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
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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
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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.
Jane WongJane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023) and two books of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She lives in Seattle.