The Hours That Rooted Me

by Courtney Justus

I started to build a garden of my own: Devil’s ivy

in a blue china vase atop the bookshelf, strawberry

sprouts lilting on the balcony, pot a bittersweet

burgundy. From there, I could see woods’ edge,

the Atlantic strewing shards ten minutes away:

garden of sharpened shells and lost bottlecaps.

Saltwater the dream of a twelve-year-old girl

in the blue bedroom of the rental house

in Talar del Lago, Buenos Aires. I grew

crops in Harvest Moon, tomatoes and

eggplant and strawberries in pixelated fields

under skies of amber, pink days passing

in minutes.

I measured loss by the barns that collapsed,

animal names forgotten, flash of winter

storm on my screen, fields that withered,

slick and hazy with frost. It’s gone,

said the old neighbor, all gone, and though

the sky outside my blue room may as well

have been gold, all I could see was winter,

splintered wood like bones in the snow,

ice slicked over soil that once gave fruit.

Even after the thaw, even after I gathered

wood as solid as a human heart, I never

rebuilt those barns. No sustenance, no

spring yet, only withered chords of once-plant

in my calloused farmer’s hands.

And to whom could I offer such hands?

Scrapes strawberry-deep, skin cracked

as a patch in a desert, sweat freezing

across a body bent and unbent and bent

again, forever working and running across

every cultivated corner of some farm town haven?

I could never ask a boy to kneel in the soil

with me, though I picture them raising

one hand to cup my cheek, patchwork

of pockmarks, or to pull me from the waves.

Is any of me strawberry-patch skin, sweet

earth damp from April rains? Will this mouth

bring someone back to the ocean that whispers

and careens outside my foggy window?

The boys of this ocean town are salt-dried

and scattered, unbattered by any sort of wave

broken open or curled like a fist. When I meet

them now, I think of the girl who knelt

in the fields, who turned her narrow back

to the shadowed school corridors, who tossed

the tattered remains of a meager crop to the earth.

I want to tell the boys about her, the Harvest Moon

girl I still see when I stroke bell pepper sprouts

or let swallowed saltwater hollow out my chest,

but I hold the words in my damp throat.

Afraid, still, of storm, of drought.

In the muggy mornings, no smooth

knuckles balanced on the rain-slick railing

next to my own soft palms. Basil leaves

instead of warm skin between my slim fingers.

My Devil’s ivy grows in the bars of light

from the window, its new leaves touched only

by my hands.