What Grows When You Water with This Much Want

this year, the garden feels higher stakes.
I am dead set on life, my hands
blistered from the tilling.
what it would mean
if the garden failed. we all know what
it would say about me, about
my hands & their killings.
I dig the holes with reverence,
determined to be good.
it’ll be months until
these become graves, & the
thought nearly crushes me.
when I transplant the
seedlings, I touch them so
delicately that I nearly break
open with tenderness. I gather
the soil around them
perfectly, as a mother tucks
her children into bed, praying
to whatever god will
see them through til morning.

The Damage

we came home to roofers
stripping our home of old &
tattered shingles &
tossing them
horribly, casually
onto our garden, &
though we rushed outside to
triage the situation,
so much was crushed beyond
repair. we hold this grief
badly because we did not
expect it, because
we had both been sure
to take our medicines,
because they were just flowers
& herbs, after all, right?
but of course, our speaking
of the gardens had become
its own sort of language;
did you see that
the rosemary is coming back
was an offering, an olive
branch that once warmed us
when we were on the
brink of freezing solid.
so it meant something serious,
then, when the garden was
damaged as it was.
we forgot how to speak
to each other in anything other
than a yell, & our home
felt like an interrogation room,
so quick we were
in our grief
to assign blame to each other.
when, in a week, we saw
that the plants were rebounding,
rising from where they’d been
flattened, we tried to repair
what was broken in us,
too, but no amount
of sun or water could
touch it.

Emily Adams-Aucoin is a poet from Upstate New York who now writes from South Louisiana. Her work has been published in three anthologies, as well as in Electric Literature’s The Commuter, The Rappahannock Review, Variant Literature, Meridian, and The Chaffin Journal, among other publications.