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42 35 Miller Drive My mother knew it was a fault to love a place, to believe a cure for hunger lived in the ground. In July shade, that dark torch burning in the air between us, she watered dirt, broke beans, clipped leaves with her scissors’ eye. She said if we separated magnet from root, killed beetles and mealworms, slugs, we wouldn’t fail if the rain came and spoiled the soil with guilt. The moon warps vegetables with incubations and foils, and to such elements I was sensitive—the nipple given, half-wet, the dirt that cries for its milk. Years later, I still feel its pull and confess I want to return to that place, sun on my shoulders 43 and face, where I might revive that garden, channel its water, and tend it like a mother who stays with her dead child, who won’t let go, who sleeps in the same bed with it. ...

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