Your file opened into a bunch of triangles and boxes. I don’t even know how you did that. I mean, it had exclamation points. And they felt intentional. Maybe Margaret is planting daffodils. Or maybe she has walked into whole new worlds so many times autocorrect has renamed her Marvelous. Maybe she stops correcting it, starts thinking it means … No. Who cares what it means, you’d say. And that is exactly what I hope is true of this whole morning. I’m supposed to be planting fennel. John says swallowtails love fennel, and I want to read the geometry of their wings with my own wide eyes. But at the Hilbert’s hotel across the street, another neighbor I’ve never seen stands on the front porch. And I can’t look away. A cigarette in one hand and a phone in the other, she shifts her weight so wild that hibiscus flowers sway. She puts the maxi in dress, and the clouds curling through the sunrise were born from her long drags. Whatever she’s saying, it must be intentional. Her arms slice the day into tolerable doses and keep slicing like the second second hand of a clock. Yesterday a fly disguised as a bumble bee landed in my line of sight and died. I mean, just up and left this plane of existence. Went static on the edge of a small rock on the edge of a water bowl. At a young age, I thought I was going to die. Thought that’s what it meant to have to go to the hospital and I buried my face in Mom’s blouse until I could breathe smooth again. By now, I’ve memorized the directions for hope in the face of . I rip open the seed packet. Never mind that the seeds expired eight years ago. I’ll tear myself away. Water dice into dirt. I’ll wake up tomorrow and refill the pail.
Amanda Russell is an editor for The Comstock Review and a Pushcart nominee with publications in The Shore, Gulf Stream Magazine, and elsewhere. Her poem “The Blizzard of 1888” was a finalist for the 2024 Kowit Prize, selected by Ellen Bass. Amanda has two poetry chapbooks available: https://poetrussell.wordpress.com. Instagram: @poet_russell
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