We are the hum in the marrow of the rot,

a billion-mouthed choir tasting copper and salt.

Do not seek us in the treason of branches—

we are the downward hunger, the wet subtraction,

thirst wearing the earth like a second tongue.

We speak in filaments, in drips, in pressures,

a living net that thinks in moisture, minerals,

and slow collisions beneath the world.

We quarrel through the loam,

a thousand slick wires carrying the slow

electric gossip of the dead. Listen:

the soil is a library of nerves

still murmuring the taste of rain

that fell before your grandfather was born.

The air thickens. Sound becomes weight.

Heat thins into a cold that tastes of metal.

Then the dark splits open—

a sudden braille of pale fire in spore and gill,

the wet click of roots forcing bone apart.

This is no hymn to the sun.

It is a chemical scream,

wet iron and old breath,

neon nectar pulsing in the throat of the world.

You are not lost.

You are already being read—

line by dissolving line, slowly, without mercy—

digested into a map without edges.

Then the mother-heave:

the dark closes like a fist,

a velvet forge crushing the formless

into bone, rind, and remembering.

It presses back against your ribs

and answers in the only tongue it knows—

a low, patient vibration that says:

become.

We grow toward the ache’s red center,

braiding memory into a knot

no blade can loosen.

Something vast is being born here—

lush, lawless, blind, and widening.

The dark is not empty.

It is the pressure that teaches us

how to become a shape

that still carries the weight

that keeps remaking it.

Anatoly Loginov is a writer, educator, and clinical psychologist based in Saint Petersburg. He is the Grand Prix winner of the All-Russian literary competition "Ecology of the Soul - 2026." His essay, The Narrow Neck of Being, appeared in the 15th-anniversary issue of Asymptote (USA), where the editor-in-chief described it as a “tour de force.” His fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Rowayat (Egypt), Space and Time Magazine, FlashFlood (UK), Flash Phantoms, Foofaraw Press, and the Kazakh literary journal Dactyl. He is also the author of several educational and popular science books.