Pseudopsychosis.

I brought you flowers
the rain is the face 
of a macadam// a moon
before abandonment grows
in the weeds

my mourning garden
shunning my hands in the absence
of throat weeds; and my bones are my father’s,
restless;
sheltered a sad death
in the thorns, my child,
the cat does not know penance
like you. A body’s destitution in the sun,
the delirium in her 
as plant prostitution 
of the ladybugs bind/twist 
like a redolent heart

I called her my garden
just once
the kind of dying 
that nobody wants

that nobody stalks for, and I did not beg 
to make you Snow White
as my father bedded dry soil,
no I just wanted to disencumber your faces
before I abandon you.

You overslept rain
I cannot outlive or love you
as I am tired
of each humiliation 
as your ghost rusts like madrigals,

like father always said—to add another to keep them out
but they danced in 
the spit of water
to be my death 
to keep the roses.

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Written for the 7/13/2021 dVerse prompt where we write a poem about gardening, or something germane to it. I based this piece on reality as I recently had a little garden bowl of cacti and succulents that my cats went into.

Yes, they’re fond of cacti and apparently masochism. I personally believe they used the thorns to pick their teeth with.

My garden of death (or what it will be if I don’t plant the remaining ones outside soon), how fitting.

Also Happy 10th, dVerse. 🙂