MY DIRT CONTAINS MULTITUDES | Samantha Sharp

Found in the garden behind my house
in Endicott, New York,
Birthplace of IBM,
Home of the Square Deal:

Chamomile florets, apple-breathed,
a plump, tight-lipped toad,
wax-beans strung from unpitched bushes,
an aphid egg unhatched.

Glassy sheets of web with dew,
a half-eaten wild plum,
ladybug-speckled clover-leaf cover,
a pollen-coated snout.

Twisted heirloom-carrot roots,
an overripe, bruised tomato,
spots of fire-blight on twigs,
a piece of snakeskin, bleached.

Pages of a medical journal,
a pair of matted shoelaces,
12-gauge shotgun shells, unspent,
a Clydesdale figurine.

An empty box of Junior Mints,
data-entry keyboard gaskets,
one gift card to Starbucks, 2012,
wire-mesh full of glass.

An EPA identification number,
formaldehyde-based embalming fluid,
nitrate filmstock, benzo(k)fluoranthene,
trichloroethane (methyl chloroform), chlorobenzene,
acclimatization society, debt consolidation loans, pipeline
supercharger impeller superstructure stockholder melanoma heptachlor-epoxide
clean-up blue-chip cathode ray mono-pump slaughterhouse tax-cut jet-propulsion crypto
15 U.S.C. §3701 4-(4-amino-3-chlorophenyl)-2-chloroaniline 59 FR 7629 4-methyl-2-pentanone (methyl isobutyl ketone) 42 U.S.C. §2011 indeno(1,2,3-cd)pyrene 16 U.S.C. §1531 E2021008617





seasons of future-compost, layered,
sets and sets of barn-red gloves
in dirt.

Our neighborhood tabby with unnamed kittens,
a small claw-hammer, borrowed,

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Ovum | Rose Cobb

In the garden tonight, I cut free the growth points
of this years tomato crop, hoping to ripen their stubborn green fists.
Embryonic and deviant, fruits crouch like villains in the understory.

These dear girls, waxing metastatic
in their spring green, their chaste abundance.
I work against a metaphor for womanhood but fail.

I imagine the ovaries of my mother, grandmother.
Picture the rosary, unspooled,
a clutch of frogspawn in the cold fist of memory.

Seeds form in their jelly, a wet rope wrung
by the savory jazz of death.
Fecundity waits, bated. Dense and wicked as a black hole.

I picture the packed brown scales of milkweed roe,
wedded in silk to the air. Picture the monarchs,
their keenness of instinct.

I was, for a time, the last good kick
of a wintering cricket. The last whole note.
I was the strong brown river, packed with turtles.

Before, I willed God to remake me
and was made in the image of my mother.
Winter women– the tart irony of January’s desolation; its rare, intimate heat.

Winter women, an animal truth. I was made in the image of a liver.
A cervix. A brain. But tonight, in my hand, we are the earth’s brief fruit.
Evergreen and everlasting. My mother, her life burrowed in me like a seed.

Her laughter in my mouth.

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Rose Cobb is our Featured Writer in Vol.5. Consider subscribing to support Anodyne Magazine and its contributors. We pay our contributors dividends for each purchase! Plus, this is the only place you’ll find an ebook + print subscription combo.

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