Bindweed

come into my garden of nightmares. look at the boxes my pa built. see the cedar sheen? my ma’s sealant. her mesh bags too, strung for field mice. the shovel? pa forgot it. neither returns. only rain, showers and storms, so i prune pea sprouts mottled with rot. the fairy eggplants dangling above barren pumpkins get my secrets; every web in the garden knots me to the past. when ma fell, my arms stayed caulked to my sides. the jar pa labeled SPOILED fogs on the shelf beside unpaid water bills puckered with mold. on the wet window, pa’s dimple and ma’s crescent eyes multiply in distorted spheres, like they’ve come back to watch me work. bindweed braids its blush through my toes, laces my flip-flops in green. a county NOTICE flaps on the fence, a watering ban and fines for waste; still, i drag the hose out like a bad habit. the garden presses a cask to my chest and drops me to my knees. call it reckoning, call it relapse — i name what grows here: mildew, debt, bindweed, and what i keep watering anyway. i down its sake, clutch the cherry tree’s roots, moss damp against my cheek. the shishi-odoshi, its hollow clack, splits its bamboo spine as the shovel rusts deeper in the soil, the handle pointing nowhere, like a finger connecting the distant dots of stars.

* * *

Lineage

“Her mouth, Ma’s,” my aunt said; “Grandma’s brow,” my mother corrected. In our family, likeness is evidence. I turn the phone face-down, my pocket token on the ledger, blinking with missed calls I let rot. The dog never cared for faces. She loved salt on knees, the socket of a tired shoulder, the way i smelled after bad news. Sixteen years: the heart-shaped tag heating my thumb, night’s sake-glass rings silvering the oak, a laurel leaf filed from a trophy into dust. Prestige left, proof right; they balance each other like teeth in a cracked smile. After the dog went, the garden exceeded itself, bindweed through the bloom, mildew in the lung. I thought floodwater; I thought the necktie of lightning; the shovel’s lip shaped my name without vowels. tomato cages slumped like bad vertebrae. Then bluebonnets muscled through the screen, planted, forgotten, a mockingbird stitching insomnia to the blinds, forcing a sprig of song against my face until i almost recognize it.