Pot-Bound
All winter, men are yelling in the walls.
The gas is out. Somebody smelled a leak.
The ghosts of cigarettes waft stories high.
This is how the year begins, already wrong.
Was it in my stars that I would never think
of now, that I would wall myself inside
with looping thoughts?
My brother lives here for only one season,
flown back to his home coast at the onset
of the plague. Don’t think I will forget
how we cloister us indoors to hibernate
exactly when the daffodils burst through
their winter confinements, heralding . . .
what, exactly?
The men are gone. The scaffolding remains,
keeping my seedling body from the sun.
Some other season I’ll emerge — blinking,
splitting off the husk of one who watched,
who waited — and maybe will believe in now,
then. Later.
Editor’s note: if viewing this poem on a mobile browser, turn the phone sideways.
Sarah Lyn Rogers is an editor at Soft Skull Press and series co-editor for the annual Best Debut Short Stories: The PEN America Dau Prize anthology. She is the author of Inevitable What, a chapbook on magic and rituals, and was the 2014 winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Virginia de Araujo Prize, as well as a finalist for the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award. For more of her work, visit sarahlynrogers.com.
