I invited the apostle to my stir-fry
dinner by accident. I shook
into my smoking wok a packet of dried
wood ear mushrooms—the ones I’d bought
from a farmers’ market. I threw in
a handful of broccoli, carrots, snap peas,
halved Brussels. My husband
added the firm tofu he’d cubed
on our walnut block. As the veggies
seared, David set the table while I stirred
the crackling mélange right-handed
with a wooden spoon, held a cell phone
in my left. I decided to look up
the mushroom’s other common names
and found one—the Judas ear—that made me
drop my spoon, sent hot canola
spitting at my wrist. The mushroom
looks like a whorled and ridged
human ear sprouted from a tree trunk,
its canal tipped down as if listening for gossip,
a far-off cough. Its flesh:
henna-colored, peach, or taupe. And it grows—
this is the biblical part—on decaying bark,
including the rotted logs
and stumps of elders: same species of tree
from which the suicide Judas
hangs himself after he learns Jesus
will be crucified.
All I’d
bargained for were mushrooms, but as I stared
into the wok, I watched the Judas ears unfurl,
their dried fibers now plumped and sweet
in the bubbling teriyaki. I thought of Dalí
posed in a photograph, deadpan next to a huge
replica of the human ear. I thought of Emily
Dickinson. In one of her poems, she imagines
all mushrooms as the cumulative
Judas-face of nature, since fungi thrive
in death and rot, betray the carbon
bonds that hold our bodies,
and our earth, together. She brands
the mushroom using Judas’s surname:
“an Iscariot.” It was almost a dare:
the rehydrated mushrooms sitting there, the Eat Me
hovering, like a prompt on Alice’s
magical cakes in Wonderland. The last time
an Episcopal priest dropped a consecrated
wafer on my eighteen-year-old tongue,
muttered, The body of Christ, the cup
of salvation, I pressed the Host
to my wet palate until the bread crumbled.
What would the communion of Judas
now make in my mouth? What was there to do
except turn the gas burner off, grab
a serving spoon, give the wok
one final shake, wonder who would betray
whom after the first bite.