Screens and Storms
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Correction:
This poem by Natalie Shapero was printed with the wrong line breaks. The online version has been corrected.
Our garden grew enormous not from care,but from neglect. I slept there, covered in bellsso I would wake if anything tried to harm me. Of the two types of windows known, he threwhimself from neither, over and over. A birdclock, he extended his body past the sillbut never dislodged from the structure, chiming onabout how he couldn’t die if he tried.
Who left this lab to me? Viewing a cabbageby microscope, I proceed with only reverence,while for my own body, I feel nothing but pity.It’s so blind. It follows me here and therelike a lovesick person, fetching my essentials,shoeless on the slate floor in the cold or crampedin a truck for a thousand miles, and yet I don’teven like it. I wouldn’t cry if it died. [End Page 305]
NATALIE SHAPERO is the author of the poetry collection No Object, and her writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches at Tufts University and serves as an editor with the Kenyon Review.
