SPORED: Barbara Nickel, pt. 2

Barbara Nickel and her poem Annular, from Domain (House of Anansi Press, 2007).

* * *

Another attempt at spore printing, another failure. So I left the mushrooms on the pages, in the hopes that they would at least rot interestingly. And then, instead of decomposing, they dried.

So I left them on the windowsill in the hopes that I'd figure it out.

And then, when my daughter was painting, I had an idea. Potato printing! Except with a mushroom!

But only one of them was stiff enough to survive painting and pressing on paper. The others sort of crunched. So I used the same purplish mushroom on all three.

I'm determined to keep going until I have an actual spore print on poems from all three of these poets. But until then...