Movement IV / Compost and Weather

Compost Confessional

I told the zucchini
my secrets last night.
It said nothing

  • 24 in book order
  • 38 lines
  • 8 stanzas

01

I told the zucchini my secrets last night. It said nothing but it softened in my hand.

02

I don’t want fertility, exactly. I want decomposition with benefits. I want my longing to get moldy, to bubble a little.

03

I want to whisper into a bed of rotting lettuce and have it whisper back: you were always edible, baby, you just needed to wilt a bit.

04

My compost pile is not a metaphor, it’s a relationship archive.

05

There’s the rind of our last trip, the pit of that argument, a peel still sticky with what we almost became.

06

I buried your name in coffee grounds, but it keeps sprouting mushrooms shaped like little hearts that know too much.

07

I sit beside the steaming heap and tell it: I’m not ready to grow again, but I am ready to stink in new directions.

08

Let the worms have me. Let the queer earth suck me back into itself. I don’t need seeds if I can be soil.