Every year I could count on you maybe multiple times, depending on conditions. I’d go searching into the heart of the raspberries, the honey locust stump, six feet high, your host. Usually in September or October I’d go diving with a knife to find your bright orange and yellow folds. How you brought a smile to my face. And then the work, unexpected for that day, the collecting into a large bag of the ears I’d cut, the cleaning out of the little black beetles speckled within, the slicing and sautéing with garlic and oil. Then eating. Then savoring. Then the stowing away of the rest for another day. Every year, my dependable friend. Every year. Until I moved away.

a gatherer’s dream
new ears on the old stump
waking alone

Publisher’s Note:

Fascinating fact, as per Guinness World Records: The world’s heaviest edible fungi was a one-hundred-pound (45.35 kg) “chicken of the woods” mushroom, Laetiporus sulphureus, found by Giovanni Paba in the New Forest, Hampshire, UK on 15 October 1990:
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/66485-heaviest-edible-fungi

See also this article by Nate Prime in The Black Trumpet Blog (September 2024; Portland, Maine): “How to Find, Identify, and Cook Chicken of the Woods Mushrooms”:
https://northspore.com/blogs/the-black-trumpet/how-to-find-identify-and-cook-chicken-of-the-woods-mushrooms

Links were retrieved on 7 April 2025.

Carla Schwartz’s

poems appear in The Practicing Poet and in her collections: Signs of Marriage (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Mother, One More Thing (Turning Point, 2014), and Intimacy with the Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Recent and forthcoming curations include contemporary haibun online, great weather for MEDIA, The MacGuffin, Modern Haiku, North Dakota Quarterly, ONE ART, Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Spank the Carp.

Schwartz’s poem “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E. E. Cummings Prize. And she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in 2023.

Learn more at the poet’s website, which includes links to her poetry and performance videos: https://www.carlapoet.com/

See also the poet’s YouTube channel, which features documentary and how-to videos about her off-the-grid, solar-powered tiny houseboat: CB99Videos

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Chill Season by Carla Schwartz in Poets for Science: The Nature of Our Times (3 January 2025)

⚡ Musing Weather, an anomalous haibun by Schwartz in Issue 20.3 of contemporary haibun online (1 December 2024)

⚡ Contemplating Humanity While Swimming by Schwartz in Verse-Virtual (July 2024)

⚡ Two poems (“Saying Goodbye to My Father” and “Not Merely a Player on this World’s Stage”) in Verse-Virtual (September 2023)

⚡ Two poems (“Umbilical” and “How He Leaves”) in Issue 24 of The Ear (2021)