Sarah C. Harwell

I will not tend. Or water, pull, or yank, I will not till, uproot, fill up or spray. The rain comes. Or not. Plants: sun-fed, moon-hopped, dirt-stuck. Watch as flocks of wild phlox appear, disappear. My lazy, garbagey magic makes this nothing happen. I love the tattered camisole of nothing. The world runs its underbrush course fed by the nothing I give it. Wars are fought. Blood turns. Dirt is a wide unruly room.

for Hannah The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll backwards in her head, her senses fold one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat. Every night she fights this silent way of being with all the whining ammunition that she has. She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small and willful links to life that carry her away. Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades with her stuffed animals. When she wakes, the sad circles disappeared, she blinks before she knows me. I have listened to one million breaths of her. And every night my body seizes when she leaves to go where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.