To feel and only know feeling; the common dirt worm possesses small sensors to sift through light—its world a plane of shadows, from deep earth dark to the blinding sun above, the worm toggles through gulping moisture with little in between, wriggling its muscular coil, shrinking its juicy limb to squeeze past the bedrock, and again to extend and plunge further down the dark; legless, armless, eyeless, noseless it has no beak, but like a bird, worms have gizzards—where they open their maw to swallow sharp rocks and grains of sand to grind more chunky fiber moving down its gullet, more than just a long intestine with a mouth, they eat what we don’t crave, coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peals; they shit the shit we leave behind—if you find one in your garden, myth insists on splitting the worm in two, this is a lie for only one of the halfs will wriggle back to life and the limb won’t grow back fully, just soften with time, it’ll nose dive to trudge away from danger, taking its fat and plump and crusted stump below to excavate another tunnel until it feels the barometric pressure change—the soil getting wetter from the sky, it’ll scoop, and plow to the surface, sensing this hanging chandelier of moisture and wish to join it, for worms have no lungs, they breathe by sipping moisture that hits the surface of their skin, here worms rolling pin and lurch across the grass or concrete, kurplunking at the bottoms of puddles until the sun comes out and cooks their tubular bodies rubber band dry—still they endure, when speculated if they could last the soils of Mars, it turns out worms can endure even in outer space, when pierced on a metal fishing hook, flanting it for any nearby hungry fish, worms can live underwater for several weeks, they endure, when Heidi Klum cosplayed as a worm wriggling her ringed body up and down the red carpet, worms endure the paparazzi, having their moment in popular culture, to get asses in the seats to see Dune: Part Two, movie executives approved the creation of a collector’s popcorn topper in the shape of a sand worm from Arrakis, where moviegoers plunge their hand through the maw of the worm—plastic spindles tickling their hands as they reach for buttered popcorn, even while looking like a fleshlight worms endure, scientists took a sample of permafrost from the arctic and in the sample were two worms—once the snow thawed, and the worms warmed up to room temp, their mummified bodies inflated back to a fleshy pink and they slinked to movement, to feel and only know feeling—these worms were from the Pleistocene, for 46,000 years they endure, the last time they moved before the frost, mammoths and saber tooth cats fought above.