These poems are from a series inspired by reading Atlas Obscura stories while listening to a music genre randomly selected from my list. The poems were written immediately after reading, still while listening to the randomly chosen music. Please share and/ or click the “clap” button at the bottom if you enjoyed this.

One of Hawaiʻi’s Rarest Bogs Just Got a 16-Year Makeover

90’s house music

I’m wearing the blue ghost perfume tonight, I’m invincible in the strobe lights, I’m invincible with my black light hand stamp now that all the hog wire is in place. For years I thought I’d have to accept that beauty included mud puddles made by hoof prints, mud puddles where mosquitos grew to infect the honeycreepers. If I wanted bog, I’d have to take all this and the strawberry guava trees that can’t be killed by pulling out the roots or cutting off the heads. But I wanted white-tailed tropic birds and to wear a white lace-up bustier to the club tonight, to dance with a stranger so briefly I have to believe the stranger is good and kind, and it doesn’t matter that we’ve just given way to feral pigs. Did I tell you about the Pele lobeliad? Looks like a talon. Color of a bruise. Native plant. The honeycreepers love it. I love bogs and disrepair and disarray, but listen, stranger in the coat-check, I need to see something get better. I’m slurring my words. I’m promise I’m not drunk so much as I am drunk, stoned, and medicated. Sixteen years from now I might not be. I will have feathered the bog. I will have taken out 90,000 plants. I know there is rain here. I know the soil is high in acid. I know things grow here that can’t grow anywhere else in the world.

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