I’m weeding through my bedside manner

because I thought the dull thudding of bass line wasn’t just my heart anymore

I met a boy who could see his heart through his chest

and and and

the women on the bench moved anyway

they asked what i was drawing

and the woman’s tattoo looked like adventure

but her face looked like she had spent too much time waiting

and and and

my feet don’t touch the ground

but my soul does.

my mother was born a gardener

and my father became one

through patient snap peas and

angry red tomatoes

he seeded and watered and waited

while my mother grew hibiscus in the mountains

and plums in the shade

i was born a painter

but its tank me years to pick up a paintbrush

and my brother was born a poet

but i sincerely doubt that he’ll ever show it

i mix my paints on my palette of flowers

and my brother goes to meetings at banks

My other attended the only Agricultural High School available to her within a 40 mile radius of her South Philadelphia home. This was not a coincidence.

My father attended the best athletic conference in his affluent suburban community. This was.

She started out watering plants in fast food joints, arranging flowers for junior proms in the poorest neighborhoods of the city. When my father met her, she only ate lettuce and seeds because that was all she could manage to put in her body.

My father kneeled to the ground, saw the soil beneath her fingernails, and fell in love.

I can only love men who garden. I can only be a daughter of the earth because of them.

I don’t like terrariums because they frustrate me. Life trapped behind glass, that I cannot touch, or feel, or smell. I cannot water, I cannot fathom to even slightly disturb their existence, no matter how desperately I want to.

I’m getting my hands ***** touching old soil. I wipe it on my skirt before I touch the sweat on the back of my neck. I’m planting forget-me-nots and basil. I don’t even know if those go together. But I am putting them deep in the ground and it occurs to me that in a few weeks, I might not even remember them. They might die and become some stupid memory, a part of my dinner party story vernacular, Or maybe waiting for them will change me, will allow me to commit as a meditation on earthen peace.

You were the few leaves of Ivy
That over grew onto the building
And I the willing building

You were the small speck of rust that
over took my smallish metal frame
Crippling me from allowing anyone else inside
And I the willing frame

You were the mold
that spread against my walls
infecting me
Causing me to be ‘Closed For Good’
but I allowed the spread
never doing anything to halt
the damaging process

I never had anything to offer you
But you still took everything I had
And after I was completely encased in You
You moved on
To see what other damage You could cause