Sosha Pinson
Re-entering The Garden
Mother’s warning hissed
let me tell you a secret
if you’re on your period
stay away from the garden
the scent of blood
carries, kills the cucumbers
and if I had any of that sticky fluid pooling
in my uterus to be released as a natural herbicide
I swear
it all traveled to my cheeks.
Her white shadow fingers
burned my wrist where circulation
evaded Mother’s touch
as if my blood was ashamed
to make contact with her hands
as if when I ran up the hillside garden
my young body screamed Woman! Woman!
You do not yet know
your power! and I— desperate
to disown this blood that made me
ordinary. I was so strong,
I carried nothing
grew wild in the mountains like blackberries I loved
sticky purple juice
stained hands, lips, blue jeans.
It’s been years
since any cucumbers
were planted in that garden
rows overgrown with weeds
I’m free to bleed again
carry my blood and step between
unseeded rows
no coarse hand to plant, nourish, or keep me
from burying
every discarded egg of my womanhood here
everything that cannot grow. Beloved garden
once knew watermelons, tomatoes,
squash, beans, corn—I believed my mother
when she told me
I was a threat—
none of us will break ground here now
or blanket it with horse manure
and when I stand at the edge of the hill
between drooping brown sunflower heads bent
in prayer, I can see the stone
marked with plastic floral arrangements
that won’t die when unattended
but fade monthly, bleached by the sun.
~
Sosha Pinson is a born and bred Kentuckian transplanted into Northern Virginia. She received her MFA in Poetry from Drew University and her BFA in Creative Writing from Morehead State University. Her poems have recently been found or are forthcoming in Minerva Rising, Eunoia Review, and Dirty Chai among others. To fund her writing habit she works as an office assistant for a commercial plumbing company. She is obsessed with game shows and small animals.
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