Windthrow Rare on Established Specimens
No wonder it’s called milk thistle, that purple
bauble with its Areola of thorns. Milk is prickling
in me again– letdown, they call it.
My eldest feint-hugs the Suaharo to glimpse
my weather, so quick am I to panic. Her laugh,
the automatic sprinklers. We walk the children round
the block, past the marmalade cat on the corner,
the cat so eager for our hands to stroke his back,
the cat my husband fears has fleas, the cat
whose tail’s tip my son’s small fingers graze.
Here crushed granite in lieu of grass.
They call it fill– it can’t. Nowhere
for a budding Alice to sink and gaze skyward.
That milk thistle I mentioned doesn’t belong
here, nor do we, nor does the hybridized
Chilean mesquite– it’ll bust up your sidewalks.
Consider instead the deep-rooted Velvet variety,
not often a cause for heaving hardscape. If
you plan on staying, that is, long enough
to plant, to hang a swing from the branches.
We won’t lodge in any passing fur,
just a family taking the air
past the beckon and chastise of honey
locusts whose thorns modify a mammoth’s hunger,
lest it lean too hard, strip their bark. They don’t know
there’s nothing that hungry anymore.
Thus concludes A Month Of… Boundaries. And we usher in A Month Of… Dreams: Find the Stuff Fiction is Made Of. We encourage you to come share your stories at the live show! If you post a story about the task in the comments here, you get into the show for free.
A Month Of
Stage 773 1225 W. Belmont
Wed Sept 9th 7:30-10:00
$10 free with a posted story or shared dish
