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  • A Nigger and His Tree
  • Darius Christiansen (bio)

        Red boughs, brushfireset the field aflame     Tree pimple    with walnuts suspended in pus     The moss too big            to be moss, that shell too empty

        to be a boy, lichen too stubbornto be living     & trumpetflowers            march acrossNew Orleans, Louisiana     Rainsweat mats grass,        suffocates it, sopping and shaggy,            dogtrees dripping

with pine needles     needling themselves into amputated branches    jutting out torn termite wings        Inside his cavity,    flies are sewn together by the veins of their wingsmovement: like zip ties orbiting                lightning bugs without a blaze:

are just inflated ladybugs     In understory, rosette dung    & clumped fungi        befriend each other under his feet     & these leaves:            umbrellas with broken stretchers [End Page 107]

Darius Christiansen

Darius Christiansen is a seventeen year-old writer from New Orleans, Louisiana. Darius was introduced to the art of writing from when he would secretly taking his mother’s portfolio of poems with him to school. While all the other students were reading their bibles for early morning mass, he would be reading his mother’s poems. Inspired by his own childhood, Darius pulls a lot of his writing from natural elements and the southern life in which he grew up. He attends the arts centered high school, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where he studies Creative Writing. He has been published in the literary journal, Umbra, and the inaugural issue of the online literary journal, Umbrat. He considers writing to be one of the best ways to connect with and reach people that are placed all around the world. He hopes to one day be a writer who is able to do just that.

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