“In the Farm Garden,” oil on cardboard, by Olga Wisinger-Florian, c. 1898.
My father lost his job in a season
of snowstorms, unable to handle
the roads even with tire chains
on the old yellow Buick. I was five.
When winter thawed, Mom and I planted
a garden behind our rental: salvia,
marigolds, morning glories for a trellis,
bachelor buttons. As we dug the bed,
cleaning out grass and weeds thick
against cement blocks, she instructed me
about seeds, how temperature and rain,
soil and air, work together
to crack them open. She culled the dead
matter, remnants of another tenant—
blossoms and stems spent into dried
straw. Among the withered plants—
a small bird, a goldfinch, still,
tangled in spurge and bindweed.
Mom pulled him free, sent me
inside to fetch toilet paper and the empty
kitchen matchbox we’d discarded
that morning. She spread the tissue
across my fleshy palm, placed
the bird on top. We inspected the body,
wings, markings. She helped me roll
the tissue around him, several turns,
lay him in the box which she slid
open. A gold corpse, a winding
sheet, the matchbox she’d reached for
every day to light the gas stove.
We buried him in the garden, leveled
the ground, lined out furrows for our seeds,
pushed them into the soft earth.
All summer we weeded and watered.
Morning glories curled, purple
blooms, eyes shut to noon—
the narrow plot clotted with color,
salvia red as blood, flocks of marigolds.
Annette Sisson lives in Nashville, TN. Her poems are published in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, The Citron Review, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. Her first book Small Fish in High Branches was published by Glass Lyre Press, and her second, Winter Sharp with Apples, is questing for a publisher. Her poem “Fog” won the 2019 Porch Poetry Prize, and her poems have been finalists in Frontier Poetry’s New Voices contest, the Fish Anthology, and other contests.
