Cage by Kevin Simmonds


 

John Cage was a mycologist, someone who collects & consumes mushrooms. I studied John Cage in music school. I didn’t think much of the connection between mushrooms & music. There are many connections. John Cage knew the reticulum, tubes & teeth. John Cage knew the gills, striations & pores. John Cage knew cap morphology, the fruiting body.

John Cage presided over autopsies.

When the rot sets in, music isn’t far behind.

 

 

Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer and musician originally from New Orleans. His writing has appeared in Asia Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, FIELD, jubilat, The Moth, Pank, and elsewhere. His second collection, Bend to it, appeared from Salmon Poetry in March 2014. He wrote the music for Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica, which won a 2009 Emmy Award, and Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey in Verse, both commissioned by the Pulitzer Center. Most recently, he received the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner and a Creative Work Fund commission for the Japanese noh-inspired theatre work Emmett Till, a river. He lives in San Francisco and northern Japan.