My mother plants snow peas behind the garage.
She works around the sink hole that takes
dry leaves and garbage all summer.
In her memory, I am an almost abortion.
She plants marigolds with the tomatoes,
symbiotic bright suns
bursting between the rows.
Sometimes she knows, love
abounding, sometimes she overlooks
an entire season’s glut, and rot
carries us through winter.
In the cellar, plastic roses, night crawlers,
unfinished half-hearted projects,
the potatoes’ all seeing eyes and me
damp through my nightshirt.
No natural light filters in,
so I only know the earth’s eternal hour.
My mother, an unstable gardener,
tosses spare seeds into barren patches
of the backyard. We won’t know until spring.
Sometimes new buds shoot up
in the most unusual places,
but more often, they don’t.
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