Pruning Burning Bushes. Sarah M. Wells

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      The landscape sighs,

      breathes with the gardener

      who stands back,

      fists on hips.

      Climbing the American Metal Playground Slide

      I am the groove in the “R” at the center

      rolling forward, narrative ornate

      because I have repainted my primer

      of private history emerald green,

      replacing the rust-red grit I inherited. . .

      though it might only be rouge,

      a ruse of erudition over ignorance,

      making rubies from the affairs

      of faith and farms. I trace the space

      between the dirt and my fingertips anyway,

      as if to lift the elements of my ribs

      from their fissures, a superficial rinse,

      surface shimmer. The root of my fruit

      is still bruised at the base of the tree.

      This rhetoric of theology follows me, I am

      swallowed in iambs of nursery rhymes

      and grace, grandmother of forgiveness

      who handed me the caramel-coated apple

      and said eat all the way to the seed.

      The remaining core is this verse I climb,

      every rung branching back

      to our revolutionaries. This earth

      is ours, its harvest, its rot. This ladder

      has our dirt tucked between the crevices

      of every letter. I reach and reach,

      polish whatever skin I can and trip

      over the broken treads, all repeat

      American, American, American,

      until I reach the peak and slide, hot metal burning.

      Ohio

      I. Against the Ground

      I was wheat-field flat and growing

      into rolling foothills. Somewhere in me

      were illuminated cities waiting for dawn,

      but my factory towns slipped into dusk,

      their single-panes broken against mid-day light.

      I did not see myself deciduous,

      shedding cherry blossoms like wilted promises.

      The spruce with its blush of blue growth

      led me to believe I was evergreen, but even that

      cannot withstand six months of winter salt, of ash.

      Snow melts before it hits the earth

      as rain in a season I pretend is spring

      because the crocus and daffodil return

      and the factories churn out shopping marts

      and parking lots filled with rusted pick-up trucks.

      I wait, perched on my steel I-beam,

      for the college students to come home,

      but it is spring, and the frost returns to kill the buds

      before they’ve bloomed. The Earth turns,

      pushes fieldstones into my hands for harvest

      before the plow restores the hollowed stalks

      of last year’s crop into the dirt. Earthworms

      labor alongside the farmer who toils

      against the ground, ready for the slow shiver

      of crops, slow billow of hope.

      II. Soup of the Day

      I only knew the many ways to cook

      zucchini because there was so much of it

      and I was tired

      of fried, tired of bread, tired of grilled.

      I do not sauté; I sauce, I boil, I butter and boy,

      my boys grow tall.

      But now I am old. Unyielding. I do not produce

      as much food as I used to. My fields are named

      suburban neighborhoods.

      I eat the meat of other states and export

      grain-fed college kids. I do not know

      how to behave

      in this marketplace, how to diversify my menu,

      integrate new ingredients. Entrees remain the same.

      I do not change.

      III. Histories

      I hold my histories

      like apologies,

      named the river Cuyahoga and walk

      a crooked path past Flats

      of abandoned restaurants, wander

      Geauga County trapping

      the raccoon here

      and releasing it there,

      out of sight,

      trace the large creek that meanders

      the southern border, utter Ohio

      and do not know or remember

      the Seneca Indians

      would not have added “river”

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