POLLIWOG POND

Onto mud side

Cup Hands, draw water up and onto face.

I am Naiad, spirit of the Freshwater mussel, Alewife Floater. I have come with human language to urge your listening, and your becoming benthic. I experience my own flesh as human in relation to yours, for you to find kinship with me, and soon beyond. There is no instruction to become benthic - it is a beingness which liberates boundaries for being mush with all things. Think with the juices of your body, decompose a dogma of self, of human. Sink your matter into a between world, into the Benthos.

Benthic “between”ness  is an unstable site, the region between terrestrial and aquatic worlds. This is a place of land and water, it is a “between” and an “among”. It does not negate the seeming binaries but unites them. Benthos allows for all the positions within that surround and rupture binaries. Benthos is the animals which look like rocks, the animals whose homes are future limestone, those whose beingness is questioned, ignored or exploited. We of the Benthos exist simultaneously between and outside – we are unplace-able.

CATTAIL POND

When Anodonta implicata surprises with a bed in the Delaware- a fish ladder dam allowed alewife to extend our livelihoods into future possibilities. We are a nearly sessile folk- expending ourselves greatly as we drag our covered bodies through sediment with our tongue foot. We reside in fragile permanence, requiring survival with interspecies symbiosis, we ask our fish kin to deliver us to new migrations. We cannot simply flee contamination- we are denied agency over our own homes as our waters warm, our riparian shade disapears, as silt builds and suffocates our bodies, as invaders starve us. We as why we perish in your economy of use. We of the benthos ask for interspecies survival with human - for consideration in your own practices. Out of neccessity for you and all clean rivers, of which we keep house- making all benthic and aquatic and land being possible - but also we ask through care and generosity - a reciprical life is not composed of owing or debt- this only leads to exploitation and death. Reconciliation with yours and ours ecological hoes requires reciprocity of heart- give you spirit away to the great untold bentho- in which our bodies disperse

for interconnected self soup in communion with all biotic and abiotic. Here it is the benthos.