{"id":469,"date":"2021-05-27T15:52:14","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T22:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=469"},"modified":"2025-02-07T12:47:47","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T20:47:47","slug":"ode-to-super-friends-and-nature-television-by-kathryn-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/ode-to-super-friends-and-nature-television-by-kathryn-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cOde to Super Friends and Nature Television\u201d By Kathryn Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in Willow Springs 86<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Author Profile<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\u201cOde to Super Friends and Nature Television\u201d By Kathryn Smith<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Days when the planet seems particularly poised
for disaster, I wear both my cephalopod T-shirt
and my cephalopod ring. Have you heard of a more
Anthropocene coping mechanism? I do it
for the birds with nowhere to land at the critical
point in their migration, for the skewed seasons
and the jungle ants with parasite-skewered brains.
Cave dwellers evolve to survive their sealed-over eyes.
Who needs eyes on a planet wobbling its axis
like a Tilt-A-Whirl? No wonder I wake
motion sick, the fact of death and the ocean and
the mouthparts of insects brimming the list of things
I can\u2019t control. Wonder Twin powers, activate!
Form of a fang, a blood-thirsty proboscis,
a tidal turnaround. I wear pants the color of a sea
cucumber, wash my octopus shirt on the saltwater setting.
Anything to understand the universe\u2019s categories.
Bats aren\u2019t birds, but they\u2019re winged. Still life and stillbirth
sound like they\u2019d mean the same thing, but they don\u2019t.
Mammals are peculiar, our young feeding on us. Humans
are more peculiar yet, building intricate reefs of plastic
and dread. The beauty of birds isn\u2019t flight. It\u2019s how they let
their young cram pointy beaks down their throats.
On a planet poised for disaster, I track my desires
in a bullet journal, cover my mammary glands
with a boneless bioluminescence. Delicate dangers
of life in the wild dominate my queue. I watch a robin
side-eye me with its bird face, asking what I did
with its family. I\u2019ve never been good at discerning
the joyful cries of children at play from the backyard
yowl of a cat fight. If I weren\u2019t such a creature of habit,
I\u2019d be a creature of soil, tunneling a nest that writhes
the earth\u2019s surface. I am sixty percent water and less than one
percent salt, and when ocean levels rise enough to wash us
from our perches, I\u2019ll have zero control over my need
to breathe air, which is not in my control to begin with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/332\/2021\/05\/ode-to-super-friends_1.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5945,"featured_media":1098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5945"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38838,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions\/38838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}