“If Humans Mated Like Trees”

“She said she wanted something serious, so I buried it.”

Photo by Max on Unsplash.

It began with a headline on my phone—
“Botanists Confirm: Trees Have Sex Too.”
And I thought,
well, that would’ve saved me three years of awkward small talk.
If humans mated like trees,
I’d stop rehearsing my opinions on Radiohead.

No wine. No clever lines.
No “So, what kind of music are you into?”
Just a breeze,
a well-timed gust—
maybe a bee lands on your shoulder
as you microwave leftovers at work.

Forget the apps.
No Tinder, no Hinge,
no Bumble bios like:
“Sapiosexual. INTP. Let’s travel and vibe. No drama, no fungi.”

Just roots.
Deep ones.
A nice bit of mulch
and a solid spot by the creek.

Ovid would be furious.
No tragic loves turned into laurel trees—
just trees, making more trees.
Daphne wouldn’t run.
She’d just bloom mid-march,
her suitor a passing wind
clutching a Zyrtec and a sonnet.

Gone would be
the soft moan of Marvin Gaye.
Gone would be
your roommate banging on the wall
with a shoe.

Instead, your mother finds a seed pod
in your laundry basket,
sighs,
and plants it out back next to the compost.
No gender reveals.
Just fertilizer.

And still, somehow,
Jake Paul has a line of signature saplings.
“Broccoli, but shredded,” he calls them.
Elon offers a pollination subscription—
XSeed™: Reforest the future.

Romantic poets would go broke.
Byron, leaf-blown, tweeting at Keats:
“u up? 🌱”
No response.

In the end,
you wake up one April,
your last lover long carried
by the wind into someone else’s yard,
and all you can do
is stand still,
and grow,
and hope
some squirrel doesn’t eat your future.