A Perfect Summer Day | Cassandra Whitaker

Once I fell into an oak so wide and tall 

a town could live inside the trunk, so thick 

and dense and open to all, the trunk, 

and when I fell into the oak all my mirth ballooned

and carried me through the fibrous body 

of the trunk, and into the limbs I rose, happy 

to be a lark branch, so useful and kind 

to those unlike me and quick to mind 

the mind of me, which being an oak tree grew 

green and stretched towards the sun 

which did not look like the sun, to me, rising 

through the oak, carried by happiness, instead, 

the sun appeared as a pulsing heart and all I saw 

pulsed with heat, which filled my happiness

with sleep and carried me sleepily into night, 

and into night I went and wended through the root 

and returned softer than a forest floor, and as wise.

Cassandra Whitaker (they/them) is a writer from rural Virginia. Their work has been published in or is forthcoming in Foglifter, Barrelhouse, Fourteen Hills, Kitchen Table Quarterly, The Little Patuxent Review, Evergreen Review, & The Comstock Review. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle.