Scavenging I notice boxes

        poking out of your blue bins standing at attention for the trash collectors

in this little town where the only recycling services are

called chickens

Far from France where recycling is radically inclusive of everything, grime and all

But I am back here now

Texas woods

this year

making gardener friends who

ghost

me after they learn my politics

But the sun doesn’t

care

young boys moving dirt

a smooshy cherub with cherry cheeks tagging along

their nurse grandma pricing

the mass destruction of this

rose vine

hideously archaically

pink

a vine whose briars are mass destruction

My dirtpile can’t help showing off

blooms everything that floats by it

I owe the begonias a hundred dollars

                for blooming naked thrown into the yard, not even planted

    would that we could all do this!

My cough subsides after I put some wanky concoction into me whose name I can’t say for fear of being lumped together with the political wackjobs who tout it.

But it keeps me alive

I think this week we’re on my forty fifth round of covid.

The planter is finally put together

that stepped over the “assembly required” line fully

into carpentry

and I learn

I should have been applying sealant with

paper

towels all these years that I avoid

finishing my wood for fear of

mineral spirit use incompetency. MSUI

My idiotic home word processor with no logic keeps unindenting everything I type. 

So begins a gardener’s summer on the first day of a poetry challenge