular” in which bad smells, “fragile rib cage[s]” of dead creatures, and things that “crunch bones clean” live without human structure or observation. This nonanswer becomes an ecological resolution: that it is not in nature for us to find clear and defined purpose, and that the desperate human desire for this definition is anomalous, rather than the norm. As Gautam Bhatia’s Strange Horizons review of the novel observed, the text is ateleological as part of its ecological commitments. For Dex to remain uncertain about their purpose, yet to continue onward, enacts the text’s central invocation to “find the strength to do both.” Dex is still a participant in an ecosystem, but their role shifts: from purpose-built to wild-built, from ends to means. 

This shift in Dex’s identity is catalyzed by an assertion made by Mosscap. Embedded in a love for, and wonder at, the environment more broadly, and a joy at their participation in it, Mosscap’s assessment of Dex’s dilemma returns Dex to the ecosystem without reducing their complexity. Mosscap says:

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it… You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do. (Chambers, pp. 138-9)

Mosscap’s argument locates both Dex and itself squarely alongside the rest of their ecosystem, and, more subtly, it asserts Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” Mosscap’s assertion that Dex is only an animal is not a denial of the particularities of humanity so much as it is an invitation for humans to recognize their existing participation in a larger system. Dex’s failure to reach a clear definition of purpose¹ constitutes a rewilding, facilitated by Mosscap’s intervention as an equally authoritative interlocutor within the same ecosystem. By asserting that “it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it,” Mosscap reframes Dex’s purposelessness into a subtle call to action—or, perhaps, a call to attention: to “marvel.” The claim that marveling is a necessary ecological function recalls Bridle’s framing of the purpose of intelligence as one ecological interface amongst many. In an echo of early American naturalist thinkers,² Chambers asserts that to marvel is a necessary part of human flourishing, a mandatory part of responsible human participation in our environment. To be a responsible ecological citizen, Dex must recognize that as an animal, they have “no purpose.” Dex’s shift across the course of the text is a reversion from a purpose-led synanthrope to a more expressive, attentive partaker in their ecosystem, following in Mosscap’s footsteps.

The success of Dex’s realization depends on Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” By putting substantial definitional power in the hands of a robot, Chambers confirms that the “wild-built” robots of the text are not only members of, but advocates for, the natural world.

Much of Mosscap’s ecological authority rests on its status as a “construct.” The monastic scholar whose reflective introduction contextualizes the novella asserts that robots were originally made as “constructs that could build other constructs” (Chambers 1). The term “construct” evokes a synthetic, potentially artificial quality, particularly when it comes to questions of reproduction or species continuance, maintaining in its periphery the possibility of deconstruction or even spontaneous collapse. Chambers emphasizes the anomalous, fragile, and potentially transitional nature of constructs: “we struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around” (Chambers 110). Mosscap and its robot kin could theoretically live forever if they maintained themselves indefinitely, but robots in the novella refuse the potentially empowering permanence and adaptability of immortality. Instead, robots in A Psalm for the Wild-Built reproduce by scavenging the functional parts of their deceased kin. Once no more robots function, the species will come to an end, having run the natural course of its component parts. 

Constructs must be reconstructed, recycled, and repurposed. By developing these new and yet more conventionally natural forms of reproduction, the robots imagine an effective way of participating in an ecosystem which is inspired by the time-limitedness and inevitable decomposition of its other members. Mosscap asserts that by remaining immortal, rather than recycling, the robots would be “behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sought to understand” (Chambers 94). These recycling practices position the robots as not just responsible actors within their ecosystem, but also as its historians, echoing Donna Haraway’s assertion that “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (Haraway 103). 

Robotic history in A Psalm for the Wild-Built is not transmitted through oral storytelling, nor through formal robot history texts, but through the passing-on of “remnants.” Describing remnants, Mosscap says: “I have a remnant of chairs, but I have never sat in one” (Chambers 56). Remnants lie between instinct and memory, and are transmitted through robotic component parts. In a human analogy, Chambers’s remnants are almost epigenetic. The function of remnants, to borrow a metaphor appropriate to Dex’s monastic calling, resembles the inborn architecture of the soul in Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle: structural, with all the local nuances of a city, and, likewise, traversable and signposted. Remnants carry trauma from the Factory Age, and guide the development of a robot culture despite the dispersion and solitude of Chambers’s robots, who spend most of their time alone in nature. The book itself also mimics this dynamic memory, as the natural world intervenes on the page with the inclusion of naturalistic fleurons of maple leaves at the beginning of every chapter. This symbolic infiltration of the processed paper of the book by its material precursor enacts what Connor Louiselle calls the “positive reinforcement of solarpunk” through aesthetic reminders of the natural world (Louiselle, Almanac for the Anthropocene). 

Mosscap models this alternative way of being in an ecosystem for Dex by maintaining its inherent remnants alongside the embedded newness of its capacity for wonder and curiosity. This emphasis on both present being and cultural memory reframes construction as a creative, generative activity rather than an industrial one. Compare the craftsmanship of Mosscap’s with the manufacturing origin of its original central compartment, which is stamped with “643-143, Property of Wescon Textiles, Inc,” a name whose numerics evokes any number of dehumanizing historical precedents (Chambers 93). In contrast, Mosscap’s insistence on the ecosystemic embeddedness of robots models a creative, reconstitutive way of being in the world. Rather than being constructed, the “wild-built” robots are described as “composed,” like music, with the regular rhythm of consciousness accompanied by a melodic emergent cultural memory (Chambers 93). Like the crickets Dex leaves the city for, Mosscap’s existence sings. 

Resisting the temptation towards anthropomorphizing, Chambers’s depiction of Mosscap remains resolutely nonhuman.³ Mosscap insists on being called “it,” while emphasizing the dignity of an object operating outside of recognizably human behavioral norms: “We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its… We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value” (Chambers 69). Mosscap’s is not a call for objectification, for treating humans in the same way we currently treat objects. Rather, it’s a call to recognize different ways of being in an ecosystem by nonhuman actors, a recognition that does not detract from participation already realized by human ones. Dex’s rewilding results from a recognition that humans are made up of separable and often fluid component parts, built without purpose or calling, embedded in an ecosystem of which we are not always fully cognizant but must always try to be mindful. We must continue anyway, and we must continue to marvel.

From the vantage point of 2026, this novella already feels, in some ways, like a relic, with its optimism about the potential of technology to do more than steal our data, hallucinate our work for us, and provide positive reinforcement where gentle criticism from a human might do a better job. Russell and Norvig’s seminal text on the development of deep learning gestures at the Bayesian networks they anticipated in advanced AI models. The suggestion that machines will operate on Bayesian decision-making principles neither suggests any encouraging similarity to the unpredictable texture of human decision-making nor offers an alternative model for true robot consciousness. It certainly does not do much to reassure the reader of much opportunity for kinship with our future robot neighbors. 

Yet, as Bridle observes, “We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us” (Bridle 18). SF imagines alternative ways for us to coexist with these tools, and in turn posits alternative ways in which we may ourselves be better “technology.” To recognize our own constructedness in a way that extends beyond the social world into the natural one is to challenge our specialness within the ecosystem, and to perhaps have a shot at a more collaborative relationship with our environment. We clearly have remnants of cricket song. Perhaps the recognition that it is our duty as a species to listen to it might tug the reader to the wilderness, where we could unpack our constructs from a satchel and watch them flourish.

Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either. (Chambers 135)

Footnotes

1.  Perhaps best framed in religious terms, in conversation with Frank Herbert’s Litany against Fear or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed tenets.
2.  Consider Thoreau’s essay “Walking.”
3.  Much can be said about the reassurance found in treating machines that appear to think like people, and about the lengths we will go to in order to make these objects familiar to us. Consider the Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer, the CM-5, which had to use extra computational power in order to maintain the flashing red lights that made it appear to be “thinking” (Thiel, 1994).

Works cited and consulted:

Arianne. “A Psalm for the Wild Built: Analysis & Reflections,” Letters from Ari, Substack, 21 June, 2025. 

Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, Vintage Books, 1997.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Function, 2022.

Haraway, Donna. ‘4. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’, Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

Harris, James. ‘A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT and A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY by Becky Chambers’, Classics of Science Fiction, 18 November 2025.

Hendlin, Yogi Hale. ‘Compost modernity!’, Aeon, 10 February 2026.

Ladd, Christina ‘A Psalm for the Wild-Built Review: Find the Strength to Do Both’, Geeklyinc, 14 July 2021.

Konstantinou, Lee. ‘Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction’, Slate, 15 Jan 2019.

Magnasson, Andri Snær. Love Star, 2002; translated 2012 by Victoria Cribb

Russell, Stuart and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, 1995.

Scott, Spencer. ‘Solarpunk: Refuturing our Imagination for an Ecological Transformation’, One Earth, October 5 2025.

Thiel, Tamiko, “Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2: Design Legacy,” 1994 (Digitized).

Wagner, Phoebe and Brontë Christopher Wieland (eds.), Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures, West Virginia University Press, 2022.

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Posted by Kuzhali Manickavel

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Hallo strange fam! You are all so gorgeous that it’s not even funny. Today we are going to be listening to a story from a show called Nightfall, that ran from 1980 to 1983 from the good old CBC. So bear with me a little here. I used to be Canadian. Meaning that I was born and raised there and moved to India in my early teens. One thing I remember about my time in Canada is that as a country, we either made really awful stuff, or really cool stuff. There was no middle ground. Like there’s Informer by Snow. And then there’s the movie The Twentieth Century which is just so bafflingly amazing that it is obviously Canadian. I mean maybe that’s just me but anyway. For me, Nightfall is one of those really good shows. Often times, I would be listening to an episode thinking it was going to be like Inner Sanctum or something, and later I would be like why am I listening to this in the night when it is dark. This intro is already too long and probably didn’t make any sense. So without further ado, here is Love and the Lonely One from CBC’s Nightfall. Let’s go!

https://archive.org/details/NightfallUPGRADES

*

So there’s a man teaching some medical students about cutting cadavers and he made a joke but I didn’t understand it

Everyone’s laughing a lot though

I doubt if it was really that funny

This story has already set up its dialogue and back story so nicely

So two college dudes, Freddie and George, are carrying the body of an auld woman with a terrible mouth

They are going to use this to prank some girl who stood one of them up

Oh you silly boys

They have now dragged the corpse to the girl’s door and now they will probably run away quite fast

Wait! Creepy music!

Instead of running away so fast, Freddie is staring at the corpse

Freddie says that the corpse’s mouth was green and it was staring at him whaaaaaaaaat

This is what we came for you guys

Digging the synth music at the scene changes also

Now we are at the medical college hospital? And Freddie has suddenly been called in to assist with something. George, on the other hand, is going skiing because his priorities are different.

They are trying to revive this body but it is not cooperating

You know why? Because it has a huge hole in its heart and its face is dark purple

I’m not a doctor, but I would say such a person is dead. That is just my opinion though

Phone is ringing but since no nurse is around, Freddie magnanimously answers the phone himself

Oooh Freddie has a secret admirer who is calling him. He thinks it might be a prank though.

How did she know that Freddie would answer the phone? Dun dun dun!

The secret admirer has the perfect voice you guys

This secret admirer is bamboozling Freddie with her words

He has now promised to meet this admirer at the same place they dropped off the corpse

So a mysterious lady has asked you to meet her at a place where you dropped off a corpse. NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN I GUESS

Freddie has asked how she knew where to find him, pertinent question fam, and she says the guy next to you told me only the guy next to Freddie IS DEAD NO BIG DEAL

Now Freddie has come to meet the mystery lady and they are in some room? And there’s like twenties music playing? And she looks great apparently.

The lady has referenced banks crashing, so I guess she thinks it’s the thirties? I don’t know anything

We all know this is going to end badly for Freddie but right now, he’s dancing with a pretty girl and they’re having champagne and they seem happy

Now they have stopped dancing and he is asking what her hopes and dreams are

Feel like there is a rule somewhere that one should never ask the undead what their hopes and dreams are

Now I think they are going to have sex

FREDDIE DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD

Well, to be fair she said she was going to go change into what she really is.

That’s probably not a good thing

She just said that’s what you want, isn’t it? NO THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT FREDDIE

Freddie is saying stuff like when you meet someone special you just kinda know and we all feel bad for Freddie right now

OMG THE LADY SOUNDS LIKE SHE’S DECAYING WHAAAAAT

As we said before, DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD FREDDIE

Freddie has screamed and SCENE!

So I guess Freddie is trying to tell George about his ordeal but George is laughing

He has figured out that the ghost lady was the corpse lady

George is really, really laughing

Well whatever the boys are now going to sleep

None of this is going to end well for Freddie

Which seems unfair, considering that it was George who came up with the idea, no? Isn’t it?

Some twisted twenties/thirties music is playing and I have to say it’s uncomfortable fam

George is going skiing today and Freddie is staying back to study

It’s the phone DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE FREDDIE

It’s the corpse lady who wants to meet again

Corpse lady just said that they belong together. Which is discouraging when this kind of sentiment comes from the undead.

Bro is now having insomnia

There is now a knock at the door

Surprise! It’s the corpse lady!

She’s like you took me from my bed you can’t send me back now but again this was George’s idea no?

Is Freddie having second thoughts about this whole ‘don’t have sex with the undead’ thing?

Fred is actually considering this whaaaaat I mean the logistics alone Freddie

Maybe this isn’t about sex at all, maybe the corpse lady just wants to hang out.

Freddie just opened the door and the corpse lady is standing there with no clothes on.

Welp. There goes Freddie.

Now we are back to that same cadaver class like from the beginning

I think they have opened the cadaver freezer and found Freddie inside.

Oh, the corpse lady and Freddie are together in the freezer I think.

And they look so happy. Aw

*

That was pretty good fam! I enjoyed it a lot, a typical, strong Nightfall story. I thought the lady who was the corpse did a particularly good job and it is sweet that we got a happy ending here. I did expect the story to go another way because I thought it was going to be like any other undead story. But I am very happy to see that it wasn’t. For the next few weeks I am tempted to go through some of the other stories here. Frankly, they are a nice change from the usual OTR shows which, to be honest, are often on the sloppy side. So do join us next time when we will look at another show from Nightfall. Bai dears.

Columns Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

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Posted by IM Shulman

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I unzipped my skin and all my bones fell out. This was not by design: I meant to loose my soul from the forest of my lungs, unfurl its banner past my legs and my toes and there, in the blameless earth, find a new alchemy for living. Instead—bones. Ribcage smiling across the grass. Femurs and tibias and clavicles in their wet dynasties between dirt, between roots, between the fern crawling its quiet way through this lower heaven.

You must not let them recollect me. Sing to the wind until it remembers its promise: The only law is motion. The only scripture is change. I have no more excuses; metacarpal tumble, they are lost to the loam. Only this reason remains: I wanted motion. I needed change. No wind can reach the cage they are crafting. I was staring down the barrel of stillness—the bleak gargoyle, its dazzling gunpowder, those months when only we were hysterical. Everyone else watched us from the boiling sea. Policies fell upon us, hard rain. Every headline a new lash of laughter: can it get worse? I decided I would not bear witness; they would strike no pillar of salt from me.

I remanded myself back to nature. I slipped open my skin and out came the bones. Perhaps this is for the better. The flesh has always sat strangely but the bones never betrayed. Freed from the burden of bearing, they do now as they always dreamed: kiss the moss, kiss the leaves. My bones are conferring with the earth. My bones are considering the vagrant seeds. They too wish to grow of themselves more selves, coccyx chrysalis unspooling into spines, into shoulder blades, into the steep curve of a jaw, a jewel, jumbled bouquet of geometries never to be resolved. A forensic mystery: did these bones belong to a man?

What is a man but bones and bones and bones, black wind pushing through a tunnel. This is what I learned through the unsteady years of needles and tubing and scars corded across my thickening flesh, fat recanting its vows of softness, settling against the pelvis in pouting shelves. Muscle is malleable but the bones remain. They are accustomed, now—to molting, eschewing, stripping my self from myself until I am more. Here is a riddle: what grows happier the more you take away? I never knew such joy until that day. Emerging from that blissed, undreaming haze and realizing, at last, I was free. I was only a box of pieces, but those pieces were not me.

You must not let them regather me. Not even the heap my bones have left behind. Pour my eyes into the river. My tongue, threaded through the trees. What must you tell them, when they ask where I am? Listen and listen, even the earth will not say:

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