The Plant Ladies

 

View this email in your browser Sandra Alcosser The Plant Ladies I was sent to my room to think things over So I sat with white dog On a ledge Twenty stories high in golden haze Concrete belfry Breathing black oxides from the East River Drive Watching the turd-eating seagulls dive. Periodically a maroon Cadillac passed Under my window and tooted It’s Now or Never into the wind. Friend Dorothy on the eleventh floor Had all the best shrinks Gurus Five brilliant husbands And a C-R group But she never got solved either. Stacked together in a dead-faced totem we Stared west at the Statue of Liberty. There was no choice. But Burpee Seeds saved us. Nursery stock Like broken nerve endings Bugged Rotted. We pick pick pick, deadhead Loosen the earth, massage the roots Whisper Play Bach flute sonatas and They survive. We become the plant ladies. Our souls spore-borne Heart-shaped gametophytes Descend Lie like liverworts On sweet sour soil. Bodies left behind in a room of wallflowers and Baby’s Tears. No one notices. Fern women Hairy creepers With untouchable Head likessores Up from swamps, thick and malarial We possess the seed, the sex, the fruit. Wind gives us rebirth: Sweet Everlasting, Virgin’s Bower Corn Cockle Sunflower Moonflower fanned by ten-inch Tongue of hawkmoth Darwin’s dream Bush bean Columbine Silver Queen And Dorothy calls herself Iris. Detectives on our trail But we do not fit the description. Scabs, cankers, slugs Such, pierce, chew Sow bugs Maggots Six-spotted leafhoppers Crotch-weavers Coddling caterpillars. We try not to be eaten or taken alive.   From issue no. 71 (Fall 1977)