you have to forgive
the snow for its
waking. ideally, you
occupy a land. you
are accommodated. you
are private school
broad, shouldering  
the quiver of a pollen
weighty spring. instead, you
occupy an apartment. you
are a tenant. you
are watching hived frost
slip through unsealed
window slits and sting
your sore thumbs blue. you
are fused to the mud, you
are dodging silverfish.
you are too broke
to buy space heater.

                     this is not the south you were promised:
                     marigolds, big and batwinged
                     off of yam-sun, blushing your neighbors’
                     lawns, taro ichor leaking from your nostrils.
                     it is january seventh, radnor lake grey
                     and heronless. snow webs white the orchid
                     lounge awnings. wind delivers a cold
                     that coagulates your blood to tubers.
                     the city, saltless, shuts down.
                     at the start of the week you bronzed
                     your wrists on bike handles,
                     thanked for shade the copses of trees
                     that keep the barred owls company.
                     you unnotched yourself from the palm
                     long icicles, the rockies’ paleozoic udders
                     that nourished you, in the name of sun
                     gorged skies. but the weather erupts,
                     unravels, unfurls the cartilage keeping
                     magnolia bloom bonded
                     to otherwise unimpressive bark.
                     This will be the most docile winter
                     of the rest of your life.
                     Soon, your grease sweet scalp
                     will gulp a warm hibernal rain.

i restart my tomato garden
in a halved oatmilk carton,

stuffed between teakwood
kingfisher and propagated

peperomia on east most
window. i spend hours and

forty-six dollars on a red
covered book that promised

thriving indoor heirlooms.
paige told me to celebrate

the little wins. this morning
i am alive and so i sit cross

legged beneath the window
to sniff the mycelial yellow

blooms that indicate a future
harvest. a reason for bees.

the last tomato garden i had
was shoved behind wasp

bloated grill and stunted by
dirt unturned since the sixties.  

the last tomato garden i had
is six years gone, six years

without the smell of trichome
stippled stems to keep the shit

from clinging to vibrissae.

             a year of wrestling the ooze
             leaking from mother and
             grandmother’s thinned skin.

             a year of eiffeling piss pad
             and diaper boxes.

             a year of moping chowder
             dribble from arid lips.

             a year fracking contentment
             from the sprain of iowa city’s
             sparrow population.

             a year of licking the sales
             floor salty taint of the man
             who paid my rent.

             a year of tattooing nightshade’s
             daughters on my forearm.

             i name the first star-splayed

flower tabitha, the next denzel.
when i catch the sun squirreling

away from the sisters’ fragile
sprout, i move them across

the country of my apartment.
the more light, the more fruit.

is about you :: the bald spot on a widowed
man’s peak, sunned a sapsucker red :: you are
bruise red centered in silt grey tonsure :: an opened
mouth :: an opened chest :: an adolescent hare braced
against sidewalk :: all the bottle flies suckling
the final pink of its small intestine :: you
the collective :: you trillion eyes :: prismatic
former maggots pulling meat from rabbit’s bone braid

—beloved, today i spoke to the river about you.
told her you are her milky equivalent :: a gosling
white flood receded. the river wants to meet you.
the river wants to check beneath your skin for sunfish.
the river wants to know if the cornsilk :: cornsick yellow
:: hurricane in me is stilled by the pink brash of you—

‍

Note: originally published in Booth.