Climbing Teapot Hill

Your whole future, your whole past, we tell each other, can slip between the folds of the cedar’s bark.

There is a white porcelain teapot centred on a stump wider than your arms can circle. Everywhere, white fog traps cedar and fir. The green of moss sleeps entire trees into jewel-tones. Sword ferns are still dizzy and dipping from a long winter. Your hair is wetter than wet and still the rain comes. Lady ferns kiss the feet of cedar. Even the path blurs in the embrace of sky. The only sharp detail is the teapot: its gleaming snout. So white. Chipped. Written on in indelible ink, already fading, lost and found.

A child calls a crow a black eagle. As you climb you see more and more teapots, broken ones, whole ones. You carefully right a tipped tea cup on a stump near its felled trunk – long and leashing the ground like a path, a thing we cannot right. It will dream a new generation of trees and feed them as it slowly crumbles.

Sometimes I apologize for how drenched my stories are. You name them: how we ended up here – blinded by rain and awe, laughing at the impossibility of what is in front of our feet. We set out porcelain questions for the future, perch them on the behemoth mothers of the forest. Your whole future, your whole past, we tell each other, can slip between the folds of the cedar’s bark. See? It disappears. It is held. •

Art by Maaike VanderMeer (me).

Thank you for reading today, friends. I’m going to take next week off of posting. I haven’t missed a week since March 2024, which is a streak I’m personally astonished by and proud of, but being a student again has me writing to other people’s cues more than my own. A Broken Tulip is officially becoming a bi-weekly publication, as I cope with MFA homework.