Anne Marie Wells | Excerpt from Forest of One

on the side of the highway, dead, of course, in a pool of ended potential. The days she once knew—free but bound to her role in predator and prey, shackled to the means by which she survived—were over, and her shredded pelt could not, at this point, even find use in a furrier’s workshop had she surrendered her dignity in exchange for a vain existence traveling on the hood of a coat in the upper echelons of the city, feeling the arias of sopranos resonate in the tips of her fur from a Kennedy Center box seat or the September whir of the turnpike whooshing through her cayenne and ginger tones from the passenger side of a top-down Aston Martin.

The beast would never know what tragedies would have hit her if the tires had not, and yet, she still had work to do in this world. She was no longer just a fox, but had she ever really been? If she lived on now within the veins of vultures and crows, raccoons and coyotes, within the grass peeking out from the gravel, hadn’t she, too, always lived as a composite of the past? An amalgam of all the realities that were once possible—the ones that still are and the ones that are no longer. One life had come and gone, sure. But what is it to release one unrealized dream when standing at the threshold of

infinite what ifs?

Forest of One

The clouds paint the sky in watercolors

as I commit my feet to the Earth blessing

the worms and voles blessing the needle

-laden soil weaving between my toes as I sink

beneath the surface Thrushes play their tinny flutes

and I laugh at the quilt of doubt I patched

from years of revolving doors

and fire escapes Why has it felt so hard to find freedom

in stillness? The way trees have done for ages?

Instead of asking if I will endure the months

heavy with bitter snow falls with the trust

needed to swear nothing will change or asking if

I will tire of this view after I let my skin harden

let my hair fill with the smell of dust can I

intertwine my branches and vow to bloom

a ring for each year I’ve forgiven myself?

Can I keep pushing toward a new unknown?

Can I let myself settle into an evergreen existence?

Allowing everything else to whorl around me?

Anne Marie Wells is the author of Survived By (Curious Corvid Publishing, 2023), the inaugural winner of the Wanderlust Travel Book Award for her memoir, Happy Iceland, through Wild Dog Press, and the 2023 winner of the Cinnamon Press Chapbook Contest for her collection, Mother, (v). She is the lead faculty for the DC Chapter of the Community Literature Initiative poetry publishing program and strategic partnership fellow for The Poetry Lab.