1.
This slug is first to go
stuck under a plastic six-pack
nosing the roots of lemon gem marigolds—
with a snap of my wrist it drops
from the trowel, hits the dirt
under my boot.
I’m good at this. None of its slime
(protective no doubt) touches my glove.
This earwig I’ve read eats mostly rot
so what the fuck, but
it too is gone. By noon,
the self-sown— perennials, annuals—
pulled by the hundreds, and why?
So smoky blue spikes can peek through
a citrus haze of ferny leaves.
2.
What about the maples, beeches, oaks?
Seedlings a month old hold fast to the soil.
And there’s the kid I was:
the girl who intended to live in the woods,
would never mow a lawn—
fog is white when hit by the sun: at thirteen
she stopped eating meat, never thinking to track
the cannellini beans arriving by boat
or the toll she took on the evening meal, the candle lit,
grace spoken, her mom’s craft, her time
(she could’ve jarred a second batch of rhubarb jam,
become a doctor, a politician)—
3.
But here I sit, reader, recording
each death, lacing the killings
with beauty—
be careful.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 1.
Mermer Blakeslee is the author of three novels, Same Blood (Houghton Mifflin), In Dark Water (Ballantine), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and When You Live by a River, an excerpt of which won the Narrative Prize. Drawing on her work with fearful students as a professional ski teacher, she wrote A Conversation with Fear (formerly In the Yikes! Zone, Dutton). She was awarded three fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Blakeslee was born, raised, and still lives in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
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