Cuscuta denticulata
By Emily Hoover
Originally published in Waxing and Waning. The poem was selected as runner-up in the Tennessee Tempest Edition contest in 2021.
Desert Dodder, Cuscuta denticulata
In springtime, rust-colored spiderwebs
are woven across the Mojave like fishnet
stockings draped on an open dresser.
This desert dodder engulfs creosote bushes
& sagebrush scrubs, an outstretched
hand in the dark after a nightmare.
It’s a slender vine that attaches to its host
through a root projection called haustorium,
leaving wart-like lacerations as kisses.
Having lost its root to the earth, it pulls
nutrients from the host plant, coils around stems
or branches like legs entwined, spreading.
It was a sickness, you & I. I spent moments
among what they call strangleweed this spring
& came to know this for certain. Before the new
year & the virus that set ablaze the resolve
of the new year, I knew this but hosted you
because I had sun, soil, water, & air to share.
I did this for a decade. Now, as the rocky land
cracks, marking familiar thirst of summer,
as humanity’s lungs expand & contract
for another season of caskets, I can’t breathe.
I stand in hot wind that makes me miss us.
Even in this grief, I know what it means
to be dipped in uncanny orange-gold,
embraced by a beautiful pest wearing white
bell-shaped flowers as love tokens to disguise
appendages with fists. The last time
I hiked in shrubland infested with strangleweed,
a dust devil swirled where Redstone mountains
meet sky. We saw a family of wild horses.
My new lover stopped to observe C. denticulata’s
texture & growth, how it bled life from its host,
with a curiosity in his eyes I’ve only seen when
he stands over my body, penning me in his
shadow. He pointed to purple wildflowers
sprouting from strangleweed blanketing straw
& said, there is resistance alongside suffering.
Emily Hoover is the author of the forthcoming poetry chapbook, My Mother as a Serrano Pepper (Zeitgeist Press, 2023). She serves as a Lecturer of English at Nevada State College and is currently working on a flash fiction collection about women who leave.
Photos by Lance Hignite.
Double Down Blogger photo courtesy of Emily Hoover.