STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
FREESIA MCKEE
Love fell down while circling your home for the right
door. She could’ve stepped in on your neighbors
or tried to enter the cellar or pushed hardly
against windows painted shut, but love found you
through the box of books you posted on Craigslist
and stored on your stoop–antipoems,
Angle of Ascent, Brautigan’s missives about
his penis, Hospice Plastics, and a thin volume
on the virtues of Dutch cycling. It was Friday
when love took an inappropriate seat to wait
for your pickup. She wanted, waited, and you came home:
“What did you think you could learn about love,
what possibly, from all of this reading?”
Love was the wrong person planting a garden
with a tape measure so that nothing touched
as if these living things were just foods
on a segmented cafeteria tray,
but I was rogue chicken bone, too-big crusts,
spring mix, variegated carnations crashing
in slowest motion after perfectionism, pummeled
pansy on a post-bloom conveyor belt,
saying tally-ho! and isn’t love supposed to be
that one documentary about a Buddhist nun in Korea
who doesn’t weed her vegetables? We watched
the whole thing on our trash-picked couch. I laid
my legs over yours like crosshairs. You said
it was too much. All I wanted from our garden was “go.”
You were a doting bee on purple asters
and whenever I opened the back gate trying
to reach my Subaru by the garage, I disturbed you.
We could’ve pruned a path, but I didn’t want
to remove your favorite spot.
Love was an overgrown hedge like a waterfall
of grape tendrils and a swell
of some red vine my landlord declared
actually invasive. I was mad at love for growing
once I sat on the grass in September
trying to write a sonnet about you
inside the fence’s sentence, wondering
what I knew of love at all, if it always meant
displacing or feeling displaced.
Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about history, place, gender, and genre through poetry, creative prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Recent work has appeared in Cleaver, Fugue, Puerto del Sol, petrichor, and Pensive Journal. She is the author of two chapbooks, How Distant the City (Headmistress Press) and Hummingbird Vows (Bottlecap Press). Freesia works as an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. You can read more of Freesia's work at FreesiaMcKee.com.
