Trees & Flowers

I watched the first weeds burgeon and decided this was the summer
I wouldn’t stop them, every inch of …

Carey Salerno 

Abínígo ch’iłbaa hózhóní
ch’ínádzi’,
Bí ch’ilátahózhóón nídiich’ah
dóó ádík’as,
Tłeé’go ch’łbaahózhóní
ná…

In the morning the flower
petal wakes up,
the flower petal yawns and
stretches,
the flower petal goes…

Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
                         speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
                                       of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

We should not mind so small a flower 
Except it quiet bring
Our little garden that we lost
Back to the …

Our neighbor’s orange tree is in full bloom fat and overgrown and spilling
sun-bright fists over our…

By Janiru Liyanage

a tender girl plucking the tender flowers

I myself in summer hours wove together flowers

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for…

As a quiet little seedling
    Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
    And this is what…

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat…

1

A path through the woods winds along a stream that flows into the ocean.

I look up at new leaves on …

By Mei mei Berssenbrugge

I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with …

stripped batting of cloud
glimpsed ligaments
dusk coming up under
lithographic, nib-hatchings
       instruments click
       the fine-sprung locust
       replicate dinge along hill-lines
       tailings of umber, the rust smudge
There is still that hemmed ocean of oaks
       the various reds, the somehow
       silver cast over the...

I am drinking a tree. Not exactly.
Not as exactly as the branches
lay, self-sectioned, over the round space
they had shaded, till workers
piled them at the curb. Not as exactly
as I planted it, seventeen years
past. A fig. The map
of its leaf. Before...

Every morning I pull up the blinds,

Letting in the trees into the study.

Their seasonal shadows first hover

Then blend into subconsciousness.

They speak to the desk, assembled

Into a four-legged beast, yet remains

Kin in their kingdom of wilderness.

They conjure up each other at...

Neighbors
pass, two lines of smoke
in hooded sweatshirts,

from the sober living house
next door, as I stand in the front yard
watering dirt.

I ask little of the garden—
mere inspiration—working
my shovel into bare earth.

While witnesses in neckties
carry scriptures, county sheriff
circles the block.

A couple fights
in...