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177 viviAn shipley Digging Up Peonies Overcoming fear of stalks that are too close, I remind myself it’s Lexington, that mist on fields meant rattlesnakes curled in rows of corn would be cold, sluggish. Like prying out potatoes with my fingers, I dig up tubers as if I could lift my father, seeded with cancer, if only for a day from gravity, from ground. My parents know what I know—this is the end; they will not return to this house my father built. No refugee in Kosovo, wheelbarrowing his grandmother to safety, I will bring as much of Kentucky, of their dirt as I can carry with me on our flight to Connecticut. A bride, moving to New Haven over thirty years ago, I have not taken root. I cannot explain this urge to go to creekstone fences my father stacked, dig up box after box of peonies I will bank with Stony Creek granite piled along my side garden so my father can see pink, fucshia blossoming from his bed. Is this what revision is, change of location, spreading, to retell my story another time, in another soil? Unable to untie what binds me to Kentucky, to bones of all those who are in my bones, I will save what I can of my mother, of my father from this earth, from the dissolution that binds us after all. ...

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