A cleaver to the flower sharpened on butcher block, the petaled head, heavy with dew and rocks and

troubled pollen. My mother lops off husbands, the beards of bird-beaked snapdragons. Ooze of

divorce in sticky white sap, sopped up by eggshell shard. What rips off no matter how woody, no

matter how shorn the cell. How well she knows this cycle of ugly necessity, rot in the bubbling bog

still singing. She shows me how, pail of steaming compost, my continual birth when badness nearly

kills me again. What he and he wanted, umbilical umbrage, my dead roots, my dead rhizomes, my

deserved-it she did. My mother did not call the garden dead, overwintered in pine and hay, under

weather pruning heart by heart. Seeds spewing along the sewage rows, doused in wormy

multiplication. To lop off what feeds off you. Off breath, off energy, off self, off body, off poet,

simmering down to speck. In what went to seed, I wanted seeds so swollen, wanted the cartilage of

earth to carry me, spit me somewhere safer. Baby bee of a beginning, slurping sugar already in me,

fed by me, easy. My mother tills the dirt and it turns even without her shoveling speech, jaw of mud

over flower heads, a concentrate, a slurry, a stench to say here is a life, again. Watch then, the

deadheading one by one, silver shorn what heavy, what deflated, what plucked, what circuity, what

ravishing decomposition.  My mother keeps fertilizing, feral arteries linking water, light, blood, until

swell. Stems gone putrid and puckered then, time and time passing in the leaving. I left. Hair laid

down to grass and mulch to mold. Cut all cornered kisses and fake floral feeding. Sipped on bird

droppings in hardened ground, gnats nesting ear to ear. My panic unpretty in bloom one day, then

shut the next. Twice I fled, he and he, and I was flesh and poem, still. New shoots curling in green

ligaments, burgundy in the under, glowing in the almost-death, alone and not lonely, bare and not

barren, what saturated sun blaring my name awake.