"The Pepper Plant"

 

Eddi was twelve weeks into the pregnancy when she bought the pepper plant.

"I feel like I need the practice," she told the clerk at the garden center.

She actually felt that she needed some kind of distraction, something that wasn't a baby book or a question about her child-rearing plans from an eager co-worker that would leave her worrying away the rest of the afternoon. And she had always loved the taste and the color of hot peppers. She took the plant home, gave it new soil, and applied an Epsom salt solution to its leaves.

Once the plant, a cayenne, had produced several fruit, Eddi snipped one of the peppers and sliced off the tip. She was well into the second trimester by that point. She brought the piece to her mouth and began to nibble on it. Immediately she wanted to cry.

The burn of it was horrible, nothing like she remembered or had expected. Her stomach had felt like a minefield flooded with acid throughout the previous months, but she had still hoped to be able to enjoy some of what she had worked so hard to grow.

She called her mother.

"I can't do this," Eddi wailed into the phone, "I don't know what I was thinking. I can't do this."

"Do what?" her mother said. "Honey, is this about the baby?"

"I just wanted to eat a pepper," Eddi said.

She couldn't stand to look at the pepper plant the next morning, and she was hardly able to look at it the day after that. She did, however, check on it three days later. Its leaves were drooping. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she whispered as she silently urged the water to fill the watering can. It didn't matter that she couldn't eat the peppers; it was still her plant. Yet she wasn't as worried as she thought she should've been. Somewhere deep inside of her, a voice was saying, It's all right, it's all right.

"Circular"

 

[Two other influences on today's post: 1) an image I saw, very similar to this photomicrograph, of bone tissue; and 2) Inger Christensen's incredible poem "alphabet," which I've checked out from the library.]

bones and branches, they both exist

with their circles of cells swirling

whirling in a time-wrought wind

round go the centuries of record

softly the days play a song

"Under the Tarp"

 

"Fact Number One," said Nisi's neighbor, "the thing you say you have under there survives by ingesting nutrients that come from broken-down organic matter."

"From food scraps and yard waste that decompose in the compost pile, yes," Nisi told him. She tied a knot in the cord, securing the tarp in an embrace strong enough to be considered parental.

"Awesome, it eats the dead. Fact Number Two," he continued, "you say you're expecting the thing you have under there to push its limbs up through the soil and essentially come back to life in a few short months."

"Maybe sooner, depending on the weather."

"I'm pretty sure you're raising a zombie and not a perennial herb," the neighbor said.

Nisi laughed. She patted the billowing tarp, urging it down. Trapped beneath its heavy folds, the wind groaned with its ache to rise.