DANIEL BRENNAN

 Crabgrass

                                It’s growing warm. 
I think of home and its sloping lawn,
its many invaders,
the living things that
come in uninvited, as if
our invitation matters. 
Burrowing in plain sight.
Crabgrass, sprouting up
in clumps like a patchy beard.
I think of the pooling shade
beneath our dogwood tree,
planted at my mother’s request
long before I could name its
flowering buds. I think of my hands,
still smooth, still free of the blemishes
that growing old collects; those hands
slipping through the cool morning
dew. I think of that scent,
of upturned earth as I pull at the stems
of weeds, rending the root
skyward, the way soil lodges beneath
untrimmed nails.

                            I remember
what it meant to push back
against the world, its hungers,
in the pursuit of perfection.
Pursuing what we believed was paradise.
I think of our house, with its
windows sagging like my grandmother’s
droopy eyes, whose walls began
to peel under the beat of rain and time,
a home we’ve now surrendered to what was,
the green and heat claiming it
as it claims all things with a steady
heartbeat. The house that gave way as all childhood visions must,
ghosts of my family unspooling
amidst the English ivy and azaleas.

                            No lawn to speak of now,
no yard to comb and clean;
the things that grow in my city
do so without consequence,
without a second guess.
But here I am, grown, limbs sturdy
and weathered, and still
I feel the weight of
of those things ripped from the
land in my hands,
the scratching touch of
living things returning,
hungry, unchanging somehow
in spite of my ambitions.

                                I am learning what the
root and stem had whispered
all those years ago upon the
lawn where my body became
so much more than just one thing, where it
became the rhythm and burn
of enduring the only way we know how.
I hear the blades of grass, they hover in a hum
to me now across the decades;
they promise that
all things can grow back somehow.

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and resident of NYC. Brennan hopes to juxtapose the vastness of our rapidly changing natural world with the daunting intimacies the body presents. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, The Garfield Lake Review, Sky Island Journal, and ONE ART, among others.