Frances Cannon

Trying to shake the existential dread while on a walk in the spring sun

Your daughter finds a baby snake in a rotten log. While you hunt for beetles in the log’s remains, she plucks the snake out of the spongy wood, no fear in her fingers. The snake appears unresponsive—perhaps it’s cold, hibernating in the shadows of the early morning. As the snake begins to thaw in the sun, and wake to its peril, it stares us all in the face, in turns: who is this, and this, and this, what are these fingers clutching my belly, is this the moment of my death? Finally, it opens and closes its jaw to bite, or threaten to bite, and this is when your daughter drops the poor thing in the grass. It coils and bites, unfurls and bites, lunges and bites, but the actions of its jaw are futile; the snake is too young for teeth. I have felt this way all week: snapping my jaw away in defense of attack, to no avail—those more powerful have already snatched me up at my tender middle, dropped me, and I lay half-hidden, biting at air. 


Eye of the storm

Warm rain on the aluminum roof. We have the window cracked open, and the humidity seeps into the kitchen, mixing with the odors of our cooking that waft out into the garden. The neighbor’s big black dog is curled up in the flower bed, napping through the storm. On the radio: a string quintet in C major by Franz Schubert. You and I tear through a loaf of my rye sourdough bread, with smoked provolone cheese and raspberry jam. We’re hungry after a short hike around red rocks hunting for morel mushrooms, but we found only dwarf yellow violets and jack-in-the-pulpit. Can we stay in this hour beyond the limits of the clock? It’s a selfish wish—low pressure days make you sleepy, but I’m wide awake—I want to take it all in, slowly.


The art and science of naming

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” — Audre Lorde

Our mushroom hunt leads us through marshes, fields, hillsides, in wider and wider loops around the Champlain Valley, and finally, to a patch of morels hidden in plain sight at the base of two dead Elms by the Burlington waterfront. Twelve shriveled, brain-like blobs, poking up out of the grass, they bring my immense joy. The ecstasy of the quest: the finding, the naming, the eating, then we stay up late reading scientific articles about the speciation of Morchella. We think we’ve found our species: Morchella ulmaria, though we haven’t ruled out prava or cryptica. We dissect one of our twelve specimens into quarters, you scrape the edge with a double-edged razor blade, smear the spores on a glass slide, and hunker down at the compound scope—one of three or four microscopes which you’ve set up temporarily in your small apartment during the covid quarantine—this scope is located in your kitchen, next to the coffee and spices. This midnight hour of fevered research is more delicious than the spoonful of buttered fungus which we spread on toast for dinner. The naming and studying—that’s the reward of the hunt.



FRANCES CANNON is a writer and artist currently living in Vermont, where she teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Champlain College. She is the author and illustrator of several books of hybrid text and artwork: Walter Benjamin: Reimagined, MIT Press, The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank, Gold Wake Press, Tropicalia, Vagabond Press, and Uranian Fruit, Honeybee Press. She was born in Utah and has since lived in Oregon, Vermont, California, Maine, Iowa, Italy, Guatemala, France, and Mexico making art and writing books. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont.

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