The heart trembles like a herd of horses.
—Jontae McCrory, age 11
Hold a pomegranate in your palm,
imagine ways to split it, think of the breaking
skin as shrapnel. Remember granada
means pomegranate and granada
means grenade because grenade
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I have this, and this isn’t a mouth
full of the names of odd flowers
I’ve grown in secret.
I know none of these by name
but have this garden now,
and pastel somethings bloom
near the others and others.
I have this trowel, these overalls,
this ridiculous hat now.
This isn’t a lung full of air.
Not a fist full of weeds that rise
yellow then white then windswept.
This is little more than a way
to kneel and fill gloves with sweat,
so that the trowel in my hand
will have something to push against,
rather, something to push
against that it knows will bend
and give and return as sprout
and petal and sepal and bloom.
Copyright © 2016 Jamaal May. Used with permission of the author.
Copyright © 2016 Jamaal May. Used with permission of the author.
Jamaal May is the author of The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016) and Hum (Alice James Books, 2013). He codirects OW! Arts with Tarfia Faizullah and lives in Hamtramck, Michigan.