Poems

We pay to have the scruffy yews replaced by red elf coreopsis and balloon flowers, the dwarf variety, each cutting selected for its sweet bee perfume, the whole fenced in by fuschia-bright phlox. It’s a good plan, well-researched and weed-tended, until the morning I spy a wild invader’s stalk, rising like a Trojan horse with spine so tall it quickly outpaces the lame domesticated roots, races upward, one foot, two, ten, each leap a succulent invitation to butter

The farmlands are mostly gone now, paved over, plowed under, transformed by tar and girded by concrete and order. But there, on the curve of the cul-de-sac, the wild creeps in. Mansions consume large lots, sport cultured lawns awash with weed killer that seeps and runs and strangles the native flowers, but deep within the curated grass, the wild creeps in. The wooded groves, the prairie fields struggle to retain purchase amid the plats with throwback names: Settler’s Walk