A Sense of Belonging
There are a lot of good reasons to leave a place and one of them is that you hate everyone there and another is that everyone there hates you.
The ditches at the edge of the field were thick with poke, which I did like, even loved. The poison root of the poke grows down deep and snaggled like a mandrake. Likely you could make a doomed baby by bathing this tuber in buttermilk too.
Poke will drink cadmium and whatever heavy metals our phosphorous fertilizers leave behind. It will drink, it will grow tall, and put on those berries that bulge weird eyeballs at passersby.
I had to be so angry to become someone who didn’t need to be angry at all. The cowbirds stalk the ditch of the field eating the vitreous purple of such toxic fruit. I couldn’t have known how I’d miss them.
The ditches at the edge of the field were thick with poke, which I did like, even loved. The poison root of the poke grows down deep and snaggled like a mandrake. Likely you could make a doomed baby by bathing this tuber in buttermilk too.
Poke will drink cadmium and whatever heavy metals our phosphorous fertilizers leave behind. It will drink, it will grow tall, and put on those berries that bulge weird eyeballs at passersby.
I had to be so angry to become someone who didn’t need to be angry at all. The cowbirds stalk the ditch of the field eating the vitreous purple of such toxic fruit. I couldn’t have known how I’d miss them.
Source: Poetry (May 2023)