We continue our ancestors’
work, build a summer house
nestled in a cranberry
bog, fruit-plumped perennials,
marshes flooded with frogs in spring,
consumed into the bay by August.
We study the names of flora and fauna
to discover alongside our children:
Anise-scented goldenrod,
woodbine, heart-leaved aster;
yellow-shafted thrashers,
brown flickers, whippoorwills;
otters, muskrats, and minks.
By campfire, we whisper of llama
bones rumored to be buried beneath us.
We own even them, we howl
under the moonlight, revering
the immaculate conception
that bestowed this land upon us.
We turn away when the trail
of deeds–our cover and legacy–
runs dry like the summer marsh.
(Thieves is not a term befitting
of us, or those who came before).
We place a machine in the basement.
Elegant and upright, seductive
with a leggy, bare-shouldered vixen
beckoning, Put it right here, baby.
Few understand how to elicit
the primitive Pop! free game,
but no matter–we own it,
can always play again.
The winner’s board, our family tree.
The children emerge from below
stoned by neon wonder, tiptoe
over the carcasses of fertilizer-
bombed bees to pick fruit nudged
to bright, symmetrical ripeness.
The children descend back
to the fluorescent embrace
when they have taken it all,
inheritors who need not consider
if the honeybees (colonizers
in the only natural sense)
would have lived if—
if we had not.
—
Christine is a poet, fiction writer, mother of three, and domestic violence attorney. Originally from Michigan and Ohio, she now calls Boston, MA home. She is an MFA candidate at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in Post Road Magazine and Solstice Literary Magazine, where she was selected as a finalist in the 2023 Annual Literary Contest.
