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  • Bittersweet Nightshade
  • David Wagoner (bio)

Its name jumped out of the book at me along with its other ones—Blue Bindweed, Felonwort—and a minute later, I started digging and hacking the deep roots under that green and black mass clutching itself and crouching against the old fence like a witch guarding her poison. I wanted to save my newly acquired goats, Nimrod and Rameses, and my newly acquired blue-roan burro, Clancy, already browsing on almost anything even remotely resembling the edible parts of the vegetable kingdom in my overgrown two acres of pasture. So one wild clump at a time, I loaded my car, jamming them in till their pointed leaves and ripening red berries were crammed up against the windows and half the windshield and half of me as I drove off even farther from the edge of suburban sprawl and dumped it illegally in a drainage ditch where it might learn to get along in life without killing its neighbors. A farmer told me weeks later it wasn’t really a bother, wasn’t worth spit or sweat, but was no problem, and goats and burros had too much common sense than to eat what didn’t taste any good anyway, and birds liked to perch among its pretty blue flowers in spring if they had nothing better to do. [End Page 266]

David Wagoner

David Wagoner has published eighteen books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (University of Illinois, 2008). Copper Canyon Press will publish his nineteenth, After the Point of No Return, in 2012. He has won the Lilly Prize, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.

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