Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture, and spirituality. Leah Papura is the author of nine collections of essays, poems, and translations,

including It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful and All the Fier's Tethers.

In this essay, Leah bears witness to the decomposing body of a deer

and considers stories of rightness,

the processes which transform bodies from one state to another

and the beginnings that emerge from endings.

Music that emerge from endings. Because this too is a way to begin, I'll begin at the end.

We're all in some way beginning at the end now, aren't we?

October 26, 2019.

I found a deer, dead in the patch of urban woods where I walk every day. The cream of his

belly rose up like a moon. He was hurt at the rump, but I couldn't see how. None of the

brush around him was broken. The simplest explanation felt right. He chose precisely this spot to lie down in peace. By the next day,

the maggots had come, a wave of them creak lapping the banks of the body, eddying in shadows,

lacquered in sunlight. I got down very close, and yes, I heard them, soft shushes like carp,

mouthing along upon surface. In two more days, they'd paired the body back to hide,

moving up the bone cliffs and into the hollows, a tide floating parts of the wet world back to the deep.

The maggots started from the hurt open end. All hungers seek away in through our wounds,

and then advanced across the body. Standing back, the method's clear. It's not each on their own, grabbing and looting, but a collective force, working according to plan.

Some collectives are so much more easily loved, the murmuration of swift's en route to the Amazon, which spend weeks every fall here in Baltimore reconvening at dusk above the

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