The sprouts which inch between my ribs—a horticulturist crouches by on his toes and shouts for them to come on up. When they crown, he runs out of patience, and snatches them between his knuckles, grasping the bud before it’s run into bloom. He turns me over; he plants a tuber between plates of sod; he plants his knees on my back and laughs, bright boy. Troweling into what might have remained, he digs his heels into my hinder.
From femmey sprouts hatched under my baby ribs, tinctures have been extracted, of such a hue, and such a hue, that barefoot poets and general peripatetics crave; likewise mawkish maidens in Milwaukee enclaves, bus stop loiterers, devotees of musical theater, Alsatians, Huskies, Sitka spruces, the rare earths of the periodic table. Or so the horticultural claimed, cackling over the phials of essence as I woozed on a slab in his chambers.
-2002
