After that dream in which I kill someone or someone kills me, I start to see the Green Man: his leafy face, his clothes of vegetables and vines, his foliate head carved in an old church door and in a bookplate, oak leaves sprouting from his ears. I see him in the supermarket, thumping watermelons. He sports a mustache of asparagus. At the beach, wearing seaweed boardies, he hangs ten off the nose of a shark. In the restaurant, he chomps celery stalks, his putrescent jacket covered with lichen and mushrooms. At the park, an arbor vitae breaks loose from its hedge and stumbles toward me, holding a bottle of ale in an outstretched branch. “Green Man!” I shout. “What do you mean?” But green men never speak. And so, I drink with him on a splintered bench and fall asleep. Published in Star*Line