ANNA LAURA REEVE

Trying

1.
Leaving the party on a pretext,
I return to the second-story apartment.

I could walk out of each window
onto hackberry branches,

or emerge from the bedroom skylight, dimmed
with rainwater deposits,
fine cracking,
into the crown of a hackberry.

What do people want, when they want
children? Souls

from the next world, or the previous.

Maybe our lives have not yet been lived.
Maybe our lives have never
been lived.

2.

Little shoots, little eggs,
you wither

and go down with the massa damnata
to the place where the unformed
rest.

In my body, in my pelvic cavity,
I spin the wheel of the seeder,
dropping eggs in furrows. At the farm
I seed clover, vetch,
rye, and oats over four acres
but nothing comes up in the fall,
or spring.

A flock of doves bursts into flight
as we drive past—did they eat the seed?
Did early warmth coax the shoots out
and then kill them with hard frosts?

3.

End of March and the martins
            and red-winged blackbirds are back,
      & song sparrows
      with their little epiglotti.

My basil seedlings keel over
   one after the other, damping off.

Our farmer says, “Healthy plants
       can fight pests.” She says,
“Healthy soil doesn’t need fertilizer
      in the growing season.”

           When the farm’s bright February seedlings
faded pinks and purples in the greenhouse, starved
by nutrient-poor soil, we started over,

adding handfuls of fertilizer,
           soaking new shoots
     in fish emulsion. Direct-seeded
though it was early.

Tiny seed leaves, opening yourselves
      so joyfully to the glow of my apartment grow-lamp,
   what do you want to be? 

Anna Laura Reeve is a poet living and gardening near the Tennessee Overhill region, historic land of the Eastern Cherokee. She’s working on her first poetry collection. Previous work of hers has appeared or is forthcoming in Jet Fuel Review, Humana Obscura, Canary, The Racket Journal, Cutthroat, Fourteen Hills, and others. Read more: www.annalaurareeve.com