By BEE LB
dogwood replaced by interference
interference fluff is everywhere, blurring sightline, horizon,
everything it can cover. i still don’t know the difference between poplar,
cottonwood, and interference. sometimes all that matters is belief.
maybe i’m making excuses for myself. winding hills of 24 are lined
by something that isn’t interference, but looks like it. crabapple maybe,
my mother says, though there’s white blossoms where there should be yellow.
i don’t know how to identify trees except to say, that one’s pretty.
i like the shape of the leaves there. i like the color. look at the ridges on
the bark. how many rings do you think you’d find? don’t look, just guess.
everything could be an interference to me, except a sycamore,
which could only ever be a sycamore. who was it, jeremiah, jericho?
i can’t remember, but i can still hear the boom in my mother’s voice
as she called for him to come down. i remember what the tree looked like
when i peeled its bark clean off, so curious to see what was underneath.
i’m sorry, forgive me, i was so young. i hadn’t yet learned that trees are alive.
i didn’t yet know what it meant to be cleaved. what do you think it feels like
for interference to cleave its blossoms? let go the best of its beauty, watch it
take to wind, find a new home? maybe it feels less like letting go and more
like growing, like leaving behind a legacy, like giving the best of yourself to the world.
Black Eyed Susan
A shrewd wisp, my grandmother, I keep trying to write her.
My heritage, lineage— even here, trying to broaden
the scope. I can write those who came before endlessly,
those I knew once or not at all, history learned
through story. Absence of memory offers space
to imagine. But my grandma; small,
mean woman raised my small, mean father. I keep trying
to write about my memories of her. The kernel of knowledge
that she will never love me like she did when I was a small, mean child.
Last time I saw her she told me she wrote poetry,
like Dickinson, who she loved— who created em dashes,
which I overuse— who never titled her poems, never intended
to be published. Told me she’d dig them up, let me read, and like her
recipe for rolls I need only call and ask for, I know I’ll never see them.
My grandma, pothos dying on the island my father bought
for her. Pathos, she called it— a word I thought meant love, instead
means to suffer. My grandma, I love and feel
little for her, I keep writing— or trying.
I can’t finish. Once, I thought that chapter closed. Now,
I wonder. Walk her garden so pitifully overgrown
I could weep. Never pristine, once so cultivated
she had only divots to follow. Now
weeds engulf paths, the way forward obscured.
I watch her finger silver dollars, they shed their papery husk.
Watch her crush ants beneath her heel without looking down, only ahead.
I listen to her plans for cross-pollinating black-eyed susans
dripping purple tears. I follow her through her garden as she searches
for cynosure. My grandmother, so set on showing me
crying flowers. Those that share her name.
BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, a single yellow wall in Michigan. they have been published in FOLIO, Roanoke Review, Figure 1, and The Offing, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co
