Although my poetry skills are merely intriguing at best, here are some nature poems for you. Two of which were written recently, the third written years ago.

Magnet Poetry

The beauty of magnet poetry is that the combination of the words provided for you generates its own meanings. With these, I closed my eyes and felt along the magnets and picked a handful until I felt I could garner a direction from them. The random words I “drew,” so to speak, were fertilize, vine, manure, and wild.

Soft Nature – a poem about nurturing Mother Earth

It reads,

“Fertilize this soft nature;
We climb all vines.
No aroma breathes like manure
Love is warm & wild.”

Because I interpret my own meanings retroactively with poems like these – arguably all of my poems – this poem presents itself as as a call to action for us all, myself included.

Fertilize this soft nature = I call upon you to nurture Mother Earth with gentleness,
We climb all vines = we’ll expend ourselves to the extreme doing so,
No aroma breathes like manure = but it will be worth it, because nothing in life is as precious as life itself,
Love is warm & wild = and in doing so, we will find that the love we gain from it can be comforting as well as unexpected.

“Cottage core” criticisms

I am in so many Facebook groups with “cottage core” themes – Fairy cottage core, Dark cottage core, Cottage core basic, Cottage core maximalism, Pink cottage core. I’m starting to sound like my metalhead brother – have you ever argued about genres with a metalhead?

Anyway I don’t actually have any real criticisms of the cottage core culture or aesthetic, but rather a complaint as someone whose cottage core experience feels like that of a forager.

Being A Ground Looker – a poem about litter

The modern day 'cottage core' aesthetic
romanticizes ground-lookers.
As a ground-looker myself, I can't say I blame them -
nor can I deny mine own complicity.

We ground lookers love to envision our finds as -
colorful and wildly shaped mushrooms, and
many legged insects or critters with no legs at all (worms), and
hag stones and wish stones and smooth stones and ancient stones, and
flower petals, and
dirt.

But the reality is that
being a ground-looker isn't romantic at all.
Being a ground-looker places in our visages
the worst of humanity's mistakes.

We see -
solo cups and styro cups and coffee cups, and
shiny wrappers in gold and red and blue, and
receipts for small purchases at the fast food joints around the corner, and
crumpled papers of God-knows-what's, and
plastics and cigarettes, and
plastics and cigarettes, and
plastics... and cigarettes...

Being a ground-looker isn't romantic at all.
Why do we look down in the first place?
"Why do you look so down?"

Garden Poem

Below is our, like, ten foot tall cherry tomato plant. His name is chief. When we transplanted them from the pots gifted to us by Susan and Scott Duff (Pete’s parents), he lay flat on the ground in his pot at first. Everyone else gave up on him, but Pete and I knew he’d spring back up.

We name our plants based on alliterations with what the plant is. We had Chief the cherry tomato plant and Beef the beefsteak tomato plant. Chief & Beef.

When he did finally spring back up I said, “We’ll call him Chief because the greatest leaders go through the greatest hardships.”

I thought it sounded pretty wise!

If I Am – a poem about a garden

If I am a garden,
then my mind is made up of tall, 
dazzling flowers.
Sunflowers, perhaps.
They stand eye level with the world,
Like a wall.
Thick and swaying.

If I am a garden,
then my body is the soil.
You may catch glimpses,
You may brush it in your rolling through my fields,
But it is conserved
and fertile
and clean
and well kept.
My body is the holder of all the rest
and that is why you want to be smothered by it.

If I am a garden,
then my heart is surrounded by flowers.
It is a thicket of thorns,
you do not know its center.
It may be crimson red,
or ocean blue.
It may be greener than my grasses or
more yellow than the sun to which my walls of sunflowers look up,
It may be a tangerine -
displaced: a fruit among flowers
vibrant and tempting and
SOAKING.
My heart may be all of those things, but in fact,

All you see is a stone.
It is so tall that you know not of its inside.
Is it hollow? Or solid?
Is it old, or newly placed?
Have I built this garden for it, or around it?

You tell me.

If I am a garden,
then you are the bee,
and NONE OF YOU KNOW
HOW TO POLLINATE ME.

The greatest leaders go through the greatest hardships

— Andrea Geller (@absgeller) August 25, 2023

he's 10ft tall now

— Andrea Geller (@absgeller) August 25, 2023