Hi all - please see my nascent new blog here.
https://luxannica.wordpress.com/
I hope to migrate all old work here, but that's where I'll be posting fresh work. Alas, the Blogspot tooling and UX has gotten creaky, and I needed something with less friction.
Photo of Corydalis solida “Beth Evans” from the author's garden
One single name stuck at the end of the binomial,
memento mori for a botanist and their dedication to
certain qualities of the plant: a marble bust set on
a plinth. The plinth has its say, though—irrupting
through pollen blown or carried in, stigma swelling
into seed, seedpod bursting out laughing as it sheds
its appended name, refusing to breed true. I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.
Young Gymnocladus dioicus stems with leaf scars visible.
My fingers press on these cold keys and shed
bits of skin too small to see. The wind presses,
too, slips through gaps in the window casings.
A busy wind, chilling my hands while ripping the
last of the winter abscission hold-outs on down.
Leaves shed, dropping off and piling, so slow to
dance. The scars on stems. (I search for the faint
scar on my ring finger, when I took a dull knife and
tried to cut a walking stick from a red osier. The knife
slipped, I cut myself—the shed blood, my red sap,
made payment then, payment now, for the poem.)
Volcanes de lodo, Buzau, Rumanía, 2016
Diego Delso
The wet ground swelling,
pregnant with something I
can’t see. A skin of silt stretched
over a depth, a muddy womb—
who is it that leans in close
to watch as every living thing
makes its way to light?
