Evolution of a Prairie Spring by Kirstian Lezubski

Evolution of a Prairie Spring

In March when the days stretch swollen-jointed fingers through the grey seed hull of winter sun,

I drag myself from the cold cavern of my bed to groom nits from thin-veined leaves.

Everything’s desperate or dying these days. I lost the big monstera to desiccation, & also

I can’t recall the last water I drank from a glass, not kneeling, like a beast, to lap from the tap.

Enough time has passed that I need a magnifier to spot the yellowing nymphs who suck sap

from the underside of my houseplants. Black with wings is for adults, & by then it’s too late.

Thrips wake with the spring, with the grass under grey pockmarked banks of snow & burnt-out mattress coils napping in back lanes. Potholes, like frozen butterflies, are damage that can never be

Undone, only fixed in place on corkboard turning lanes or tipped into sinkholes of cat-grit litter,

asphalt spall & salted meltwater, all those blinking terrors blocking traffic, seen from space:

lines of ants backed to the city’s edge, industriously furious, circling the drain of outlet mouths

beneath the river’s cracked-glass turpentine surface, atop which the province inches forth three

Green-armed grenouilles tasked with undamning us all. Later, once the water has receded into

farmer’s fields & Grand Forks & the floodway’s wrinkled shut, once summer’s leaked light into

Our window cracks & every surface parking lot to fry us like dogs alive, I’ll still sit inside

a sweltering noon & cut kitten-bit crisps like green & brown construction paper. Damaged leaves

Still phosphoresce, stomas still breathe, huffing golden-skinned moisture some second-hand

contagion high. Sheafs of wheat blown into mushroom clouds. The pests eat at my patience,

& yet I crouch, meticulously plucking them one by one to crush between my nails, lice to eat at the edge of reason, for what is left for me but to cultivate some small persistence in all things:

swell of life, subsistence sustenance, instar collapse.

Kirstian Lezubski is from Winnipeg, MB in Treaty 1 territory. She is a queer, neurodivergent mother of two and a recovering academic with an MA in Cultural Studies. She draws upon her experience living with Generalized Anxiety Disorder in the Anthropocene and her work in local governance to inform her writing.