By Alison Lubar

It Will Be a Garden Again

Last year's tomato vines’ hollow bones snap, 

a satisfactory breaking. Cannibalised for compost,

they barely shatter: each shaft bereft of marrow, 

hollow—the garden’s heart is a cavern,

dried vines splinter like brittle ventricles

This is how I winnow you from memory: 

our roots easily relinquish dirt— 

no fine fibers of life left to cling 

to this body of earth we built.

Ungrounded, unburied, it scatters 

all of us, in a new season's wind, 

warm enough for garter snakes, 

the neighbor’s tabby, every wanderer 

finding temporary respite, with permanent

room for      just me      and the bees.

I leave the untidy strawberries,

wayward   tendrils   spilling   out 

of chicken wire onto pebbled path— 

you wanted to uproot them (too wild), 

split vines like ancestral veins. I let them 

grow to the lawn   and   over the walkway— 

I am both immersed conservator and distant witness, 

lucky that something untamed    and    sweet   survives.

Alison Lubar (she/they) teaches high school English by day and yoga by night. They are a queer femme of color whose life work (aside from wordsmithing) has evolved into bringing mindfulness practices, and sometimes even poetry, to young people. Most recently, their work has been published by or appeared in Rowan University’s Glassworks, Giovanni’s Room anthology queerbook, Fearsome Critters' Quaranzine!, Apiary Magazine, and antonym.