Red letters

Dear Dana,

I climbed the ridge to look for a poem & came back with supper instead: five pounds of chicken mushroom, freshly sprouted from the end of a log & dripping with moisture.

A couple of rove beetles scrambled in & out of fissures as I began breaking off hand-sized fans & nestling the boneless yellow flesh in a shopping bag. In this supermarket,

the shelves themselves are edible. Red letters on the bag said THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU Have a Nice Day.

Looking in at the bright crop, I felt as if I’d raided the crayoned worlds of first graders & lifted the sun from the top left corner of every drawing. I left a little behind for the beetles.