Alexandra Teague
Two POEMS
Garden Elegy
In the Ozarks, winter light pries itself apart into
cafeteria fluorescence spotting the silverware
a chill, bleak silver as Frank tells me about green beans,
cabbages and radishes planted inside the high stone walls
of his imagination—what next summer he’ll grow.
Jars of pickles: a future of cucumbers, each still seedless,
the dirt frozen as the ice buttressing the salad bar bowls
where Frank complains as always about the bacon bits
drifting into the lettuce again, splotched on the hard-boiled eggs
like dirt-red hail. On his aunt’s land, somewhere tick-
deep in the Ozark fields, he’ll farm and finish five hundred
pages of the first novel of a trilogy, which must be a trilogy,
as the fields must be beet-greened and radished, verbed and
herbed into a future I hardly think of, eighteen and ordinary
young that winter I eat each lunch with Frank, who’s positive
for HIV, full-blown to AIDS at thirty, back to school
to study writing so he can finish his novel next year, by 1993, if
(though we do not say it). (Isn’t this why anyone tells
stories at all?) His thin arms gesturing the French-fry-sticky air
with tines that are pitchforking the first melty mud, sowing
not this wilting iceberg, but fresh bunches of crisp-edged lettuce
that taste like earth and good weather. That willfully, wildly grow.
Neighbor Poem
Praise the perfect bowels
of the woman on the corner, who has never
known the too-urgent present rushing
through her, who has never squatted in shrunk,
scraggly bushes, never felt herself seized like a dark field of trees
by a lightning storm, never woken to her body split
by the new horizon of a scar—window down, wind
from the beaches rushing in, sand somewhere, sand—
my intestine burst then like a toxic peach—white stars in place of sight, and
the bathroom spinning like the ceiling fan, and the
car like a streak of pain, streak of emergency so blurry, blurred I
could hold onto nothing long; praise the scalpel, the tubes, the green
stomach juices running through my un-understandable body
where food—still, years later—only sometimes fits, where I have turned inside-out
now this soft green plastic bag to gather dogshit, lovingly, bit by bit
from this woman’s lawn, my dog pulling toward her flowers
made of beaten tin, their unfailing bouquet: no uncontrolled decay, no
flailing spray of real green and petals ’droop; praise her for living
for so long without a single sploop of misbegotten shit
against their rootless roots, the grass clipped close as a bitten nail
as she rails about the many ways we’re wrong, the dog and I,
how uncontrolled, how too-alive, how rude: how would you like it
if I came and shit on your lawn?—praise hyperbole for the lucky times
it doesn’t stray to too-big truth; praise “seeing stars” for staying
in cartoons; praise bodies that do not burst like peaches, bombs, or figs;
all ticking time that stays inside its clock; praise perfect skin and dogs
that never learn to walk, tail-tucked, with fear, were never strays,
were born already leashed to a single, righteous route. What luck
to know your truth and everybody’s truth, to never feel your body slip
or need to squat—praise her, this woman who will not
someday need my yard or someone’s yard or a friend to wipe
the crevice of her ass as the river of her blood and bowels bucks
the rocks of life; praise her voice trimming at the air like shears, my dog
sniffing oblivious, enfurred, her second coat ruffling in even now
for winter, though it’s August, because when does time
fit perfectly inside our bodies with their old corduroy
scars? I got distracted by the world. I’m so sorry. Praise this bag
I tie tightly. The shame, I refuse (poor Puritan
I am in this messy garden) to carry.
Alexandra Teague is the author of [ominous music intensifying] (Persea 2024), three prior poetry collections, Spinning Tea Cups: A Mythical American Memoir, and a novel, as well as co-editor of Bullets into Bells. She is professor of creative writing at University of Idaho where she co-directs the MFA program.