Thomas Winfield Marie

@magpine

Thomas - poet and ecologist- plants, climate change, human geography. He/him and she/her. Buy my chapbook!

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Is it #weirdpoemWednesday? Here's one from a few years ago when I was writing daily fish poems. @tomsnarsky.bsky.social Click for full poem - a bit long for this format

ELECTROFISHING / ATLANTIC SALMON

ZAP! Ha Ha Ha!
We heard you and we came.
We wanted to taste the anode, since we had no choice.
Your stun gun hijacked our muscles.
Now we are here to laugh at you and dance in your bucket.
Ha Ha Ha! We all saw you when you slipped in the river
and you lost the grip of your hip waders
and cold electrified water got in the rubber.
YES! That is the sort of thing we really love. That is why we came.

By now you may have noticed:
We are not the Atlantic Salmon you were hoping for.
We are the Elopomorph Superorder.
We are like olms with eyes or like worms with bones.
We are the treasured jesters of your nets. We are
THE AMERICAN EELS!

Do not be impressed by frogs who go between
wet mud and wet leaves. We have seen the only two sides
of the world.
Salt and not salt.
These are the absolute antipodes.
Because of this it is very natural and easy for us to die or be born
or move between other such states of matter.
NO BIG DEAL!

But your hands are horrible to touch and unlike us.
Your current could hold us only because we LOVE currents.
We do not love your hands and so we are going now.
We know where the salmon went.
We have seen them on the way to our own secret place.
They are chasing a different anode
far more convulsing than yours. No offense.
ZAP! Ha Ha Ha.
We aren't telling!

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· 21d

I did a plant nomenclature project a while ago and in the process compiled some really goofy ones (click to expand)

List of silly plant names with photo slices of each plant. List reads:
Aunt Lucy
Parry's pussypaws
Dolly Parton's lichen
ant plant
fool's parsley
little weaselsnout
nipple beehive cactus
treelover
annual bastardcabbage
stunted she-oak
hairy banana
salty popcornflower
fragrant popcornflower
turkeypeas
beautiful bladderpod
stinking willie
icecream bean
liberal
flaccidgrass
bats in the belfry
devilqueen
crusty jelly lichen
cerebral fishscale lichen
tube tongue
urban spurge
navel cornsalad
intestine silverskin lichen
wartycabbage
summer snowflake
Urban's false cocaine
biscuitroot
musky stork's bill
pale five eyes
single delight
fire on the mountain
least snoutbean
slugwood

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Jun 30

out-of-season poetry WIP #poetry

WOMA

Against the black stack
of the mountain
the pitch of the wind drops

Bring me
starvation food
pine bark bread
dark dust, pine in the lungs
lark in the gone-pine
stark on the tongue

Bruised by the axe back
back-breaking, bread-baking
resinating
voice of the hungry mountain

We will
want for another winter

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Jun 12

Today on my half-mile walk to the bus stop I stepped over five "ant wars" between pavement ant colonies. I saw four yesterday as well. They are most likely Tetramorium immigrans. This species is also parasitized by another ant species. It's a brutal time of year to be a pavement ant!

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· May 7

Been a while since I shared a poem in-progress 🪽#poetry

LODGINGS

Passing storm brings
nightlong heat lightning
and we are
still singing the wintering song
the one with the long longing
the tanagers’ black wings
dark orchards full of glossy tangerines
full of migrators
voyaging passerines only
as gone as the stars are gone
we passengers of the wind.

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Apr 8

I made this educational comic for an upcoming event - it introduces native plants and introduced plants, and the impacts of climate change on plant communities, at a K-5 level. If you'd like to read it or use it, check out the whole thing here: doi.org/10.7275/2ns2...

Colorful kids comic. Text: "Plants take a long time to: grow, change, adapt - to evolve! It can take millions of years. When a type of plant grows in the same place their long ago ancestors grew, they are a native plant. They have many connections to: birds, insects, microbes, and human beings. Over time, all the living beings that make up an ecosystem grow to fit each other just right! So, native plants have deep root. "Native plant" means old, rooted, and well-connected - not "never-changing". Illustrations of plants in ecosystems.

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Nov 17

This little poem came to me in my dreams last night.

Text reads:
Every map has a dent
Every dent is a river
Every river evident
Even those gone forever.

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Jul 4

One of the poems from my new chapbook, Natural Causes, available at Bottlecap Press: bottlecap.press/products/cau... . Remembering the masting beech trees - now sadly interrupted by beech leaf disease. #writingsky #poetrysky #poetry

MAST YEAR

— when the ground was brown,
soft down brown,
burrows in butternuts
brown, broken open
in the chipmunks warren
brown enough even for the starlings
pine grain of their feathers
fine gold on squill on brown —
the acorns
glossy the carrot’s
bitter crown
the blackberries
round the cattails
brown

somewhere else
the sky was brown
crowded armfuls of light
light, like any boon
never going away
so long as you never ever put it down

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Jul 1

Y'all won't stop hearing about my new eco-poetry chapbook at Bottlecap Press! bottlecap.press/products/cau.... It's got seeds! Abundance! Disturbance! Grief! Bewilderment! Fish! That's basically everything! #writingcommunity #poetrycommunity #poetrysky #writingsky #bottlecappress #chapbooks

Cover image of Natural Causes by Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer. A woodcut illustration of an ash branch obscuring a swallow in flight on a sage green background.

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Apr 5

I recently finished watching The Untamed and I liked it enough to make some fanart! (downplaying my obsession here)

A watercolor and ink painting of Wei Wuxian gazing up into Lan Zhan's eyes. They are surrounded by lotus leaves and blossoms, bottle gentians, and pine branches in soft pastel colors.

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Mar 6

I realized I swapped two of the pages in my #standupforscience2025 zine so reposting here! LMK if you want a PDF or Canva file.

A zine about how scientific funding impacts Massachusetts. The title is "Scientific funding is being frozen and cut by DOGE, but what does scientific funding do?" The first two pages have examples of NSF proposals funded in MA in 2024. The third page describes some of the impacts of a pause in funding and links to an article about medical trial participants losing care. The fourth and fifth page gives financial statistics about how the NIH and NSF contribute to MA's economy and who are employed as a result. The last page emphasizes that public science keeps the state fed, healthy, safe, and employed, and links to 5calls to encourage calling representatives. The back cover has links to other organizations including the Union of Concerned Scientists and 500 Women Scientists.

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Jan 18

My collaborators (including a fantastic undergrad) and I are conducting some survey research! If you work in invasion ecology or weed risk assessment, will you consider filling this out or sharing it with your networks? #InvasiveSpecies #Ecology Survey link: tinyurl.com/plant-study

A survey recruitment poster which reads: Participants needed for invasion risk assessment study. Study overview: Researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst are looking for participants in a study about the information that ecological professionals use to judge the risk a plant species may pose to an environment. This study seeks professional experience around risk assessment of non-native plant species in the United States. What is required? Eligible participants will conduct a short online questionnaire, estimated to take approximately 20 minutes to complete. You may qualify if you: are at least 18 years old & have professional experience with assessing non-native plant risk in the United States. To learn more please contact the lead investigator: Thomas Nuhfer, PhD Student. tnuhfer@umass.edu. Please share with your networks! Survey link: tinyurl.com/plant-study. End text. The poster also includes a QR code.

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Nov 16

If you leave a cat in a warm, sunny window for long enough, it might sprout a second head

Two black cats in a rocking chair. One is sitting on another so it looks like one cat with two heads. The cat being sat on is staring right at the camera and looks fed up

Thomas Winfield Marie@magpine· Aug 4

Two very little favorites for #smallpoemsunday