June 10, 2025

the good news

There’s no telling if the seeds 
will take to where you scattered them 
yesterday, just before the storm 
passed through, in the far corner where the mint 
keeps spreading. No one knows if, having stayed 
so long in the small yam-colored envelope, 
they will yield to the sudden influx of attention
and be moved to open any wider. How delicious, this 
shapeless destiny—fertile or fallow—and the loose
way your fingers sent the skinny kernels flying. 
And the rain, when it came—so sure of itself,
soaking the deck boards in the seconds 
it took to retreat to the mud room and marvel
at the darkness advancing right in the middle
of a Thursday afternoon. Days later, you still feel
the giddy hitch in your side, remnant of the near-
miss with rotted wood you’d dislodged 
from the old bed and left by the stairs. The swivel
you made by instinct to avoid a splintered collision—
imagine! How like a cheetah you leapt and landed,
unbroken. Wherever this goes, you have the fact
of your own astonishment—the rain pelting down, sky 
a kaleidoscope of every graphite pencil from your childhood,
the seeds swimming in their new forever home or grave,
your body millimeters away from ruin, saving itself.