November 11, 2025

putting the beds to bed

She watches the demise outside, overgrowths from summer
browning deciduously. It is, even from enough distance, a kind of carnage.
Curled carcasses of leaves all over the paths, kale stiff and starchy,
the basil stalks skeletal. What if, she wonders, I do nothing? A whole season
could pass this way, every death taking its own putrefying time and she
on the other side of the window, warming her toes on the hearth.
She doesn’t have to keep looking if she doesn’t want to, but you know what
they say about train wrecks. In the tool shed, a pair of neon-green rubber gloves,
clippers, a rake minus a center tine but with still enough tooth to pull.
Winter is headed here, unavoidable as a rusk of bread no one wants to eat.
Maybe it matters that it’s just begun to rain, so she can feel the labor
of what she is about to do, so the sweetened stain of it lingers on her boots.