FENNEL by Shelby Handler
Do I want to be a poet who tells you exactly why they’re sad?
Should I be someone who mixes in the cream-at-the-top of the yogurt
or someone who eats it straight
off the surface?
I wash plastic produce bags and hang their dripping membranes on a line to dry.
I have been disgusted by intimacy and I will be again.
There are days where I can only watch videos of people being touched
and the sound of their touch
touches me, ears-first.
Their scalps scritched softly beside a bulb-like microphone.
I fear that what I need will erode me.
Confession: I did not mulch the garden in September as instructed.
Now, I watch rain leech the bare soil of its nutrients and feel a grasping.
I chipped my front tooth without noticing and now I tongue
the rough edge when anxious.
I’m trying on being okay with disintegration.
I’m too sad to call back a friend who I miss so much
my heart hurts. They understand.
They text a sparkle-heart.
I heart their heart.
Neither symbol is shaped like what aches inside my chest, but rather like the leaves
of a giant fennel from antiquity.
Leaves that were plucked and mashed into contraceptives.
This was once quite commonplace.
It is difficult, being here, growing things
where so many have already been buried.
Loving my beloveds knowing none of us get to stay.
Our remedies will also ripen into symbols.
Our care is fragile and the only thing.
I place a take-out order, typing the address for a friend
nursing an unimaginable grief.
Skimming the terms and conditions for my payment, I must make the choice today:
Yes I Understand and Wish to Continue.
That splinter of my tooth will exist as long as everything else.
The garden’s minerals eke elsewhere and I am learning how to live a life
where I tend to the elsewhere.
My dog and I walk in the rain through a blackberry bramble
and she lifts her paw, asking me to pull a thorn from it.
This tenderness that I have not earned.
Could never.
She walks on without fear.
I harvested fennel once.
It no longer has leaves—instead fronds, that grazed the back of my knees.
I cut straight through
where it came from
and cradled the heavy bulb in my hands.
