Lawnmowers are thorough because there is one that always works somewhere on these streets, their stretching veins obsessed with pillaged space.
There is one humming at the bottom of the hill. Two blowers tint the air buff brown, stain it acrid with the boast of gasoline. Two men saw at a mailbox crushed by a parcel truck.
There are still blanket flowers, zinnias, azaleas. Still there are buddleia blossoms, abelia. They are covered in the last of dew. In the dew to come. In a room with pine walls and an empty vase, a story stains the air again:
More than 400,000 children forcibly displaced in Lebanon.
400,000 flowers torn apart and scattered. The gardener is in a state of failure. The gardener is the failure.
Here, a single dark pink rose rises above the far west gate, the shrub’s remainder battered bare. I don’t know any of their names. How does one return and return to the flowers of one’s own space and not see the world? What is the calculus behind what makes us only see the flowers that do not burn?
How do you see this and not want to drown the world as rain?