Photo by Daniel Tafjord on Unsplash

I ate the aphids because we fed them


Martha Ryan

our cruciferae in the garden box

we built from Wilfred’s moving sale. We packed

up planks, gutted his beds of amended

soils—off our shovels, shook chickens who hoped

to score worms—tetrised our haul in the car:

we drove home, rusty screws combing our fly

aways, planks over headrests like boom mics

recording our spat over where to eat.

Required: re-assembly in parking

lot. Every summer morning thereafter

haul hose to each splay of roughage, x marks

the grave of chicken shit and expectation.

Come harvest, cut broccoli heads, half bud

half bug bitch you’ll eat what eats what you grow.

Poetry

22 September, 2023


Martha Ryan is an emerging writer. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has previously been published in Foglifter and a smattering of academic journals.