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Zebulon Huset
Arboreal Arbitration
1. Podded
Family as pod of lilacs poking forth from bush bordering side yard from side yard. The sun reaches across neighborhood to tickle out our soft purple. The branch pulls from within bark skin to maintain our protective green. Still, each budlet will crack, spread its purple brown and fall.
2. Coned
Family as pine cone. Grand Sequoia, Monterey Pine—Prometheus's favorite. Fire climax, the tree's embryos are sealed deep in its plate mail in a stasis unaware of future ennui and only when licked by the flames of a forest fire does the sap melt to allow its seeds to germinate without burning through bark, seed shell.
3. Repled
“How does the author plead?”
Pine cone, your honor.
“Do you rescind your plea of lilac?”
Merely to amend it.
“I will allow this—continue.”
4. Decreed
Family as group of humans sharing broad stretches of DNA. Sharing progeny but distinguishable by more than vitamin D deficiencies or where time's firestorm ordained to drop our fertilized germ onto earth. Marred both by time and consequence into the abstraction we call self.
Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest, his short fiction chapbook Between Even Rows of Trees is forthcoming from Bottlecap Editions and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gone Lawn, Meridian, North American Review, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. He has also published thousands of writing prompts at his blog Notebooking Daily.
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