Happy National Poetry Month! We are honored to bring you poems from a special project, “Poetry in Bloom,” a collaboration with O, Miami Poetry Festival, poets Sandra Beasley and Neil de la Flor, and Dolly’s Florist. For all of April, these poems about flowers are being folded into origami and sent out with bouquets from Dolly’s. They also appear on O, Miami and on SWWIM in a variety of accessible ways, including audio, ALT text, and more.
In the garden I did not grow, but now minister to, the measure of my success is cactus, cactus, palm, then hibiscus, shouting red after recent rain. A fig tree grows confused among another tree, not yet overtaking it. I thought I could barter: my effort for your green, my attention for succulents plumping in the sun. I thought I’d be a natural at nature. I was proud to know eucalyptus from dragonfly. To have my own tree bark, mottled. Now I’m learning I know very little. My weeding is vague or else ferocious. I imagine gardens in Japan: pristine, elegant, organic. Sri Lankan tropical splendor. What’s an Argentine garden like? I can picture only bougainvillea rising hot pink over a white, white wall. My sister’s been there. I’ll ask her. My garden keeps metaphoring. Birth. Knowledge. Territory. Are these ones over here weeds or just bad at sharing? They keep clambering across the ground, their roots choking every other root. When I pull them out, deep red is their underground color. Here is a small bush, entirely dead. I can’t do a thing about it. It wasn’t meant to be, bush, and we both know I had no plans to keep you trimmed to a rounded shape anyway. I’m learning I grow unevenly. I plough myself under the cool shadows, I pout if you refuse me even a little, but I also cultivate patience. What’s the next season, then? Can I survive another drought? I’ve thought about it. I’ve found myself out here on my hands and knees. Sweaty, unmapped, full of dumb hope.
Chloe Martinez is a poet and scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of Corner Shrine (Backbone Press, 2020), which won the 2019 Backbone Press Chapbook Competition, and Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works, forthcoming 2021). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Waxwing, Shenandoah, The Common, and elsewhere. She teaches at Claremont McKenna College. See more at www.chloeAVmartinez.com.
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I love my Darwinian garden, but I route out invasive since humans put them there. Fig trees can destroy other trees but I give mine a pass for it’s sweet fruit.