The dead woman’s daughter was sweeping under a large green fig tree, the one with leaves the size of elephant ears. I shared how beautiful the tree was. How the little green figs loved the winter rain, soaking up its presence, savoring the sheer, glassy light.
The figs are no good, she muttered, sweeping outside her dead mother’s yard, with the same tone her mother used when I greeted her in the morning over the fence. The figs are no good.
Now the dead woman’s yard is swept clean of hard little green figs, their fistfuls of beautiful mess not good enough for eating, not even for canning. No fig preserves for you, little green ones.
A harsh beauty in abundance, I want to say—
Did you know that there’s a female wasp inside every fig?
She crawls inside the fig blossom to pollinate. Her wings, antennae, and legs disintegrate in its floral bower, dissolved by enzymes. When we eat a fig, we’re eating a dead wasp, so to speak. By sweeping up the little green figs, you’ve saved us from devouring a thousand female wasps in the fruit flesh.
As if she could read my mind, the dead woman’s daughter pauses—
The faraway hills are in drought, the chaparral ready to ignite in the fire-tipped wind—and the hand-fired tiles in her dead mother’s kitchen, las golondrinas, glazed swallows forever encircled by adobe, the desert’s holy, red body.
Once I tasted a green fig, one among hundreds lying fresh on her mother’s sidewalk. Tough as a mouthful of whiskers, the beard of flesh, seed, and skin was rough as hay. No wonder there was no sign of bruising, so I was glad for the fig.
Be tough, little fig—
In your figgy glory, sing
your green anthem
of the dead female wasp
for the lives of your children.
—
Karen An-hwei Lee’s recent poetry collections are The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo Press 2024), Duress (Cascade 2022), and Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics (Slant 2021). She lives in greater Chicago.
