Ode to Your Plants by Jon Lemay
I had every intention of keeping your plants alive.
I remember how much you laughed when I said,
I can barely take care of myself, for God’s sake,
let alone another living thing—because you knew
it was true. I realized a month after you died
that your father had taken them back to New York
along with everything else of yours. In their absence, I noticed
how much sunlight streams through our kitchen window.
I wish I had left a note to your father.
Feel free to leave the plants here, I should have written.
I can keep them alive. I’ll learn.
Other poems I enjoyed reading this week: (read the full poem in the links)
"We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low, The tap is dripping peacefully; The saucepan shadows on the wall Are black and round and plain to see." -Camomile Tea by Katherine Mansfield "I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:
this grief. How slow the body is to realize. You are never coming back." -Slowly by Donna Masini
"I want to tell you: while you do your sheepish, poor-me routine, your victim-in-distress sighing, poor people are being murdered, prisoners are being zapped with fifty-thousand volts of electricity to make them behave. O hollow-hearted, New Age activist that you are, tell us in your poetry how cooly you’ve risked your life helping refugees cross the border."
"There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light." -Happiness by Paisley Rekdal
Recommended Listening:
Links of the Week: Wong Ping: Jungle of Desire + 33 Oscar-Qualified Animated Shorts // Dust Kid' (Munjiai) Unporn Popshot Where is my mind, Tracy J Lee Botanical: A Collection of Impressionistic Plant Specimens Captured Against Greenhouse Glass Frank Lloyd Wright's 10 traits that every artist needs.