This Green Earth 

by ANGELICA WHITEHORNE

This green Earth might hold you in her mouth
or she might spit you out, toss you like a dismembered 
tick into the next Universe. 

Either way, unimportant thing that you are, you
will best-case-scenario disappear into her without protest,
a granola bar she eats not for taste but to dull her hunger pains. 

This to say: the green Earth is running a marathon, 
and you are just a bad snack. 

They say each of our Tongues are a geography easily 
identifying us, glaciers and faults like fingerprints 
down the cascading valleys of our throats.

Off the tip of my own, I can tell you that 
a snow-capped Tongue is a sign of poor health. 

But an Instagram Guru can read your 
Tongue professionally, for a price. Her 
own Tongue tectonic plate shifting behind 
her teeth as she gives you the news:

“Your Tongue has been betrayed by the bacterium that
feasts on her. Your Tongue is acid-stained where you were forced 
to bring up something you thought you had swallowed.

Your Tongue is the part of land where lava ran through,
and now nothing grows.” 

Maybe we should stop calling this green Earth our Mother, 
maybe she is a Tongue. All slick muscle thrashing in the gnawing 
mouth of forever, trying to survive long enough to say something lasting,
and maybe we are just the slime she scrapes off in the morning.