Sarah Barber

You give me the slip between garlic and lilies, as if this is what comes of my unprotected loves, of my hands in the sweet earth, their willful miscegenation of the border bed where you’re tucked in deep with tulips, too, like just one more of their heart-freaks: a fluke diamondine flake, a thin vein gone gold. Being mine, you’ll grow up a girdled tree, girt with a ringed-around root, nothing like the fruitful vine of good wives—one of which I’ll never be so, my not-love-knot, you may as well come up instead like a kiss: the one wind gives to rouse the Japanese maple, October’s aerialist, its bright aureole in the last late sun a red mouth, opening.

When we finally flip it over the fireflies are out. The neighbor boy has had his stitches in so I can finally admit I think it is all fantastic: the suck of the spark plug undone, the stuck blade bent into the guard, and the sound of the hammer’s head reshaping the metal. In this our suburban Eden we’ve only a teenage Adam too dreamy to manage his motorized scythe and silly Eve leaving her coffee cups and plastic plant pots behind in the grass. Though it’s a long way from a fall, this spring’s first disaster, I did like the thin thread of red on his upper lip, and I like my mower turned over among the glowworms, a monstrous dandelion as unnatural as we are, out in a garden, with our untidy golds and our dangerous sharps.