After Robert Minervini’s “Improvised Garden II (Water Street)”

more and more of my friends

are becoming parents or partners

to plants

i have lived long and short enough

to remember the homegirls who

danced non-stop until three a.m.

the moon a parabola to our party

i’ve grown up enough

to see them sing their favorite slow songs

to herbs and succulents on their windowsills

in homes they sowed from dreams

the same sister who once dug a heel into

a man’s oblique now steals thyme with me

off of suburban bushes after brunch

in my neighborhood

when a friend locked herself out—

the same person who loses wallets &

laptop chargers & saves my broken earrings

with a hot-glue gun in her backpack—

this pinay macguyver

has me breaking into her house at night

where we be tiptoeing over her

forest of planted avocado jars

into her dark room to find warmth

the one whose living room and bedroom

once resembled a flea market  

or a super fly thrift store

and sometimes ikea—

the one who let me stay

she pays full price for potters &

vases—pronounced with the short

& therefore expensive ‘a’ sound

one womxn named her garden

“grown and sexy”

bringing new meaning

to the phrase garden hoe.

another who tops burritos with

white sauce dots like queen anne’s lace

also commits the crime of eating

one half at a time, you know, meal planning

with a sweet tooth, she drinks all of her horchata

& knows how

my family loves orchids &

she brings me them for my birthday

or any other tuesday

just because.

my mentee once congratulated me with

mint & basil & lavender & rosemary—

sweet aromas gifted when i

was leaving a job that left me to rot

for another that was not  an office

with no windows, no green

the women in my life reroot

over oceans & provinces & planes to cultivate

a geography of trunks & limbs

reminding me that to decompose

is the chance to live again

my mother’s rose bushes open wide this spring

in her backyard without her

my mother’s body is buried in a plot

of other bodies without mine

isn’t a cemetery a garden

of all we’ve loved?

and isn’t a garden full

of already dead things?

those who bury their beloved

put the gentlest parts

of themselves into soil

my mother is a seed

    the first woman i cannot unplant

       cannot pull or twist back into my hands

her orchids bloom reaching

how delicately the petals hang off

their stakes like gold, glass bangles on wrists

against disco lights   against the ambiance of a food truck menu

like lip gloss    how bougainvillea spill onto sidewalks

like how the sun stays lit

during an eclipse

the flowers in my garden grow lively

& loving & hungry from pods & cinderblocks

my friends are florists

they water & cry & bloom & sleep

from loss & clay & unfolded laundry

sometimes we grow tired & tough

sometimes you have to open a cactus   to cut

pieces off so we don’t grow stuck

arranging the flowers

in my garden

is a lattice

a life lesson

on how

to grow

up.

Copyright © 2020 Janice Lobo Sapigao. Originally published for the San José 11th Annual Poetry Invitational. Used with permission of the poet. 

When Milo was a kitten 

and spent the night

with us in the big bed,

curled like a brown sock

at our feet, he would

wake before daybreak,

squeak plaintively 

in his best Burmese,

cat-castrato soprano,

and make bread on our stomachs

until if one of us did not rise,

sleep-walk to the kitchen

and open his can of food,

he would steal under the covers,

crouch, run hard at us,

jam his head

in our armpits,

and burrow fiercely.

Probably he meant nothing by that.

Or he meant it in cat-contrary,

just as he did not intend

drawing blood the day

he bolted out the door

and was wild again

for nearly three hours.

I could not catch him

until I knelt, wormed

into the crawl-space

under a neighbor house

and lured him home

with bits of dried fish.

Or he meant exactly what he smelled,

and smelled the future

as it transmogrified out of the past,

for he is, if not an olfactory

clairvoyant,

a highly nuanced cat—

an undoer of complicated knots,

who tricks cabinets,

who lives to upend tall

glasses of Merlot.

With his whole body,

he has censored the finest passages of Moby-Dick.

He has silenced Beethoven with one paw.

He has leapt three and a half feet

from the table by the wall

and pulled down

your favorite print by Miró.

He does not know the word no.

When you asked the vet what 

kind of cat it was, she went

into the next room

came back and said,

“Havana Brown.”

The yellow eyes, the voice,

the live spirit that plays into dead seriousness

and will not be punished into goodness,

but no—

an ancient, nameless breed—

mink he says and I answer in cat.

Even if I was not

born in a dumpster 

between a moldy cabbage

and an expired loaf of bread,

I too was rescued by an extravagant woman.

Copyright © 2019 by Rodney Jones. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

I saw you as I passed last night,
    Framed in a sky of gold;
And through the sun’s fast paling light
    You seemed a queen of old,
Whose smile was light to all the world
    Against the crowding dark.
And in my soul a song there purled—
    Re-echoed by the lark.

I saw you as I passed last night,
    Your tresses burnished gold,
While in your eyes a happy bright
    Gleam of your friendship told.
And I went singing on my way;
    On, on into the dark.
But in my heart still shone the day,
    And still—still sang the lark.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 25, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

you tell the stars
don't be jealous of her light
you tell the ocean,
you call out to Olukun,
to bring her always to
safe harbor,
for she is a holy one
this woman twirling
her emerald lariat
you tell the night
to move gently
into morning so she's
not startled,
you tell the morning
to ease her into a water
fall of dreams
for she is a holy one
restringing her words
from city to city
so that we live and
breathe and smile and
breathe and love and
breathe her...
this Gwensister called life.

From Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums. Copyright © 1998 by Sonia Sanchez. Used with the permission of Beacon Press.