A few weeks before your wife left you went
feral, showed up to the houses of friends
around dinner time,
and I was out front pulling tearthumb
to put in a banana tree I’d traded for
with late-August peaches at the market
(when I still worked markets,
the year it kept hot through fall
and peaches stayed dense and true).
I was digging to shift the amended soil
where it could do the most good,
at the bottom, away from my bad mood
garden: wolfsbane, belladonna, rue—
I’d been alone so long,
trading for plants all summer—
when you stopped by to say bananas
wouldn’t bear and might die
in a DC minute
of plunging cold. But that was the point
while I tried what came my way
without a care for winter.
After studying fiction and poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, C.C. Reid earned an MFA from the University of Maryland. She’s grateful for support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Cuttyhunk Island Artists’ Residency, The Writer’s Center, and The Center for Book Arts.